Sunday, January 24th, 2010
Weirdest thing. I was going through my broken links with the broken link checker plugin I use for Wordpress this evening and I came across a broken link entitled, “Air America.” I was like, “WHHAAAAAT???”
I clicked on the link and was brought to a 404 error page with this text as the first paragraph:
“It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.”
Okay, I’ll admit that I haven’t listened to Air America in about a year, but still, they had some good programs. I enjoyed Rachel Maddow and Ron Reagan.
While I do have some hurt feelings about this closure, I am a bit disappointed in the management. In typical media style, this is how the third paragraph from the bottom was worded:
“So we intend a rapid, orderly closure over the next few days. All current employees will be paid through today, January 21. A severance package will be offered tomorrow to full-time current employees with more than six months of tenure.”
I am wondering if this is how the employees were informed that they no longer had jobs.
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Friday, November 27th, 2009
By this time in your life, you have surely seen those little icons in your browser to the left of the website URL in the address bar. Those little 16 pixel by 16 pixel icons are called “favicons.” I guess they are named that way because you see them when you “favorite” a website. By the way, making these words verbs is probably one of the most annoying things in the world to me.
So you say you have your own website. You have access to your server and you want to create one of these cute little favicons and upload it for the world to see. How do you do that? Oh, it’s so easy.
I am going to show you a handy little website where you can create your own favicon. If you visit this website called favicon.ico generator, you’ll be presented with a big square. Each little square in the big square is worth one pixel. By messing around with this one web page for about 10 minutes, you will most likely have created your very own favicon. I am not going to go over exactly how to do this, because I figured it out rather quickly. I have faith in you.
What I did want to go over was what to do once you have created your favicon and downloaded it to your desktop. That’s important. Well, basically you just upload it to your server’s root directory and that’s it. Yeah, there is a lot of chatter out there that says you have to add this code to your page’s meta data, link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico", but I have found that you don’t have to do that. As long as your file is named “favicon.ico,” you shouldn’t have to do anything. The whole reason I recently developed these icons for my own websites is because my server’s error logs were getter filled up with something like, “favicon.ico 404 error file not found.” Every time someone loaded one of my web pages, their browser called for the favicon file and couldn’t find it.
So go ahead and give it a try. There are even some pre-made ones that you can download for your website. Let’s see how you do.
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
There may be cases when you would like to see what your webpage HTTP headers look like. Why? Well, because they are kind of important. As Wikipedia states, the HTTP headers define what the returned data looks like.
Still you ask, “Why in the world do I care about that?” Ok, I’ll keep going. The main reason I look at the HTTP headers is to find out what the HTTP status code is. The reason the status code is important to me is because this is the code the search engines use for a multitude of things.
Let me give you a little example, and this related to my previous post regarding the sudden drop in Google rankings. As I was doing research into what the problem may be for this particular website, I came across an issue where someone had recently put custom “404 Not Found” error pages up on some of their websites. Everyone knows that custom “404 Not Found” error pages are cool, but what some people don’t know is that if those 404 error pages show a “200 OK” (successful HTTP requests) code, the site may be in big trouble, SEO-wise. The reason for this is because there are going to be many “404 Not Found” error pages on a dynamic website. If you have your custom “404 Not Found” error page showing a “200 OK” response code, the search engines will think that all the instances of this page are duplicate. You know as well as I do, that spells trouble.
What’s worse is if you set your homepage as your “404 Not Found” page. Your homepage is going to return a response code of “200 OK.” That’s not good, because now you have multiple instances of your homepage…all duplicate content.
It’s my opinion that the search engines are smart enough to figure this out. The page (such as your homepage) with the highest Pagerank will prevail. Still, I have some websites that I am working on that have multiple instances of the homepage and they all have Pagerank, which isn’t good, because the duplicates are taking the Pagerank from the real page. Now, again, that’s my opinion.
Here are two tips:
- How to check your HTTP headers – visit this website or just Google “Website header check”
- How to set a particular page as your “404 Not Found” error page in your .htaccess file – Just place this code in the file: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.php” without the quotes. The 404.php file is the actual error page in this case.
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