Blogs & Open Source & Scripts & Tips and Tricks & WordPress Alan Hartung on 25 Nov 2008
After much searching across the webosphere, I decided very few people have shared how to integrate sIFR with dropdown menus.
I found one example, but his solution did not work for me.
Taking his cue, however, I did implement SuperFish as a starting point.
Browsers & Tips and Tricks Alan Hartung on 01 Nov 2008
Using MultiFirefox, you can use Minefield, the new beta version of Firefox, at the same time as Firefox 2 or 3.
You need to rename Firefox to something like Firefox Beta or Firefox Minefield to get MultiFirefox to recognize Minefield as a version of Firefox.
After renaming it and restarting multifirefox, you will be able to load Minefield and any other version of Firefox compatible with multifirefox.
Tips and Tricks & Website Hosting & cPanel Alan Hartung on 05 Sep 2008
Spam can cause problems with exim when it is both incoming and outgoing. Recently, we started getting excessive resource usage notices for two different customers. At first, it looked like their mail accounts were being used to spam the server.
After further analysis, we realized it was actually that the domains were being bombarded with spam to their accounts. Exim was raising the server load dramatically, because neither account had the default address set to :fail: no such address here.
By using :fail:, “the email is never accepted into the server. During the initial SMTP negotiation when the senders SMTP server connects to your SMTP server, the sending SMTP server issues a RCPT command notifying your server which email address the email to follow is intended for. Your server then checks whether the recipient email actually exists on your server (a POP3 account, an alias or a catchall alias) and if it does not, it issues an SMTP DENY which terminates the attempt to deliver the email.” (source: ConfigServer)
These two accounts were being bombarded in such a way that they actually brought the server to a crawl by not having the default address set to :fail:.
So in your cPanel installations, you should make sure the default address is set to :fail: for all accounts to ensure a safe, stable hosting environment.
In WHM, if you go to “Tweak Settings” under “Server Configuration,” you can set the default for new accounts to go to :fail: and prevent high server load from mail attacks.
Open Source & Scripts & Tips and Tricks & Website Hosting & cPanel Alan Hartung on 16 Apr 2008
Process Resource Monitor
When running a shared server environment, you must be extremely aware of activity which can take down your server. One rogue hosting account can ruin things for everyone. While you should not allow an account to run poorly written scripts which create server intensive processes, a host should also not leave the server unprotected from scripts which will increase the server load and bog or bring down the server. Enter PRM. Process Resource Monitor will monitor processes on the server and check it for exceeding resource limits which you set in the config file. To be sure it doesn’t kill legitimate processes, you set the number of times a process must exceed your rules and the number of seconds between checks for a process to be killed. PRM will keep your shared enviromnent running smoothly and help ensure one account does not bog down the server for everyone.
Software & Website Hosting & cPanel Alan Hartung on 27 Dec 2007
If you haven’t explored Google Apps for Your Domain or just plain old GMail, now is the time.
GMail and Google Apps for Your Domain capacity is now 6 GB. That’s per user.
Using GMail and GA holds many benefits. If you configure it from your domain’s registrar console, your email will work even if your hosting provider is having troubles. It means less downtime for your emails.
Also, emails do not take up space on your server or hosting account. If a user does not download messages off the server, spam will quickly multiply. I’ve seen over a gig of spam in one user account before! Depending on your hosting package, you could be scratching your head wondering why you can’t upload your 200k picture to your website.
The GMail interface for webmail is second to none. Searching emails, organizing emails, sending/receiving, anything you want from a webmail client… GMail powers it better than any other free alternative I’ve used (and I’ve used most, if not all, of the major ones).
Firefox & Tips and Tricks Alan Hartung on 22 Dec 2007
I can’t really remember the time before tabbed browsing and Firefox’s session restore feature. On average, I probably have 5-7 tabs open at a time, and I often close Firefox with that many tabs open. It has become part of my workflow.
The other day, I learned - quite by accident - that I can rearrange the tabs on Firefox just by clicking and dragging them to another position. It’s a simple trick, and it has helped with my workflow.
Now, my tabs can reflect groupings in my workflow. When I come back to the tab in the third position, I may want to open additional tabs related to the website contained therein. Rather than just opening new tabs at the end, I can now group them all together and bring a little more organization to my tabbed browsing.
Blogs & Content Management Systems & Scripts & WordPress Alan Hartung on 06 Dec 2007
Possibly thousands of bloggers were thrown into a panic by being locked out of their own blogs the last couple of days. The popular “Bad Behavior” plug-in started banning nearly all IP’s and in many cases locking individual users out of their own blogs.
A friend could not even access his wp-admin page, because of the glitch in the plug-in!
To the Bad Behavior author’s credit, he did issue a patched upgrade rather quickly. This is quite disturbing, however.
We noticed that this blog did not block us out of the main content or the admin, but it did prohibit MarsEdit from posting or retrieving posts. Very interesting. I’m not sure why the plug-in would only block certain types of access coming from the same IP. Because it was through MarsEdit, we did not see the standard Bad Behavior message. This makes it even more disturbing as we would have had no idea what was causing this failure in our offline blog editor.
WebGeek posts on “Bad Behavior Behaving Badly“:
This was no minor glitch, and something like this could have serious consequences for websites and businesses. If left unattended in this state for a long time, a site could lose valuable search engine rankings, after the spiders of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) find that they are locked out repeatedly with 403 errors. It’s most likely that these losses would be temporary, but there’s no guarantee, and by that point the damage is done.
And the explanation comes from the Bad Behavior blog:
Update: Some people have asked for more details on what exactly happened. In brief, yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did. So therefore, this release.
WebGeek has recommended the removal of Bad Behavior from all blogs until stability can be assured. We agree, but suggest if you want to keep the updated version of Bad Behavior going on personal blogs you monitor closely, it will help to see if this plug-in has truly stabilized.
Optimization & PPC (Pay Per Click) & Search Engine Marketing Alan Hartung on 14 Jun 2007
How White Papers Can Turbo-Boost Your Lead-Generation Campaign
If you need to generate leads for business to business sales, you should seriously consider white papers.
One of our search engine marketing clients has built a tremendous business off of leads generated from white papers. While we explore demos, free trials, webinars, and anything else we can think of, white papers are the tried and true answer to lead generation.
To put it in technical terms, when we A/B test, white papers come out on top.
Software & Website Hosting Alan Hartung on 13 Jun 2007
For the most part, I love Google Apps for Your Domain. Lately, I’ve had some issues which for me are pretty serious.
Most importantly, I am continually getting no love when I try to send email via Apple Mail. What happens at first, is that it looks like it is trying to send then several minutes later I’ll get an error message saying it couldn’t be sent and asking if I want to try another outgoing server.
Usually after this message, if I try again, the email will just send right away using the exact same settings. A friend of mine has reported the same issues with his Google Apps for Your Domain accounts.
And this problem does not seem to be limited to Google Apps. My GMail accounts are also suffering the same fate.
If you are having this problem, a temporary solution allowing you to send more quickly is to close Apple Mail and reopen it. Upon reopen, it always seems to send right away. Otherwise, you have to wait several minutes to get the error message before you can send again.
Another issue I’ve had is that my redirect for my webmail does not always work. All of my other subdomains pointing elsewhere work fine, but the Google Apps configuration has been frequently failing on me. If both of these issues persist, I may, sadly, have to leave Google Apps for Your Domain.
Optimization & PPC (Pay Per Click) & Search Engine Marketing Alan Hartung on 13 Jun 2007
You Asked For it, You Got It. New Features Added to Google Analytics
Woohoo! Clickable Links for referral pages and 500 rows of data just implemented into the new Google Analytics.
Google is to be commended for quickly responding to the outcry for these improvements. The former, though, has been an issue for a looooong time, and it was a pretty big oversight to not include this in the GA 2.0 rollout. The latter, I think, was just a mistake on their part. The old Analytics had more rows, and the GA team underestimated how many people maxed out their views (and I’m one of them!).
So login to your Google Analytics account and check out the new features. There’s more, too, but those were the two I really cared about…