Chronophage's Blog

I often get questions about SEO and what can be done to enhance a web page’s rankings. SEO is definitely something to be aware of, and there’s quite a bit “known” about the way certain web browsers rank their pages, but it’s hardly a system that you can easily or reasonably game. (Yes yes, there are some obvious holes, but don’t expect them to last.)

SEO is a knowledge based cottage industry, as such, it attracts two types of people. People who know what their doing, and bullsh*tters. It’s easy enough to spot the latter, people who “specialize” in SEO will at best inflate their importance, and at worse, sell you a bunch of hot air. People who give SEO advice in addition to other web design tips, tend to be legitimate.

Search Engine Optimization is an inexact science. Search Engine algorithms are not publicly known, and are prone to changing often. Now, information leaks, and people can compare notes, so a lot is known about how search engines seem to work, kinda. However, most of these SEO “tricks” are really common sense. Most things boil down to things like: Make sure you don’t have a ton of cross links, don’t have a bunch of throw away domains, have an older domain, get your stuff linked to from reputable communities and pages, etc.

All of this falls under the purview of web design.

A good web designer knows the basic SEO ins and outs, and can, you know, design a decent looking website. A good web designer will build a functional, well laid out, logical website that people will want to come to, and people will link to and recommend. A good web designer designs good websites. Designing good websites means that you keep an eye on the SEO stuff, because SEO more and more means “Best Practices.” Bad web designers make bad websites. Bad websites get bad page rankings.

So then next time someone claims to be a SEO “Expert” who will O you so hard with the SEs you’ll be crying, and will guarantee a top ten spot, kick’em to the curb. Because he or she is selling virtual snake oil.

I recently read an article explaining why FreeBSD was not more popular. The conclusion of said article was that the installer was daunting, and archaic, and that it was too intimidating to utilize. So, basically, whoever wrote this article (I don’t like calling professionals out) didn’t get past installing the operating system. He assumes, that once it’s up and running, it’s the same as Linux. Nothing about the Ports system, nothing about administration. The sum total of his experience was that that installer was intimidating. He went on to state, and I am paraphrasing here, that only old, wizened Unix admins would use FreeBSD, sitting on high from their ivory corner of the office, replete with Star Trek posters, and choice snippets of their homemade 1994 BoFH day-by-day calendars strewn about their desks,  as they are the only ones who would defend such a terrible installer. This is the type that would utilize an operating system that requires disk slices and network configuration. The rest of us “modern” geeks don’t want to bother with such incantations, abjurations and divinations. They just want an operating system that works out of the box. Point-and-click-and-go!

Well, that tells me that you don’t get it. I’m not wasting my time with my installer. You’re wasting your time with yours. And with your point-and-click Linux install, you’ve installed an “operating system” dedicated to wasting time.

It’s all about the futz factor. And you just declared “I live to futz!”

<Here comes the biography>

I am not a wizened UNIX admin. I’m a Macintosh kid. I grew up with GUI objects, and hypercard. I thought that the most efficient way to work with a computer was with a graphic interface. I did some work with DOS, and frankly, thought it archaic, and backwards. Setting base pages for memory, batch scripting, who needed it?

My first experience with UN*X was MKLinux on a Mac LC (the pizza box) I futzed and futzed with it until I got it to boot. No idea what to do with it. 2 years later, my uncle gave me a PII 200Mhz and I put Mandrake Linux on it, to use it as a NAT’ing router and I thought: Cool! Windows sneaked into my life in my late teens, as I could not resist the lure of Counterstrike, Duke Nuke’m and Quake. Still, I enjoyed futzing with Linux. Breaking things, trying to figure out how they were put together, tinker tinker tinker.

(continue reading…)

Certain…Parties… Have intoned I am  goofy for implementing weird “mail bouncy thing” that is sometimes frustrating and is a silly anti-spam technique. Well, that would be Greylisting, and while it’s weird, it also drops a lot of spam getting through.

(continue reading…)

Very cool for dinking around, PBX in a Flash installs CentOS, Asterisk and FreePBX all in one go, with a couple of extra scripts. It definitely shallows the learning curve of Asterisk. I basically followed this Nerdvittles tutorial, and now I’ve been setting up Queues, IVRs and Voicemail. I still can’t figure out how to get someone to log into a Queue… Oh well. Very fun.

Hey, it works! I’m moving a file (on a GIG-E switch between VLANs) at around 3MBps.

Thanks to http://linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com/2008/09/howto-setup-nfs-server-on-freebsd.html

Postfix is surprisingly flexible. When I initially set it up two years ago, I set it up to reference a database, but I had a flaw in my logic. Basically, Postfix had no idea if a domain was marked active or inactive in the database. All it knew was whether a domain was in the database or not. Postfix has a default query, that looks for key information. However, you can supercede it in your config files. So I simply commented out the old variables that it passed to the default query, and wrote a new one:

user = DB_USER
password = supersecretpassword
hosts = 127.0.0.1
dbname = DB_NAME
table = domain
#select_field = domain < -- old version, commented out
#where_field = domain <-- old version, commented out
#New Query:
query = SELECT domain FROM domain WHERE domain='%s' and backupmx = false and active = true

Yes, I have backupmx enabled, even though that’s a titanically bad idea, and I would never use it. Why is it a bad idea to fuction as a Backup MX server? Because spammers don’t play by the RFCs and often send spam to lower weighted MX records in an attempt to bypass spam protection.

But I never know what people may ask for in the future.

This is a live and learn moment. When I did my last update, I had a lot of old libraries hanging around. I thought that portupgrade would recompile all of my ports, but it didn’t. Most had been recompiled in the interim as I had been upgrading, but Apache, well, Apache upgrades are hardly for the weak. So, when I deleted a bunch of crud laying around. I broke SUEXEC. SUEXEC is what allows scripts to be executed under my various users’ home directories. Well, a recompile and reinstall, and things are working much much faster. Always fix your architecture kids.

I’ve decided to get my learn on, so I’m going through Juniper and Cisco training material. It’s fun, actually. Juniper certs are free, for now, so I’m starting there. Most of their material seems to compare JunOS to IOS anyways so it’s a two for one. Now to get a lab going…

It seems that they are being blocked. I called technical support and requested that the “Case be escalated.” From my limited experience, this seems to be an AT&T issue, as I can reach my Google Voice number from a landline, and I’m not getting a fast busy, or other such errors. If this is not resolved in 24 hours, I will be filing a complaint with the FCC and MN’s Attorney General.

People are so curious nowadays… Today I’ve received one NMAP ping from Colorado State (I’m guessing since I recently downloaded NMAP) and one “Version” query from ISC.org. Or at least, I think I have. Oh well, no harm done.