Big Webmaster

Fancy way to describe a screw up

bigw — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:16:37 +0000

As you are aware, —— is working toward migrating services from its existing data center to a new data center facility. These changes will allow us to operate with an improved hardware infrastructure. During the originally scheduled date (—– –th), —— encountered some technical issues. Due to these issues, we made the decision to roll back all migration activities at that time. We have taken an extensive look at the issues that occurred, and are making every effort to prevent these going forward. We have rescheduled the migration activities, and are writing to inform you of the new date and time as well as the expected impacts.

Translation: We screwed up the first time, we think we fixed it, so we are going to try this again.

Is your Gmail Account Active. Yes/No

bigw — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:17:04 +0000

Beware, this is NOT from Google, do not reply or respond if you receive this email.

Received this email:

Dear Customer.

Is your Gmail Account Active. Yes/No.

Shows a return path of: Return-Path:

also some other telling items:

Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (173.201.193.246)
by p3plwbeout17-05.prod.phx3.secureserver.net with SMTP;

That IP (173.201.193.246) is registered to GoDaddy. What are the chances Google is using GoDaddy to send email? (zero)

Definitely NOT a legit email.

Below is a screen-shot of the email from within Gmail.

Page Not Found when WordPress Category Tag matches Page name

bigw — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:25:52 +0000

If you are using permalinks like ” /%postname%/” and you have a category base name that happens to match a page name, any sub-pages under that page will return “not found” 404 messages.

The solution is to either change the category base name to something else, or change the permalink name on that page to something different.

Adsense Ad Bad Practice

bigw — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:32:37 +0000

Look at the Ad’s below. They are Google Adsense ads, however where is the “Ads by Google” label that is required?

Now a simple view source shows their ad manipulation, the ad size is 336×280. They went and changed the setting google_ad_width to be 337, and google_ad_height to be 260 (removing 20 pixels) and therefore hiding the “Ads by Google” text from the ad.

This is a good way to get your account disabled! Bad bad practice!

GoDaddy Certificate Seal Spam

bigw — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:50:36 +0000

I noticed a Go Daddy SSL Certificate seal on a website and below the seal it says “Fax to Email”, this seems odd.. The link is from GoDaddy trying to sell a fax thru email plan. That is one way to gain links… I suspect most users of these “seals” don’t even know they are really placing a links for GoDaddy all over their site.

How to noindex the https version of your pages

bigw — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:09:50 +0000

Your site has SSL enabled so each page can be http OR https.

How to you avoid having duplicate content?

Add this simple php code to your page header:
if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == "on") { echo "put the no-index meta tag here"; } ?>

Please be sure and TEST this on your own server throughly so as to not inadvertently no-index all your pages!

Twenty Ten Child Theme – Calming 2010

bigw — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:08:56 +0000

A nice and clean theme that works with the built-in WordPress theme Twenty Ten. Calming 2010 is a simple easy to read theme that will work will with many types of sites.

Download Calming 2010 Theme

Example Site using Calming 2010 Child Theme

Google Hacker Page

bigw — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:48:38 +0000

0|\/|G |-|4xx0|2 !!!!111

Check out the Google Hacker version of their pages!

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker

Solved: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

bigw — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:43:34 +0000

If you get an error similar to:

URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

on 1and1, create a blank file called php.ini, and place the following line in the file.

allow_url_fopen = ON

then upload the file to the root folder of the domain, and it should solve the problem.

Cuil Shuts Down?

bigw — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 03:36:07 +0000

It appears the one time rising search engine Cuil is offline and not coming back online.

The search engine was released on high hopes to overtake Google. But such an ambitious goal does not come by easily.

Cuil came across to many as overly arrogant immediately claiming they there were better than Google and would soon overtake them… a fool and his search engine are soon parted.

I remember checking them out after the “big” announcement, and maybe visited the site 2 more times since then, but never saw the value.

What are your thoughts on the end of Cuil?

Restore the WordPress Admin Menu

bigw — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:50:53 +0000

You are working in WordPress, suddenly you click and you menu on the left has shrunk! Ahh what happened. A small line with an arrow will shrink and expand this left hand menu when clicked. Simply click it again to restore the menu to its full size.

Redirect directory and contents using htaccess

bigw — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:57:22 +0000

How to redirect an entire directory and all internal files using the htaccess file.

In the example below the site moved from a standard static page website to a site powered by WordPress, and thus moved its images directory as shown below:

http://www.example.com/images/

http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/

(note: In WordPress, change your media settings by un-checking this box “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”. This will keep all your uploads in a single folder.)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^images/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/$1 [L]