by WebKeyDesign | Jun 21, 2006 | Webmastering
By far the biggest problem with using the Internet is the massive amounts of spam that is clogging up the works. The most common is the spam you get in your email inbox, but increasingly there are tons of junk sites with nothing but useless content. If you run a forum or blog, you have to constantly monitor things due to the comment spam entries you get daily. Of late, I decided to start fighting back. Though I am not sure how effective the FTC is these days, I started to forward any and all spam emails I get to any of my email addresses.
If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.
I found out that Mac OS X has a really handy feature, unique to the 10.4 release. Regardless of the program, if you hold the pointer over a URL link, the operating system shows you a tooltip window with the actual URL that the link is redirecting too. I am not sure this would work for shorturl redirection urls, but it does help quite a bit with many phishing emails.
by WebKeyDesign | Jun 13, 2006 | Software
My latest hobby project has been restoring a Dell Latitude C600 laptop that was given to me. After upgrading the hard drive, processor, and even installing some missing machine screws for it, it has become a decent machine for accessing the Internet around the house. Usually for fan and temp monitoring I use Speedfan which is an excellent utility. In this case though, I found I8fanGUI, which is made specifically for Dell laptops. If you have Dell laptop, you should check to see if your particular machine is on the supported list.
Note that this software is Use at your own risk and is not supported by Dell. According to Christian’s site, the fan control code is part of the Linux kernel now.
by WebKeyDesign | Jun 6, 2006 | Google Bits
One of the most often asked questions I see on webmaster forums is about Google Sitemaps. In short, a Google Sitemap is a mechanism that allows Google to index your site with more accuracy. If you do not implement a Google Sitemap, Google will still index your site. So why should you setup a Google Sitemap?
Managing Google’s Bot
The main dilema is that you want Google’s bots to visit your site and index as much as possible, but after that you only need Google to index new content and not just waste bandwidth indexing previous content. The robots.txt file offers only limited options, it can’t tell bots to index only new content, so Google came up with Sitemaps to help webmasters make bots work more efficiently. Google’s Sitemap format makes it easy to tell the search engine bot, what your urls are, when they were last changed, and the frequency with which they change. This way the bot knows what it needs to look at and what it can ignore. This should help reduce crawling and make for more accurate indexing as well.
Sitemap Benefits
For websites that use non-engine friendly urls or sites that are brand new and have put a lot of content, the benefits of using a sitemap is that indexing will be more accurate. If your site is new and has no pagerank, a sitemap will not add your site any quicker than if you did not use a sitemap. The idea is not immediate search engine rankings, the idea is to have correct indexing, so when Google does add your site officially to its databases, all of your pages will be included correctly.
If you use WordPress, Google Sitemap Generator is a WordPress plugin that can create and manage your Google Sitemap. You can also create your own manually, just reference the Google’s Sitemap protocol.
by WebKeyDesign | Jun 6, 2006 | Windows
Last week I spent most of my time, setting up a laptop with WindowsXP, and it dawned on me to put together a little document on how I optimize Windows. Once Windows is installed and you logon for the first time, I basically do eight steps:
- Run Windows Update
- Disable unneeded services
- Modify the Registry for tuning up performance
- Install Anti-Virus and Spam-blocking programs
- Install Third Party Applications
- Add some final utility programs
The Optimizing WindowsXP page goes into further detail.
by WebKeyDesign | May 30, 2006 | Web Site Basics
I’m not sure why, but the more I surf the Web, the more annoyed I get at web sites who do not change their favicon. Every forum software package comes with a default favicon and many webmasters that install the forum software, never ever change the default favicon. What makes this more annoying is that many of these sites are actually major sites which already have a logo for their company. In the cases where the forum is the entire site, not changing the favicon just looks bad.
My advice is that if you have a website, make sure you either use a blank GIF file or take the time to actually make a proper favicon. And never ever leave the default favicon out there.
The easiest method to make a favicon is to take your logo and zoom it down to 16×16 pixels. On Windows, IrfanView is the easiest way to convert the image file to .ico format. For Mac OS X, GraphicConverter is the best image manipulation program.
Once you have the favicon.ico file, just upload it to the root of your hosting directory. You can then add the following code to your html header:
<link rel="icon" href="http://domain_name/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
If your forum software already has a favicon.ico, just replace it with the new one you created.
