mattgadient.com

A couple CPM advertisers I’ve run on the Warcraft-Maps site were Burst and ValueClick. I ran a few others as well although they were lesser-known names and I dropped them because not only did they not pay well, but they ran some questionable ads.

Last year I had a little surprise in that Warcraft-Maps.com was listed as an attack site. Turned out that either Burst or ValueClick were running some not-so-nice ads and got the site flagged. It did eventually un-flag, but I wasn’t thrilled.

I always thought ValueClick was the problem. They’ve got a huge amount of ads running on their network, and they don’t seem as selective as Burst!. You can imagine my surprise a few minutes ago though, when Kaspersky did the little “violin” when I visited my site. Turned out Burst doesn’t behave so well after all. Read more…

Recently, I switched most of my sites to another server.

After about a week of not receiving any messages through the contact form on one of them, I suddenly realized… “ya know… it’s been a while”. I tried sending myself a test message through the contact form, and never received it. Sending from another email account worked though. Strange…..

Before going any further it’s worth noting that I’m using Google Apps on the aforementioned site for mail (gmail for domains).

To narrow down Read more…

If you’ve tried to clean up your Joomla template, something may have perplexed you at one point or another. There’s no mention of mootools or caption.js in the template file, yet these 2 things end up in the HEAD section of all your pages anyway.

If your site is pretty basic, you probably don’t need them, and having them load every time just makes it that much more painful for your dial-up viewers. Heck, mootools.js alone is 74 kb !

So how do you get rid of mootools? It’s pretty simple code that you throw in your template’s HTML fi Read more…

While reading through WHT, I came across a neat little tidbit.

It’s a bit of PHP code that can be used to get an idea as to how fast the processor is on the machine your websites are hosted on – or at least the speed you have available to you. A thanks to “webpan” of the WHT forums for putting up the code he used for his LiquidWeb test.

Basically, you create a php file that looks like this:

<?php
$startTime = microtime(true);
for ($i=0;$i<500;$i++) {
$j++;
for ($k=0;$k<10000;$k++) {
$j++;}
}
$endTime = microtime(true);
$delta = $endTime – $startTime;

echo “total time: $delta seconds.\n”;

//phpinfo();
?>

Call it “test.php” or something, and put it somewhere on your webserver – then browse and run it. You could modify it to do some more stressful math, but don’t go crazy.

I tried it on 3 hosts, and here were my results:

time in seconds - lower is better

Each test was run at 3 different time periods during the day. To make things a Read more…

I recently started up an account at SimpleCDN to help offload a webserver a little bit by putting static images there.  After a couple days, I decided to give Amazon’s CloudFront a try as well.

I’ll start off by saying this was originally going to be primarily about the performance differences. However, after a few hours of testing, I found there’s not enough of a difference to be worth mentioning – neither was consistently better than the other. Performance-wise, for the most part it really boiled down to how close each test location was to the nearest respective edge server. This was relatively small-scale testing with a site that pulled about 12 images per page (and thus pulled 12 items from each CDN), but I concluded that neither’s going to make a lick of difference performance-wise… at least, not for the typical individual who’s looking at these two for solutions.

That said, time to take a look at the merits of each at a basic level: Read more…

Background:

I used to use non-SEF url’s on a Joomla site, and recently turned on Joomla’s built-in SEF. Problem is that the old URL’s still “work”. Of course, this is great for people who visit – not so great when GoogleBot comes along.

GoogleBot comes happily along and for any given article sees the original archaic url with a bunch of parameters that have been there forever. Of course, there’s little incentive for it to use the “cleaner” versions. As far as it’s concerned, the archaic stuff is the original, and the new url’s are duplicate content. It could eventually change it’s mind as to the “preferred” page on it’s own, but there are a few fighting factors here. On one hand, the sitemap points to the “new” one, and it’s predominantly linked to through the current site. On the other hand, anyone who’s linked to the site in the past has linked to the “old” one, and let’s face it – it was there first.

To make the change and get Google looking at the right page, we’ll go over the things I tried that didn’t work, and then the thing I tried that did work: Read more…

Finding it again wasn’t fun :p

In any case, if you’ve got the default

Great Success !
Apache is working on your cPanel^® and WHM™ Server

message, you can simply rename the index.html file and place your own at:

/usr/local/apache/htdocs

I did this using SSH and creating an index.html using nano. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to browse through the server using WHM, so you’ll probably have to either SSH or FTP into your server (optionally, the Virtuozzo control panel seems to let you browse the hard drive and edit files… if you’re using Virtuozzo anyway).

So… switched a site from one host to another.

Installed Joomla, restored the database, restored the template folder, and then started installing Extensions.

First up was JCE. I downloaded the lastest version, tried uploading/installing it from within Joomla’s Admin Panel, and then got the following message:

JFolder::create: Path not in open_basedir paths

Oh boy! Not so good.

Did a little searching around and came across some fixes, although the fix in my case turned out to be pretty easy.

Read more…

I’ve touched on this a couple of times, but I’ll go into a little more detail here. Assuming youv’e got a VPS (or dedicated server), should you host your own DNS servers, use DNS servers provided by your hosting company, use specific DNS services, or use the DNS provided by your domain name provider?

There are many factors to consider – maintenance, uptime & reliability, costs, speed, ease-of-use, and more.

We’ll start with a few pros and cons of each, looking at it from a typical VPS point of view:
Read more…

I recently attempted a domain transfer from GoDaddy to Namecheap.

I did all the steps – I unlocked the domain from GoDaddy’s control panel, then placed the order through Namecheap. Namecheap needed the EPP code – I used the GoDaddy control panel to email it to myself, and entered it on Namecheap’s site.

All seemed to go well until it got “stuck”. For a few days at that. A little searching around showed that it may take up to 5 days, but the odd thing was checking Namecheap’s Transfer Status page, the status description was “Transfer in Process – Acquiring Current Whois for Transfer Verification“.

Should it take over 2 days for a Whois lookup? I think not.

Although I had searched searched Google with terms similar to this page’s title, I hadn’t come across anything for this situation. I searched for “Transfer in Progress – Acquiring Current Whois for Transfer Verification” this time, and BAM, came across this Namecheap KB article. Basically it states that the status description I’ve been getting happens if the auto-whois that Namecheap does during a transfer doesn’t get anywhere for 8 hours. The transfer is effectively “stuck” at this point. Fortunately, that KB article gives instructions for opening a ticket to get it manually fixed (although it’s unfortunate that someone could be waiting for days before deciding to submit a ticket – would be nice if it was automated).

I opened a ticket at Medium priority and got an email 5 minutes later stating:

This happened because the current registrar is blocking our IP addresses for whois queries and we’ll have to manually insert whois details into the form. We have forwarded these details to our development team to investigate this further and manually update the whois info. Please allow up to 24 hours to receive the authorization email. Please use that time to unlock your domain, take off any whois privacy features and ensure that admin contact’s email is valid and checked frequently.

Thank you for letting us know about this problem.

In any case, a 5 minute response time by Namecheap is pretty impressive. All the steps they mentioned had already been taken, so it’s just a matter of sitting and waiting for the authorization email. I’ll update the post if there are any further issues.

Update: There weren’t any further issues. I got an email from eNom (Namecheap’s provider) with a link that I had to visit to authorize the transfer. GoDaddy sent me a mail at that point letting me know there was a transfer request. To make things speedy, I logged into my GoDaddy account, found the domain, looked at the “Pending Transfers” section, and approved the transfer. Less than an hour later, I got an email from Namecheap stating that the transfer was complete.