Last night, as I was doing my usual rounds of visiting my favorite blogs, I came across a very useful post written by none other than my uncle Bob. It was a blog post written about a really neat plugin for Wordpress blogs called “Broken Link Checker.”
This is one of those plugins that’s really easy to install. Just upload it to your plugins directory, activate it and let it do its thing. After a while, you can check how many broken links your blog has by visiting the broken links settings page.
So, uncle Bob has over 3000 posts and had only 16 broken links. I have 1290 posts and about 180 broken links. Something wrong here?
I will admit that most of my broken links were internal. Many were external, but the majority were of photos that I deleted from the server and links to websites that I have taken down. It felt great to “unlink” to these dead web pages.
Why is it even important to get rid of dead links on your website? Well for one thing, it is highly annoying for your visitors to click a link and have it go to a 404 page, or even worse, a page that doesn’t exist at all. For another thing, it makes the person who operates the website look a bit amateur. Lastly, search engines hate links to dead pages and punish accordingly. Trust me, I know. They don’t like it at all.
So, if you have a blog and think you might have some broken links, go ahead and install this plugin. You might be surprised at what it finds.
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.
If you are closely tuned in to the web world as I am, you may have heard that Google may include “web page load time” as one of their ranking factors in 2010. I heard about this, saw a few videos about this and read about this. Apparently, when Google talks about changing what makes people’s websites rank differently, people listen…and then talk about it themselves.
I run a bunch of different websites. Some of them have rather large page sizes. The reason they are so large is because of additional files beyond simple HTML that each page pulls in to make the web page behave correctly. These files, such as .js and .css files can get kind of big. Over the years, I didn’t really dig too deeply into the page size issue because the sites get fairly good traffic. I just let things ride.
A few days ago, I came across a post on a forum that talked about mod_gzip or otherwise known as GZIP. This is software that you can install on your web server that compresses your web pages up to 70%. Google recommends that webmasters use GZIP to speed up their websites. Google likes to present its visitors with nice speedy pages in their search results.
I read that it’s pretty easy to deploy GZIP and that it really shouldn’t take more than a few minutes (if it’s already installed on your server). I decided to give it a try. So I did. It didn’t work. Hmmm.
I called my web host and started asking questions. I was like, YO B%^&*, what up with my GZIP??? No really, I was polite. I asked about why GZIP wasn’t giving me any compression results and they told me that I was running Apache2 and that mod_deflate was already installed, not mod_gzip. All I needed to do was to deploy it. I kind of like the name “GZIP” better than “DEFLATE” but who am I to argue?
By the way, here are some good resources on using GZIP and DEFLATE:
First, I asked the web host to deploy mod_deflate on only one domain. I wanted to gauge the results and also take a night to see if anything got screwed up from it. They were agreeable and did the following:
At your request I enabled mod_deflate for one domain on server 123456:
I checked out some stuff overnight and since everything looked fine in the morning, I gave the web host a call back and asked them to undo what they did to that individual domain and set it up server-wide. They put the server back the way it was and set up mod_deflate to compress all the websites on the server by doing this:
Created a file /my/path/mod_deflate.conf with the following line:
That was about it. Since Apache2 comes with mod_deflate installed already, all we had to do was to deploy it. We did this both for an individual domain and server-wide.
I bet you want to know about the results, right? Okay. Well, I can tell you that I had some web pages that were over 400kb. They are now running at about 165kb. I also had some web pages that were about 445kb. They are now running at about 45kb. That’s about 10% of what it was. Is that crazy? Yes, it’s nuts.
Next week, I am going to deploy mod_deflate on my other web server. That should really make some positive changes.
There are a few things you should know. The first thing is that if you decide to do this and have a cable internet connection where you are connected to the internet, you most likely won’t notice much of a change. I read that this has something to do with packets. I am not that smart, so I just took this statement as face value. Although, I run cable and didn’t really notice much of a change. People who use DSL and dial up will definitely see some speed improvements from the smaller web page sizes.
Also, if you are running a website and are using a shared server, you may not be able to use mod_gzip or mod_deflate. Since both of these modules use an increased amount of processing power, many web hosts won’t allow its use. If you aren’t aware, some of these web hosts pack like 10 billion websites on each server. Any increase in CPU demand is going to cause problems. Still, you should give them a call to see what they say. You might get lucky.
I guess it really doesn’t matter if it’s Friday or not, we work seven days a week ’round these parts. Yeah, we should really stop that.
Well, it’s kind of hard to stop working when it’s like 100 degrees and absolutely disgusting outside. I have been intermittently venturing out daily for some small landscaping projects. Every time I come inside, I am sopping wet with sweat. I mowed the lawn this morning, which wasn’t bad. Things changed when I had to start transplanting some shrubs. The minute I put any amount of effort into anything, there it comes. When that happens, I can hardly get my shirt off. It’s so nasty.
Okay, enough about that. Where have I been? Well, last week I had a few projects going on with the websites. I am trying to get some of the larger things done while it’s still Summer. Internet traffic generally picks up come Autumn, so I want to be in a good position. There are so many factors…oh so many factors. Changes generally take a few weeks to complete because as time goes on, you start realizing and remembering all the ramifications of what you are doing. I won’t continue to bore you.
I have been considering hiring a developer to assist with some programming on my sites. I did the math and figured that it was doable. Then, I started thinking about all the BS you have to deal with when getting someone else involved and I decided that outsourcing was the best route. So now, I am actually outsourcing to the company that created the software. It’s great…these guys are awesome and they know every corner of the software that they created. It has been a pleasure. So far, they completed two projects for me and are working on the third. I probably have about two more after this.
Outside…I have been transplanting some shrubs from the hill up front to various places around the property. It’s a miserable chore in this heat, but that doesn’t stop me. I just like to get out there. I am moving them so I have more room to mow. I am also going to be reseeding the entire lawn this Autumn, so I want to get that hill done. I want to plant a few more pines and some smaller fruit trees up there too. That should look pretty good.
I keep saying that I am never going to order any more of those little pine trees from Arbor Day again. I have varying luck with what I get. Then, I go ahead and order more. If you are going to order any pine trees from Arbor Day, I will tell you to stay away from the Blue Spruces. All (or almost) of ours died. All (or almost) of the Norway Spruces lived. Hmmm…if I do ever order any more of those trees, I am going to get the Norway Spruces. If I could just find some baby pine trees locally, I would be happy. That challenge is more difficult than it sounds.
We have been trying to go for our daily walks, but it’s getting hard to do that in this heat. We have been going about every other day. We tried to walk in the morning and then the evening to see which one was better. They are about the same. Either way, you still have to take a shower afterward.
It’s supposed to thunder storm this afternoon. It’s a little breezy outside right now and I am looking forward to the rain. It’s funny, all that rain we got in the beginning of the Summer is a distant memory. Now, the grass is crusty and the dirt is like concrete.
So anyway, happy Friday and I’ll leave you with this. Do you agree with me when I tell you some people just deserve to be smacked?
If you are like me, you have a number of websites or blogs that you check daily, just to see what’s going on. I have a few blogs written by friends and then a few blog/websites put together by communities. These communities are quite entertaining, let me tell ya.
Let’s talk about the sites not put up by friends. Right now, I visit three of them a few times a week. I would say that more often than not, I laugh out loud. Am I allowed to say that, or do I have to write LOL? I am not a LOL writing type of guy and I serious mean that I laugh so people can hear it. Anyway, these websites are pretty damn hilarious.
Last week, I planned to list all three of them here in a post. Then, as I was visiting them to see what was new, two of them had some hilariously offensive material right there on the first page. Now, while I might LOL at this, many of my reader might not (I know that they are secretly LOLing, but I’ll still get yelled at). I am sure you are all aware of my strict policy of non-offensiveness.
Now, I want you to know that at the time of me posting this link, there is nothing offensive on the first page. That’s all I checked. So, if things get interesting, it’s not my fault.
You have to check out this site. I guess the people who created it have some source for getting emails written by whack jobs. Strangely enough, I have actually received a few of these types of letters in my day. People think they can pretty much say anything through email. It’s like driving. Same thing. That’s where road rage comes from.
Check out the site and let me know what you think. I want some comments by tomorrow morning. If you’re good, I’ll drop some hints about the other two sites. After you check them out, you’ll be LOLing on the floor.
I am a backup maniac. I backup and then backup the backup. Then, I seal up the backed up backup, stick it in a safe and plunge the safe in concrete. Even with all that, I will probably lose data eventually. I didn’t get like this overnight. I’ve had…let’s say…experience.
You know, it’s strange – with all the people out there who rely so heavily on all their computer files, very few of them ever back up anything. The worst part of it is that the majority of them work on laptops. I used to work with a girl who was in sales. One day, she came into work all upset that her laptop crashed and she lost all of her data. There was nothing she could do. When I say she lost everything, I mean the computer repair dude handed her back a laptop with wires hanging out of it. It was toast.
I said to her, “Oh don’t worry, just go grab your backup and we’ll load it up for you.” Her blank stare was priceless. I mean seriously, how long did she think her computer was going to last? It was bumped and bruised for years. Whatever. I knew she didn’t back up anything, I was just being a wisea$$. It was easy to pick on her because she had some pretty wild political views. I didn’t take too kindly to that.
Okay, onto my situation. I have websites. I back up all the data I have on the servers quite frequently. It’s a big job and it gets done a lot, but I just do it because it’s important. After the “Oh sorry sir, we don’t really have that backup up” I got from my old friends at “1 and…” hosting company, I decided to get real. I now have a pretty serious setup. Even with a new host and private servers, I still download everything. I don’t care what they tell me. One guy said, “A meteor has to hit this building for us to lose your data.” Yeah, famous last words.
Here’s a piece of advice for any of you who run websites – never trust what a hosting company says, no matter what kind of triple platinum guarantee they give you. When something happens and it comes time to get down, it’s awfully easy for them to tell you they don’t have what you need and to rush you off the phone. Here’s another piece of advice, stay very far, far away from technical support that is based in a foreign country. I don’t want to knock the support, I do want to say that the company doesn’t give these support people any power to do anything. They are basically telephone operators who create support tickets. With the old servers and “1 and…” (I forget the name), I actually had a server down for about two weeks. I just couldn’t get someone to restart Apache. I could have flown to the data center, walked in and restarted the thing myself. You want to talk about stress? Man oh man. It was rough living with me for those two weeks.
Okay, back to my situation. I back up my data from the servers. It’s probably about 15 gigs. Then, I have about 2 more gigs of working files on my desktop. So, overall, I have about 17 gigs that I really don’t trust sitting here on my computer. I back up on a portable drive, another external drive and online, all encrypted. I will say that devising ways to back up data gets quite addictive. Three backups is really enough, but I might have some others hidden.
It goes even further than that. My online backup can’t be in the same city as where my servers are. I know, I know, but trust me, when push comes to shove, it matters. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc… Remember when I said that the guy from the hosting company told me that a meteor had to hit the building for me to lose my data? Well, during the first week of me hosting with them, a car hit a telephone pole in a main intersection near one of their data centers. They were forced to run on generators for two days. I now have my servers split up between two data centers in two states.
Up until today, I was using MozyPro as my online backup service. They offer a pretty good service with lots of great features. Luckily, I never had to recover any files, but I’m sure they would have done a fine job if I needed them.
A few days ago, I noticed that I wasn’t receiving my nightly summary backup emails. I looked into the reason why and it ended up that my files weren’t actually being uploaded to the backup servers. This was a Friday. I called support and was connected to an obvious foreign country. My face got red. I explained the situation and a ticket was created. Then Monday, I got a response that the ticket was escalated. Two full days had gone by with nothing done. I called support again and got nowhere. My next call was to sales to close down my account. I don’t deal well with outsourced support. I have a long experience with being politely told that nothing is going to get resolved.
Today, I set up an account with Jungle Disk. From what I hear, they are pretty good. My files are being backed up as I sit here and write. I am under no illusion that the support is any better, but I had to do something. If I need to keep jumping to different online backup companies, so be it.
There are a few things that I like about Jungle Disk (run by Amazon, bought out by Rackspace) that MozyPro didn’t give up too easily. First, I can download the software onto any computer and just run it under the same account. I can upload and download on any of my five PCs. I like that. I can even get files from the road. Second, they charge for usage. You don’t need to buy a certain amount of space and then worry about returning unused resources. That’s pretty helpful.
Jungle Disk was very easy to set up and is quite simple to operate as well. It’s also very affordable. To top things off, I trust Jungle Disk because one of my favorite relatives uses it, along with many of his friends. Hey, word of mouth…there ain’t no better way.
I knew I was on to something. It’s like I can foresee the future; it’s a gift.
I came across an article this morning that talks about how social websites can actually harm the brains of youngsters. Can you believe it? I’m just glad I got out when I did.
I have been sitting back for some time now, watching and listening to people’s opinions of Facebook. They are wide and varied, but lately, I have been hearing some grumbling. I have heard it from friends and I even heard it on the radio this morning. That’s what prompted me to write today.
For those of you who don’t know what Facebook is, it’s a social networking tool intended to connect you with anyone and everyone from your past, present and future. It’s pretty powerful and pretty awful at the same time.
I am going to give you my experience with this website and let you draw your own conclusions.
A few months ago, I opened a Facebook account. I did this with the intention of placing my blog link on the “Info” page, to drive visitors. You know me, I am always trying to hook new readers. At the time, I had been reading so many articles online about the value of marketing your website, business or service on these social networking websites. I really didn’t think it was a bad idea. Now, being a few months later, I am seeing the value of it, but the good comes with the bad.
A few weeks after opening the account, I began getting friend requests. The friend requests were from people that I completely forgot about in my life. They were from all sorts of nooks and crannies…you know, like from that classmate who moved out of town during nursery school. It was remarkable. I started making friends. As time went on, and I made more and more friends, I started reading these little messages that my new friends would type in their profile. It went something like this – “John Doe’s is rubbing his foot” and “Jane Sue smells something weird in her apartment.” It was cute in the beginning, but then as time went on, I started feeling a little strange about reading things from people who I really didn’t know. I began to realize that I might be going down the wrong path by knowing too much about the guy who moved away when I was three years old. First, it was getting annoying and second, it was a little creepy.
I decided to take action. I logged into my Facebook account one night and decided to delete about 25 of my “friends.” I got rid of the people who I didn’t care for all that much, or never actually talked to in the first place. It was like a weight had been lifted off my chest. My life went on.
A few days later I started complaining to a good friend that I was beginning to feel uneasy about the whole Facebook experience. I knew that I was merely trying to market my websites and that I needed to “network” and gain “friends,” but the little voice in the back of my head started telling me that this whole experience was more difficult on the mind than it was worth.
Let me give you some background about my personality – I like to maintain a low profile. You might think that’s amusing because I write so much on this blog. You might ask, “Jay, if you like to keep a low profile, why do you put yourself out there so much?” I would answer, “Because I like you guys. I also get to choose what goes on here and there isn’t much that I don’t have control over.” Also, if there is someone reading this blog that I’m not necessarily fond of, I don’t know it. If I don’t know it, I don’t care about it.” You see, with Facebook, everyone is right in my face and I don’t like that.
I am fairly satisfied with where I have come in life. I’ll admit that when I re-connect with people who I sat next to in my elementary school lunchroom, it brings me back to the not-so-comfortable days of my existence. I’m sure we’ve all had them. It’s when the white milk cost five cents and the chocolate cost six. Those days were strange and hard to remember, but one thing is for sure, I don’t really want to relive them. One of the things Facebook is really good at is offering you the chance to relive your whole past. Since much of our experiences have to do with old friends and acquaintances, Facebook puts your past front and center.
If there is one thing I like about where I am now is that I put myself here. If I wanted to be back where I used to be, I would put myself there. Since I haven’t, I think I am saying something. I don’t want to relive my past. I would actually like to move on from it and never look back. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood and met many fantastic people along the way, but I think there comes a time in life to move on from those relationships to form new ones. It’s called being mentally healthy. Maybe we should call it the “shedding of time.” It’s been going on for thousands of years and for it to stop now is wrong, in my opinion.
If you are a member of Facebook, you might have had some of the same thoughts. They might not be as prevalent as mine, because I am quite sensitive about these types of things, but they may have popped up from time to time. Admit it…you have winced at the computer screen at least once while seeing someone’s name pop up asking you to be their friend. You may have been tempted to write back telling them that, “No, you don’t wish to become their friend because you were actually hoping to never hear from them again. But thank you for the offer.”
For the past few weeks, I have been threatening to delete my Facebook account. I think it might be time for that to become reality. By dumping this reminder of my entire history, I can move on the way I had been for so many years. I mean seriously, if I wanted to be reminded of my life while growing up, I would go put an offer on the house I grew up in, buy it, put down some shaggy green carpet in my old bedroom and live like I had for 22 years. I think you’ll agree, that’s just not cool.
Students have begun making bio diesel fuel by converting used cooking oil from the dining hall.
Overcoming Information Overload
Daniel Tammet: “Our world is generating more information with more resources and technology now than at any time in history: through TV and radio programs, cell phones, magazines, email, websites, blogs, and other media… Being overwhelmed by a continuous maelstrom of information can be just as damaging to our minds as having too little of it…”
For most of us the universe is unimaginably vast. But not for cosmologists. They feel decidedly hemmed in. No matter how big they build their telescopes, they can only see so far before hitting a wall. Approximately 45 billion light years away lies the cosmic horizon, the ultimate barrier because light beyond it not has not had time to reach us.
Sweden’s Fix for Banks: Nationalize Them
The Swedes have a simple message to the Americans: Bite the bullet and nationalize. With Sweden’s banks effectively bankrupt in the early 1990s, a center-right government pulled off a rapid recovery that led to taxpayers making money in the long run.
It’s the “other” ivory. And this week, conservationists in London stepped in to stop its sale. It might not be as well known as the stuff that comes from elephants, but the ivory from the narwhal, the tusked whale of the northern seas, is just as much in demand – and with that demand comes a threat just as severe as the one elephants face.
This evening, I received an invite from my uncle to stop by his blog and join Google Friend Connect. I didn’t know what the heck that was, so I took a little trip over to his blog to find out.
What did I say to myself when I landed on his page? “Hey look, it’s those cool little pictures of people.” I have seen them around, but the ones that I saw were run by Yahoo! and right now, Yahoo! isn’t my favorite provider of things on the web. They do a fine job with many things, but others do finer jobs, if you know what I mean. Either way, I always wanted to add those neat little photos to my blog.
Okay, what I am talking about is this; Google just launched a service call “Friend Connect.” It’s kind of like a social networking widget type thing that you can add to your site. People can sign up and join your website (right through the widget), and when they do, their photo and information shows up. Also included are links to their favorite sites. I think this is a marvelous little invention, so I hooked it up on my blog.
Why is this cool? Because when a user’s photo is shown on a website, people might click on that user’s photo, especially if they are hot (eh hem). When they click, all of that user’s favorite websites will show. When the sites are displayed, someone may be inclined to click one or two of them. “Oh, now I see.” says you.
Basically, it’s another viral marketing technique. I know when to jump on these things.
Currently, I have two people signed up on my blog. Myself and my uncle. That’s pretty pitiful, so would you kindly sign up? That would make me happy. It’s over there to the right.
By the way, I almost forgot to mention, you can sign up under your Google account, Yahoo account, AIM account or OpenID account.
