Recently I’ve worked on a site that is fairly new and not really ranking well in the search engines yet. There are several reasons for this (including lack of text on the home page), so I referred our client to the following article from The Site Wizard:

Why is My Site Not Ranking in the Search Engines?

The site in question violates several of the “rules” for getting good rankings, and I hope they’ll take my advice for improving the site.

Here’s a great site which allows you to open PDF files, add stuff, and save them with your additions.

PDF Escape

The ability to save and email your documents requires a free account.

It really is true that some of the best things in life are free. Here’s a very comprehensive list of the best free software:

Free Software – Reviews by PC Magazine

Several of the applications I use are on the Hall of Fame list… Gimp (for graphics), OpenOffice (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.), and Firefox web browser. Someday soon I’ll switch over to Ubuntu Linux for my operating system (I currently use Mepis, which is very nice and easy to use, too). Hopefully this list can help you save some money and help you be more productive!

Recently I came across this interesting article on Lifehacker:

Do You Back Up Your Web Networking Life?

I thought the article and comments were very interesting, and it got me to thinking about all of the places one might have information stored on the web. Granted, sites like MySpace and Facebook probably don’t contain important business information, but what about places like LinkedIn? If you have recommendations and other interaction from people, you probably don’t want to lose that information should something happen to LinkedIn.

I looked around and did find an “Export Connections” link which allows you to download your contacts on LinkedIn. But what about all the other data? You would probably want to keep your recommendations and profile as well. To get a copy, go to your “View my profile as others see it” page and then use your browser’s “Save as…” feature to download the information to your computer (usually found in the File menu). This way, you have a copy of the text on the page and could use it to rebuild, if needed. Another method of backing up your information is to use the “Save as PDF” feature of LinkedIn. This is not nearly as complete, though. But it could help, so what the heck… it only takes a minute and could save you some measure of work.

Along with the new year comes our new site! Hope you like it. And along with all this cleanup, it’s time once again to clean out my many tabs in Opera. I had been collecting resources for web site design because I wanted the relaunch of our site to go well. Here they are, in no particular order:

• 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
• 6 Things to Note Before Changing Your Site Design
• Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings
• Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
• How to Use Your Web Analytics Software to Improve Your Website
• SEO Made Easy
• How To Create a Search Engine Friendly Website

I hope you can pick up some good info on these links – I know I did!

What do you think of our new site? We’re glad to hear your opinion in the comments.

We wish you the very best of holidays and hope you have a wonderful new year. We’re very grateful to everyone we work with – thank you very much for putting your trust in us!

I really like how Google publishes the most popular search queries… here’s one of the lists for 2007:

Google Zeitgeist 2007

I haven’t tried searching for many of these questions online, but I hope people are finding some good information.

Cookies are files placed on your computer by web sites, and they can be used to track your movements online. Many of the large advertising networks use cookies to see what kinds of sites you visit, so they can target their ads to your interests. If you would like to opt-out of this kind of tracking, here’s a site to do it:

Network Advertising Initiative

Simply check the advertisers from which you wish to opt-out, and you’re all set! You may want to visit this on a fairly regular basis, or if you delete your cookies for some reason, because you have to accept their cookie in order to opt-out.

For even more ways to opt-out of advertising, see this article: World Privacy Forum’s Top Ten Opt Outs

A while back, I agreed to particpate in Blog Action Day, a movement to get everyone thinking about the environment.

One of my favorite ways to save the planet is to reduce usage of paper. It’s easy to do! The first step I took was to get myself off the mailing lists by going to Optout Prescreen to stop getting credit card offers in the mail, and then I did all of the forms at CDT.org. These two things practically eliminated all of our junk mail. And the junk mail we do get goes into the recycle bin rather than the trash. Perhaps these things can leave more trees for hugging! And that’s always good.

Do you have any favorite ways to save the planet? We would love to hear about them in the comments.

We’ve had some of our web site maintenance customers since 1999, and boy, a lot has changed in the web world since then! One of our cleanup tasks is to help people get their sites onto updated servers, like we did for one of our clients this weekend. It went very smoothly except for the database. It turned out the original format of the database was no longer compatible with the new MySQL software. Support was able to fix it, no problem. So, that made me think of the important things you need to consider when you’re moving to a new web server.

• Email Addresses – Be aware that all of your pop3 users (people who pick up their email directly from the server) will need to change settings in their email programs. If the email addresses are forwarded, you probably won’t have to do anything.
• Server Name or Program Paths in Scripts – Many web site programs have configuration settings that depend on the internal settings of your particular web host. Chances are, these settings are not the same from server to server, so you’ll need to check your software for places to update server settings. A program path example would be the location of sendmail – this client has cgi scripts which use sendmail, and one of its settings is the location of the sendmail program files on the server. The old server had /usr/lib/sendmail, and the new host has /usr/sbin/sendmail. A subtle change but it managed to break every program that sends mail, which is no good! Just a few tweaks set it right, though.
• Database and Software Versions – Some features in older versions of software may no longer exist in the new software, like what happened to the database in today’s project. There was another small problem of the same sort, and that’s detailed below. So be aware – upgraded web software may break some of your programming… hopefully only things that are simple to fix!

The problem that brought on this post was a change to the htaccess handling on the new server. For the next time I have to do this sort of thing, here’s what had to be changed…

Old .htaccess:
Options +Includes
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .html
AddType text/x-server-parsed-html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi

New .htaccess:
Options +INCLUDES
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES html htm

Oh, and one other thing of which you want to be absolutely sure of before you change servers – have a good backup copy of your site!! The importance of having a complete backup cannot be underestimated. Wacky things can happen, and if you’re prepared, chances are likely you could at least get back to where you were before the upgrade.

With a little preparation and planning, you can have a smooth transition from one server to another. As always, contact us if you need help upgrading your web hosting. We’re glad to help!