112 Things Not to Name Your PHPMyAdmin Install
phpMyAdmin is an incredibly powerful, useful tool for rapidly creating and managing mySQL databases. However, given its ubiquity and that it grants access to your database(s), it is often the target of widespread exploits. Unfortunately, most webmasters don’t secure their phpMyAdmin. First off, you should read through this to get it secure, but you should at least do the simplest thing: name it something different from what others name it. Below is a list of common names for phpMyAdmin folders that exploit bots regularly scan for… No tags for this post.
A Simple Solution to the Non WWW, WWW Question
One of the most shocking things a webmaster learns upon entering the world of SEO is that they need to choose between either the WWW version or non-WWW version of their URL. As annoying as it is, not doing so can create huge duplicate content and PageRank dispersion issues that hamper your rankings. However, what we rarely discuss is how to choose which of the two to use. The answer is fairly simple. Determine which version has the most inbound, external links across all its pages and then use that as the canonical version of your domain. If the sum of all the mozRank of links pointing to your http://domain.com/* version of your site is greater than the http://www.domain.com/* version, then you should choose the non-WWW. Well, here is a simple tool that does just...
Relevancy Modified MozRank: A Smarter Metric for Rank Analysis
We have been working for a while now on our own internal correlation study in partnership with Trident Marketing and Fuzzy Logix. In working on this project, time and time again it shocked me how crude our current ranking metrics are. We finally have good raw data from sources like SEOMoz and Majestic SEO but we have only begun to scratch the surface of how Google uses these types of data to organize and create search rankings. In the same way that SEOMoz identified a simple statistical modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation as a likely candidate for how Google models topic relevancy, we have been looking for similar statistical techniques that Google is likely to use in turning raw link data into metrics more suitable for ranking pages. The...
Auto Mounting SFTP / SSH in Ubuntu (SSHFS / FUSE / AUTOFS)
Sorry for the geek post, but I wanted to share this because it took me a while to get this right. In my first foray into eLance, I had a programmer / scripter convert a tutorial on using SSHFS, Fuse and AutoFS to auto-mount SFTP/SSH connections in Ubuntu into a single, easy to use Bash script. The individual who landed the contract was Finnbarr P. Murphy who did an incredible job (worked the first time, the right way, with great documentation). I would highly recommend him in the future if any of you are looking for Linux related work. Anyway, you can download his solution below. Download: AutoMount.sh.tar.gz No tags for this post.
Using the IPhone for Unlimited Proxy IPs
One of our premier free tools is LinkSleeve, a distributed link-spam prevention tool that handles up to hundreds of thousands of spam requests a day. In working to improve the tool, we often need to check from numerous IP addresses as we intentionally try to flag our comments in the system. However, those of you familiar with the need for regular proxies are most likely aware of the shortcomings of both public proxies and web proxies. However, we recently discovered a very useful method for acquiring new, temporary IPs for fairly trivial data transfer. We would not recommend using this method for large data transfers, as tethering is not available on all iPhones. The process is rather simple. Jailbreak Your Iphone Head on down to Iphone Dev to jailbreak your...
The New Canonical Link Tag: What to do…
First off, kudos to the search engines for working together to come up with a reasonable standard for solving what had previously been an intractable issue. I will restrain myself from saying “it’s about damn time”, or maybe I just didn’t, but regardless this is a fantastic new tool that far more webmasters can implement. Here are some initial thoughts. What it really changes…The burden has shifted from knowing all the false URLs (in order to create URL rewrites to address them) to simply knowing the correct URLs. Who it really helps….The New Canonical Link Tag is most useful to webmasters and site-authors who do not have access to redirecting languages. Since 301 redirects are initiated server-side, users of CMS or hosted-app...
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