Oct
nuff said
I was going to go into a long spiel about how I came across this saying, and what it means to me, then I realised that the saying said it all really….
If you don’t give yourself a chance to fail, you won’t give yourself an opportunity to succeed.
’nuff said really
Oct
Dealextreme - That’s the shit!
This is not a sponsored post, I just love this place!
Love cheap Chinese crap? I mean really cheap?
I do!
Dealextreme has just about as much cheap Chinese crap as you’re ever going to want to lay eyes on. Don’t think you can afford to buy stuff from China? How does free worldwide shipping grab you? And that’s not just free worldwide shipping on orders over a certain dollar amount. Want to get the one dollar Mini Pig 2 LEDs Flashlight? They’ll ship it to you free of charge!
So what exactly does Dealextreme sell?
Well, if it has a microchip or an LED globe in it, you’ll probably find it at dealextreme. A few examples:
How about a car cigarette powered USB charger? Charge all your USB gadgets whilst driving your car. How much? $2.53 with free shipping!
What about a 2.4-inch LCD MP3/MP4 Player with FM Radio, !GB flash memory and an SD Card slot? $44.74 shipped to your door!
Shipping is a little slow from Hong Kong, with packages generally taking between one to three weeks to arrive, but with the prices they have and the free shipping, one really can’t complain.
Oct
Fun with alexa - if you must
First things first, Alexa is a shit way to judge the value of a website. Ok now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s a possible way to mess with it (I don’t know if this works as a way of screwing with alexa rank, or has been done before, I just had the idea last night and knoked up the script - beware, this might yout you kicked off the alexa rankings altogether, so don’t do it on a domain you care about):
It’s well known that alexa uses a metric based on the number of unique visitors, and unique page views to calculate its rankings.
Whilst we can’t control the number of unique visitors (other than providing good content and all that), can we control the number of pageviews on our site?
It’s important to understand here that alexa just doesn’t use page views in its ranking algorythm, it uses unique page views (unique URL’s). If it was just page views that alexa used, we could just set up a page with a meta refresh or around 5 minutes, and leave the page running forever.
What we need to be able to do is keep loading unique page in our site (assuming of course that you have the alexa toolbar or searchstatus add-on installed - I might do an update on this which spoofs the header agent soon) . We could create a thousand pages, and set up meta redirects to go from one page to the next, loading each of them in turn, but bugger that. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m a lazy, lazy man.
What we really want to do is just keep loading the same page over and over again, with a unique dummy variable tacked on the end (thus a unique URL), so we end up with something that looks like this:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/viewtopic.php?t=3452345
Now we could write a script that just takes that variable number and does a +1 and reloads the page, but we want to try to hide what we’re doing from alexa, so we’ll use a random number. We’ll also use the script name “forum”, so it loos like the URL is actually a phpBB forum page.
The script will look like this:
=======================
<?php
//Let’s make a random number between 1 and 1,000,000 to use as the dummy variable
$number = rand(1,1000000);
//Let’s set up the first part of our URL, OOH - it looks like a phpBB forum!
$url1 = “http://www.yourdomain.com/viewtopic.php?t=”;
//Let’s join the first part of the URL with the random number to make our full URL
$url = $url1 . $number;
?>
<!– Now for the HTML which reloads the page - Change the 600 to however often you want to reload the page (in seconds) –>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”600;URL=<?php echo $url; ?>”>
</head>
</html>
=======================
That’s it, save it as “viewtopic.php”, and dump it somewhere on your server (FFS don’t drop it into the root of a phpBB installation though, it’ll screw up your forum!), load it up in your browser, and just let it run in the background and see whether it affects your alexa rank. This is going to make buggerall difference if you already have a decent alexa rank (say, under 100,000), but it might make a difference if your alexa rank is crappy.
If you find you have some success with this, you might want to load up a proxy on your web server, and run it throught that at the same time, as this will send a different IP address, to alexa, thus increasing your unique visitors. (or even load it up on a whole pile of free proxies, and see how long before you get kicked off them!)
Give it a go, let me know how you went.
Oct
Watch out, Amway’s coming to get you.
Posted by stuart as Uncategorized
Not only do we have to put up with the phone call from a friend we haven’t seen in years to set up a lunch date, only to discover that you’re on their Amway hit-list, we now hove to look over our shoulder should the much despised MLM behemoth take an unfavourable view of our blog posts and Youtube videos.
It appears that Quixtar, a subsidiary of quite possibly the most annoying organisation on the planet (and I include the conservative pentecostal religious right in this assumption) has taken unkindly to a few (suspected) former distributors (mules?) of the organisation’s overpriced wares hanging shit on them online.
When considered in the light of the recent attempt by an accounting software firm to sue popular Australian tech forums Whirlpool for allowing poor reviews of their software to be posted on the site, this is a case all bloggers and forum owners should be keeping an eye on.
Christ - imagine if Microsoft/Apple/GoDaddy, or any other major online players went down this route…..might just shut down the blogosphere…..
Oct
Really simple CMS with a Blogger back end
So I’ve got this mate, right, who’s a pastor at a Baptist Church.Currently, he runs a Blogger blog as his church website, which as a part time web developer, is something I think no bloke should let his mate do.
So what to do?
This mate of mine wouldn’t know a hyperlink from a hole in the ground, and is happy with his knowlege of the Blogger interface, so a CMS is pretty much out of the question.
I could try to work out how to make a template for blogger, but quite frankly, couldn’t be arsed. Most of the work I do in my part time “day job” is re-creating photoshop templates with HTML and CSS. This is what I’m comfortable with, along with a little PHP.
So I get to thinking; How can I integrate his knowlege of Blogger, my knowlege of HTML and a bit of PHP, and come up with a site he can maintain.
I know I could put together a site for him, and get hold of something like Macromedia Contribute, or Interspire’s WebEdit (which some of my clients use), but then he’d have to learn a whole new interface and all that, which he’s not really interested in doing.
Then, like a thunderbolt from the ass of my four year old son, it struck me.
FEEDS
Blogger, of course, publishes its blogs as feeds. What a lot of people might not realise, is that it also publishes feeds of categories (or labels, as blogger calls them - WTF??), you just need to know where to look. (more on this in a little while.)
The ingredients we’ll need to create our SSBDCMS (Super Simple Blogger Driven Content Management System) are as follows:
- A webserver that allows you to use PHP
- A static site with a few pages
- A Blogger blog (Yes, you could do this with Wordpress or any other blogging platform which outputs RSS feeds, but I’m sticking with blogger here because that’s what my mate uses)
- An RSS Parser (I use CARP, you could use Magpie RSS, or brew up something yourself if you’re that way inclined.)
So assuming that you have the server with PHP sorted, the first step in creating our SSBDCMS is to create the static site. In the case of the job at hand, a nice, simple, seven page site, with a hole in each page where the content goes.
Done that? Good, now on to the blogger blog.
Go set yourself up a blog on Blogger. This shouldn’t take more than about 1 minute. Don’t worry about getting a cool name, it’s completely irrelevant to this exercise, as no-one other than the person updating the site will ever see it.
Now, for each of the pages in the static site you created earlier, create a post in your Blogger blog. It doesn’t matter what you write in the post, we’re just doing this so you can set up your labels (or categories if you’re using any other platform). Save each of these pages under a label corresponding to a page on your static site. An example:
- Home page in the static site === Post with the label “home” in your Blogger blog.
- etc. etc.
OK, so now we have a label/category in our Blogger blog corresponding to each page on our static site. Next, we need to go find the RSS feeds for each label/category in our Blogger blog so we can include them in our static site.
The URL for the feed for a particular label in your Blogger blog will look something like this:
- http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/YOURLABEL/
Leave the /-/ there. It’s meant to be there, and obviously replace the bits in bold with your details. (Actually, the above URL will give you an ATOM feed, but meh… It will still work fine for what we want to do with it.)
If you punch the above URL into your web browser or feed reader, you should see the feed for that particular label/category of your particular blog.
Not there? You did something wrong, perform ten minutes of self flagellation (look it up), then go back and try to work out where you cocked it up.
One last thing - we need to set our blogger blog to syndicate full articles. To do this, go to your blog’s admin page, click settings -> site feed, then choose “full”, in the “allow site feeds” option.
So, we have our static site, and we have our blog with the labels/categories and feeds all set up. Now we need to set the mood lighting, play some soft music, and hope they’ll make sweet sweet love to produce our finished product.
For this we’re going to call on our RSS parser to get the job done. Think of the parser as the character Hitch, played by Will Smith in the movie of the same name. It’s the parser’s job to facilitate the sweet love to get the content from the Blogger blog into our static site.
I’m not going to show you step by step how to do this, it will depend on the RSS parser you’re using, but I will tell you what you need to get your RSS parser to do.
In effect, in each page of the static site, we want the parser to pull in the content from the feed of each label/category, into the corresponding page of the site. A couple of housekeeping things here:
- You want your RSS parser to “unlink” your headings from the actual blog. By this I mean that when your parser pulls a feed into a page, we don’t want the heading of the feed linking back to the blog as is usually the case with feeds. Remember, we’re using Blogger as a back end. No site visitor will be aware that Blogger even plays a part in this little concoction. It’s probably better still to just get your parser to not display headings at all, you don’t really need them here
- You also want your parser to pull one article only (unless you specifically want more articles to appear) into your page. Remember, this is a website, not a blog, so we only want the most current information. We don’t need archives in the sense that a blog has them.
OK, once we have static pages in the site pulling content from our Blogger blog, it’s time to crank out some content for the site. Go slap some content into the blog, making sure that you assign the right content to the right label/category.
Once you have the content on your site, you can sit pretty in the knowlege that you now have a Super Simple Blogger Driven Content Management System. Updating the content is now as simple as creating a new post with your new content for the required page, in the corresponding label/category in your Blogger blog.
Who said you need to be a smart coder or spend a lot of money to create a CMS that even an idiot can use?
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