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...

W3C HTML Validation and Search Engine Optimization

It has been a while since I have posted some of Virante’s research to the blog, and a good friend and former COO Bob Misita called me out on it. I figured I would release some of the data from a recent study we did on the relationship of W3C HTML Validation and web page rankings. Because validation is quite complex, we chose to take a macro-look rather than our traditional methodology of getting individual sites into the SERPs via sitemaps and then tweaking individual independent variables. In particular, we looked at the W3C validation of approximately 100 separate keywords in Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask. For each keyword, we extracted the top 10 ranking sites, measured the number of errors via a W3C validation check, and used multiple statistical...

PowerSet Will Never Be a Google Killer

Many of you have seen the recent stories about Powerset releasing its public beta. First off, I must say that they have done a great job on an interesting product. However, I think we need to quickly – and I mean very quickly – put to rest this conversation that Powerset could EVER be a Google Killer. ** Please Read the Comment below from Mark at PowerSet for their side of the story ** It takes Powerset a month to index and analyze just Wikipedia – 1/8000 of the web. (Mark from Powerset Disputes this Claim Below and, unfortunately, I have no way to verify one way or another. That being said, even a couple of days to handle a site like Wikipedia which has similar formatting across the entire domain is slow in comparison to a giant like Google)...

Really Solved: Another Common Site Review Problem

Matt Cutts wrote recently of a common site-review problem. Many sites prefer to store links within drop down menus (the “select” element). Unfortunately, this non-standard way of using javascript to link to pages within your site is quite difficult for search engines to spider. (ie: search spiders like GoogleBot have difficulty determining that your javascript code is meant to be interpreted as links). Here are a few examples: http://www.pickwicktea.com/ http://www.evinrude.com/ http://www.yoofi.com Luckily, there is a pretty easily solution to the issue. Start by creating a DIV tag with traditional text links inside representing each of the items you would like to appear in your menu. And then just run the javascript I have included below to...