SoCal Websites

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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You Don’t Need Web Analytics: “

How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? ‘Oh good,’ you thought, ‘one less thing on my to do list.’

Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.
• Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.
• Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.

(Via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim - Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant.)

With Google Analytics being such a great price… free, there’s little excuse for not having top-notch analytics available for your site. Whether someone actually analyzes the data or not, at least it will be there when someone realizes the need.

Of course, there’s arguments to be made for having your analytics from the server rather than a javascript in the code. If you have cPanel, like on our servers, you have analytics built into your administrator. We still often use Google Analytics for our clients, but the server-side stats also provide the 404 not found errors and occasionally checking Google Analytics against the server stats can show if the tracking code has been installed properly on all the pages it is supposed to be on.

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If you are experiencing problems with Google Analytics (Problems started Tuesday around noon and have persisted to the time of this post, 2:22 PST May 23), you can access your data by using the old interface.

Evidently there’s a problem right now with getting the stats into the new Dashboard. This should be resolved with no loss of data since the data is obviously being collected (as it would not appear in the old interface if it were lost altogether).

I will comment when I see Dashboard working again.

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Google Analytics provided a much needed improvement to their system this week.

As a user since the beginning of Google Analytics, I can tell you that these new improvements are intuitive and provide easier ways to get the information you need.

Among my favorite improvements are the “Dashboard,” a customizable overview of your site statistics, the extensive scheduled reports via email, and a more intuitive organization to the navigation in the left column of the Analytics page.

Check it out.

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JavaScript Fix for ActiveX

IE 7 changed the way it dealt with ActiveX, and if you have straight coded your object and embed tags in HTML, you need to change it to using JavaScript to call it.

Apple has provided a couple of different methods, I used Solution Two on a site very recently.

This fix works, and it is very simple to implement.

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After my recent purchase of a Treo 700p on Verizon’s network, I was anxious to see how well the broadband internet shaped up against my broadband at home. The results are in.

I won’t be using my Treo to connect to the internet from home or in the office, but the speed is pretty darn good. I’m impressed. With this service, I do not have to look for a coffee shop or restaurant with wi-fi, I can just pick a place and hack away on my laptop. The good kind of hacking away, of course
To test it out, I went to abc.com and watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Just for kicks, I put it in the “big” mode as it requires a little more bandwidth. I watched the entire episode without a hitch.

I have not given it a thorough test with upload speeds, but an initial test confirmed the disappointing time compared with the pep of the download. Uploading the exact same file from my home broadband to the exact same server was 10 times slower on Verizon’s EVDO.

Uploading is a minor issue for many users, but it does mean heavy-duty uploading should be put off until a better connection can be reached. And the slow upload time means guys like me could never seriously consider using it as my primary internet connection. I will test it with Skype and Gizmo Project and see if internet telephony is adequate on EVDO.

That being said, for the time when maybe I’m killing time waiting for traffic to die down or find myself out of town, I would not hesitate to use my Treo as a modem. It’s worth the unlimited data package to have the convenience.

By the way, I’m on a MacBook Pro, so yes, it’s Mac friendly!

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