OneWordSurveys.com

The Site

OneWordSurveys.com is a site as simple as it’s concept: Simple (one word) answers to simple questions. The site poses simple questions to users, all with one word answers. Questions like “Soda or Pop?”, “Coke or Pepsi?”, “Biscuits or Muffins?”, and much, much more. The site also provides a means for users to submit their own surveys as well.

The Design

As you can see from visiting the site, the design is not overly complicated. The client wanted to focus on the surveys and make them as visible as possible and make voting simple. This meant a clean and simple design making the posts highly visible in the overall design. The theme chosen is called SimpleX and is provided by WPShoppe.com.

Only minor changes were made to the theme and installed plugins on the website after the initial design. Most of these were simply aesthetic changes at the request of the client. In addition to standard performance plugins, we also developed a plugin to allow all posts to be posted directly to the client’s Twitter account as well as also posting directly to the client’s Facebook page setup for OneWordSurveys.com. Lastly, we also customized a contact form plugin so that when a user submits a survey of their own, it will automatically create the survey and schedule the post within the database, thus automating the website further. At this point, all the client has to do is double check the post before it’s scheduled post time.

Overall, this site was a very quick and easy site we developed for the client. However, as you can see, and as the client can attest to with the automation, quick and easy does not always sacrifice quality. This site took approximately 5 hours to complete.

OneWordSurveys.com includes the following services:

• HTML
• PHP
• CSS
• Javascript
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Customized WordPress Blog
• WordPress Theme Customization
• WordPress Plugin Development

Fret not, this is a very easy error to fix. As the error says, this is often caused by a permissions issue. The most common problem is that the directory you are trying to access does not have a valid index page in it (index.html, index.php, etc) and Directory Browsing is not enabled in your httpd.conf file or .htaccess file. Make sure you have a valid index file, as defined by your httpd.conf file. To enable Directory browsing (not the safest thing to do) make the following changes to either the .htaccess file of your domain or the httpd.conf file’s Virtual Host setting for this domain:

.htaccess
Options Indexes
httpd.conf
<Directory /your/domain/directory/>
Options Indexes
</Directory>

If you have a valid index file and you’re still getting the 403 Forbidden error, next check for an .htaccess file as the directives in there could likely be causing problems. The easiest way to check this is to rename your .htaccess file to something else like .htaccess.backup. Check your site now. If you no longer get the error, you know it’s something in your .htaccess file.

If you have a valid index file and no .htaccess file and you still have the 403 Forbidden error, one last thing to check is the permissions on the public_html directory of your domain. This directory should be set to 755 permissions (rwxr-xr-x) to enable web browsing. The world user needs read and execute permissions for web users to be able to access your site. You will also want to make sure that the files themselves that are being accessed have the proper permissions on them, typically 644 for files (rw-r–r–), unless they are CGI files (Perl, Python, Ruby) which need to have execute permissions and shoud be set to 755 (rwx-r-xr-x).

These are the most common issues that can cause a 403 Forbidden error on your website and should be able to resolve 99% of 403 errors you see.

I have reworked my cheat sheets and now have specific pages (and PDF versions) for each topic of cheat sheet instead of one large cheat sheet. I will be expanding all of them as time allows, but until then…enjoy!

Microsoft has been working hard (I assume) on all of their new products and are trying to build the hype around each of them as they are losing ground everywhere. In the “Mac vs. PC” commercials, Microsoft got pummeled. So they came back with their “I’m a PC” commercials, which are interesting commercials. They recently launched the new search decision engine Bing (which has been good to me so far) with a slough of TV commercials for it focusing on “search overload” from the other search engines. Again, good commercials. But how are they going to compete in the Browser Wars? Easy! Compare your product based on features only you have or in a way that you can say the other browsers don’t have it or are lacking in it. I must say, they have some good Marketing folks over at Microsoft. What am I talking about, you ask? Microsoft has released a “comparison chart” pitting IE8 against Firefox and Chrome and guess what? Microsoft says that IE8 is better than the other two! Thanks Microsoft, but I’ll do my own testing, or at least wait for an impartial third-party to give me some honest results.

Check out the full chart (for a good laugh) here

I’m not the only one who finds this amusing either. There have been 1280 comments on this “comparison chart” at Reddit as well.

From - Mon Jun 22 15:43:01 2009
X-Account-Key: account6
X-UIDL: UID52-1242085352
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Received: (qmail 11994 invoked from network); 22 Jun 2009 15:42:58 -0700
Received: from smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (64.202.165.181)
by ip-97-74-114-123.ip.secureserver.net with SMTP; 22 Jun 2009 15:42:58 -0700
Received: (qmail 12509 invoked from network); 22 Jun 2009 22:42:57 -0000
Received: from unknown (172.21.44.241)
by smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (64.202.165.181) with ESMTP; 22 Jun 2009 22:42:57 -0000
Message-ID: <4A4008F1.8020205@desertwebdesigns.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:42:57 -0700
From: Mark Stoecker <webmaster@desertwebdesigns.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: admin@poundbangwhack.com
Subject: Test Email
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

When troubleshooting email delays, the first thing you want to do is get all your times in the same time zone. Some servers will timestamp based on their current time, some will timestamp based on GMT. It will be easier to read if they are all the same timezone. In the example above, there are 6 timestamps we need to be concerned with, 2 of which are in GMT.

After getting all your times sorted out, the next thing you want to do is follow the delivery path (from bottom to top). Each server that the message passes through will stamp it. The tricky thing about reading the Received: lines is that they list first the sender, then the recipient: Received: from smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (64.202.165.181)
by ip-97-74-114-123.ip.secureserver.net with SMTP; 22 Jun 2009 15:42:58 -0700 As you can see here, the message was received from smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net by ip-97-74-114-123.ip.secureserver.net. If this gets confusing, just rearrange it to make it easier: Received by ip-97-74-114-123.ip.secureserver.net from smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net Now it makes a bit more sense.

So if we were to take the critical delivery points in the chain, fix the timestamps, rearrange the delivery notices, and re-order the server stamps so it reads top-to-bottom like we do, our headers would read something like this:Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:42:57 -0700
Received: by smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (64.202.165.181) from unknown (172.21.44.241) with ESMTP @ 22 Jun 2009 15:42:57 -0700
Received: (qmail 12509 invoked from network) @ 22 Jun 2009 15:42:57 -0700
Received: by ip-97-74-114-123.ip.secureserver.net from smtpauth01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (64.202.165.181) with SMTP @ 22 Jun 2009 15:42:58 -0700
Received: (qmail 11994 invoked from network) @ 22 Jun 2009 15:42:58 -0700
From - Mon Jun 22 15:43:01 2009 If you compare the two “headers” carefully, you will see that all I did was change the timestamps to MST, swap the “Received From” and “Received By”, and ordered them top-to-bottom instead of bottom-to-top. Looking at the headers now, there was obviously no delay in this message. However, had one of the timestamps been off by 30-40+ minutes, looking at the headers this way will help us determine where the delay is. We would know that when the message came in late at one step, the server it came from is having the problem.

There are plenty of other uses for reviewing mail headers that are too numerous to count in this post. However, if you’re email is not delivering in a timely manner, this will help you track down the cause. Once you get the hang of reading email headers, you’ll be able to read them as they’re printed without having to rewrite them.

With this GreaseMonkey Script, you set the domain you wish to locate and a highlight color (default is light red) and when you search in Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, results for your website will be highlighted.

Click here to visit the home page for this script
Click here to Install GreaseMonkey
Click here to Install Script
Click here to visit the UserScripts.org page for this script.

The input parameters are as follow:

• if: Input File – force dd to read from the file specified, in this case /dev/zero (or /dev/urandom) instead of standard input
• of: Output File – force dd to write to the specified file instead of standard output
• bs: Byte Size – force dd to use the specified amount of bytes at a time for both input and output (in this case 1 MB at a time)
• count: Count – tell dd to copy the specified number of input blocks at a time (in our case 10 blocks of 1 MB)

Important Note: If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do some serious damage with the dd command with the wrong parameters specified, such as erase an entire disk partition. The above commands are provided for informational purposes only. I am not responsible for any damage done by executing such commands incorrectly on your system. If you are unsure about executing this command, please, by all means, verify the information provided before executing it.

Phillip made a very easy function (posted below) that allows you to insert code for multiple Adsense units into your blog theme’s functions.php file and then call it with the comment-style tag <!–Adsense1–> (a la <!–more–>). After modifying the functions.php file, you only need to modify the single.php file to call the function in order to get return the Ads.

The beauty of the function is not only that you can create additional adsense units and call which specific one you need, but that if you happen to place your <!–Adsense1–> code before the <!–more–> tag or within the post excerpt, it will be read as a regular HTML comment since the index.php or archive.php files do not recognize <!–Adsense1–> as a WordPress tag.

Check back on my blog or subscribe to my feed as I plan on turning this function into a WordPress plugin to streamline the installation and use even more.
——————
Edit your theme’s functions.php file by appending the following lines to the end of the file. Your functions.php file is located at /wp-content/themes/[your theme name]/functions.php. If you do not have a functions.php file, you can create one with this code (make sure you replace your Adsense Code)

function get_the_content_with_formatting ($more_link_text='', $stripteaser=0, $more_file='')
{
   $content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser, $more_file);
   $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
   $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
   return $content;
}

function AddGoogleAds ($content)
{
$Adsense1_1 = <<<ADSCODE1
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-9999999999999999";
google_ad_slot = "0000000000";
google_ad_width = 250;
google_ad_height = 250;

//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>
ADSCODE1;

$Adsense2 = <<<ADSCODE2
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-9999999999999999";
google_ad_slot = "1111111111";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;

//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>ADSCODE2;

$content = str_replace(array('<p><!--Adsense1--></p>','<!--Adsense1-->'),$Adsense1,$content);
$content = str_replace(array('<p><!--Adsense2--></p>','<!--Adsense2-->'),$Adsense2,$content);
return $content;
}

(source: Philip Ze)

After you have made the above changes, make the following changes to your single.php file, again in your theme’s directory. Find the line with the tag the_content(parameters) and replace it with the content below:

<?php
   $cont = get_the_content_with_formatting();
   $cont = AddGoogleAds($cont);
   echo $cont ;
?>
<?php /* the_content('(more)'); */ ?>

Again, to insert your ads into your post content, place the tag <!–Adsense1–> or <!–Adsense2–> into your content. You can continue adding more Adsense units to your functions.php file following the same templaye as what is currently there.