Archive for August, 2008
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
That’s me, write a program and it works, don’t bother initializing variables, etc. That was until I moved to a new host that had display errors turned off. It is pretty much impossible to debug without errors being displayed so I went rummaging around for ways around this and found the following code:
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set(”display_errors”,1);
I turned this on and suddenly the code was spitting out warnings and messages all over the place. Some trivial but some really fixed issues that I didn’t know. Now I’ve got it turned on all the time in development and on internal systems.
As the ‘Practical PHP Programming’ manual says:
Always set your PHP error level to the most verbose level, E_ALL. All too often people don’t realise that PHP is outputting various complaints about variables not being set, etc, which you can just do away with entirely by cleaning up your code.
Posted in Web Design and Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
We are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.
A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income. Now he’s in litigation with his host over it. Much cheaper to pay the $10 per month your host charges for backups, or if you have a stable site download the files and the database to your local hard drive.
Remember - always have backups and check they work.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
This applies to you if you use Google Analytics, or any other third part javascript and your site stops responding whenever the third party site goes down.
One of the main ways this affects users is the page does not display in their browser, and in the lower left of the browser window they see ‘Transfering data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com’
The problem is caused by the script tag being in the <head> section of your site. If you move it to just before the </body> the browser will render your entire page before waiting for the third party site to respond. This will also improve the overall responsiveness of your site.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
A popular tool on the old Eixir site was the pages indexed and link quality tool. When we changed sites we lost those tools but we have now recreated them with some more bells and whistles at http://www.semreportsonline.com/
This site is still in beta (or even alpha) but I wanted to open it up for people to play with and give feedback.
Main features:
- Link quality assessment including graphs and history functionality
- Pages indexed across all 3 major engines.
- Ranking reports including capability to go back in time and compare ranking reports including how the top 30 looked at the time.
- Response time checking for your site.
- Multiple sites per login/email.
- Multiple logins per site (this needs to be done by an admin behind the scenes).
- Whois history - whois info stored once a week and you can compare old whois with current to see how its changed.
Sign up and give it a try, let me know what you think. No credit card is required at this time I want to test the site before turning off the ‘trial account’ status. I might even add advertising to see if I can allow an ad supported limited version.
Future enhancements are already planned - mainly email alerts when reports have been run and perhaps an analysis of the report i.e. details of whois record changes. SEO Road blocks, etc.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
- Increase Video Results in Search on Google.
Just saw this the other day on a firefox query for the term “next day blinds” - 4 video results in position 4. Usually just one is shown in the universal results. Could not reproduce for a day and then it showed up again yesterday. Still can’t get it to show up in IE though.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) | No Comments »
