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.

CopyBlogger is one of my favorite blogs because he always has very good advice. Here’s an article about why you don’t need to worry so much about search engine optimization:

http://www.copyblogger.com/is-google-evil/

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!

Today I found a fascinating article discussing the use of people images on your web site. It seems that where your model is looking can have a profound impact on where your visitor looks:

How a Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away

Especially interesting is the “heat map” which tracks a visitors eye movements on a page – they compared a model looking at you and a model looking at the advertised product… guess which one performed better? Have a look.

If you blog on a regular basis, you may occasionally face the problem of wanting to post, but not knowing what to write about. Check out this list of blog topic suggestions from Chris Brogan. Pick a topic, or maybe it will kickstart your creativity and make you think of one on your own. I guess I’m working on #9!

Most of my ideas for blog entries come from my daily work of being a web developer. I like to share the techniques I find, especially the quick fixes that can give a big bang for your buck. Plus it’s nice to have a quick reference for the times I need to repeat a task… just do a quick search and I have the answer.

Other ideas come from the RSS feeds I have on the site and those I have delivered by FeedBlitz… when I find a site or article that’s particularly useful, I post about it. Probably my biggest source of fodder from RSS is via LifeHacker – they have tons of useful info for technology and life.

So, I guess all you need to do is look around, and write something about which you’re passionate. It’s likely if you’re interested, others will find it interesting, too.

One way to personalize your web site is to provide a favicon – the little icon that shows in the address bar of the browser when a visitor is on your page. You may have noticed ours… the blue diamond with a magnifying glass in it (a sign of our site to come!!). I made this by taking an image and running it through an online program which creates the required favicon.ico file. Then I uploaded it to our web site and presto! The favorite icon image appears. It’s one of those small details which can help make your site stand out from the crowd.

Here’s a great site which does a fantastic job of creating an icon from an image:

favicon.ico Generator

You can also draw one from scratch, if that’s your thing. Just make sure to click the “Download” link when you have something you like. Then upload it to your website (make sure it’s named favicon.ico) and you should be all set!

One of the things I found on WebsiteGrader was a section which said my incoming links were possibly being diluted, because some of the links were for www.websitecleanup.com and some were for plain old websitecleanup.com (without the www). The problem is, the search engines don’t know the difference, so the total incoming links appear to be lower than they really are. The solution is to automatically switch the non-www links into www links. I did a little research and found it’s very easy to do! All you have to do is add three lines to your .htaccess file. This is what I added for our site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^websitecleanup\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.websitecleanup.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s it! We’re up and running, and now all of our inbound links will be counted properly. If you want this installed on your site, please contact us. Thanks!

If you’ve been wondering how your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO) are going, try this site:

Website Grader

They analyze your site and give you a score (compared to other sites they tested) and also tips on how to improve your search engine rankings. Very nice!!

Recently I found this great article about easily selecting just a piece of an image, using the wonderful, free image editor called GIMP. Sometimes you want to use just part of a picture, so here’s a way to easily select an irregularly-shaped object:

Removing Backgrounds Quickly In The GIMP

Nice!

Here’s a really nice shopping cart plugin for WordPress:

WP e-Commerce

As with all shopping carts, it takes a bit of time to learn how all of the features work, and a bit of customization to make it look the way you want. You can get the cart for free, or you can upgrade to the Gold version, which gives you access to payment gateways and a couple of other features. Also with the Gold version you can add modules for member-only sites and grid view – a nice way to display your products. The Gold version costs $15 for a personal site and $250 for a business site, which is very reasonable considering the development time you’ll save by using a plugin.