Archive for May, 2005

60+ million blogs worldwide

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/5/2005
in Technology
. 4 Comments

The Blog Herald’s Duncan Riley has posted one of the better estimates of the number of blogs worldwide (for May 2005) and he estimates the number of blogs at just over 60 million!

If you think this number is surprising, consider that MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging engine launched just over two months ago, now boasts over 10 million blogs!

Asia Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Wagstaff has tree mapped the results and it is interesting to see the breakdown between the ‘Anglosphere’, Asia, and the rest. Asia is catching up fast and as Jeremy notes

Asians are blogging in their own languages in huge numbers, roughly equal to the ‘Anglophone’ world, and yet there’s very little crossover between these groups, or even among them. Worthy of a closer look, methinks.

Strangely, there was no mention in the report of the 300+ Irish blogs!

IIS 7 details released

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/5/2005
in Windows
. 0 Comments

I saw a link on Robert Scoble’s site to a post about IIS 7 so I followed it out of curiosity (I have done a ton of work on IIS 4, 5 and 6).

IIS 7 looks like it will be interesting - a few snippets:

Right now, ASP.NET is implemented as an ISAPI extension for IIS. That will still be true in ASP.NET 2.0. In IIS7, that changes. Instead, the concepts of HTTP pipelines, handlers, modules, XML config files, etc… are all natively built into the platform.

That’s a big change and should mean easier configuration and demonstrable performance improvements. Right, well that’s a good start - what else?

now practically every feature in the pipeline has been broken out into a separate module. From a security standpoint, this is a whole new realm for IIS. Because the pipeline is componentized (the WHOLE pipeline), you can reduce your surface area by removing any module you’re not using from the pipeline. So if you don’t have Passport authentication, don’t enable the module.

Now that sounds like Microsoft is moving in the right direction, security-wise in this development. Of course, opening the code up for independent review would be an even better move, but we are unlikely to see that happen!

Finally, if IIS7 doesn’t do something you want it to do, you can write an HttpHandler or HttpModule to support the functionality you need. Say you want to run PHP on IIS7… done. Say you want to be able to support serving up a new filetype… piece of cake. Forget about all the hassles of ISAPI… programming managed IIS extensions is far easier. Of course, ISAPI extensions will still work for compatibility reasons, but hopefully unmanaged extensions will be a thing of the past.

This sounds intriguing as well - it will remain to be seen just how extensible IIS 7 actually is but if there is any truth to these reports at all, it will be a significant step forward for Microsoft.

Connect to a Wireless network (WLAN) using a Mac (OS X)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/5/2005
in Mac
. 1 Comment

I have had a couple of people ask me how to connect their Macs to Wireless networks (WLANs) so I threw this post together to be a point of reference and to help them out.

First off, the easiest way of connecting is to use DHCP - DHCP is a way of automatically configuring computers on a network. Whether you will be able to use DHCP will depend on the configuration of the wireless router you are connecting to. Many of them will be configured as dhcp servers - to serve the network configuration to their clients, in which case, all you have to do is select “Using DHCP” in the IPv4 dropdown in Network -> Airport -> Configuration -> TCP/IP

Strength of signal isn’t really a factor in serving pages (unless the strength drops to zero obviously!). If you have any signal at all, you should be able to browse. If you are connected but can’t view web pages it is most likely to be a dns issue. A way to test this is to open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type “ping 216.239.59.103″ - that’s the ip address of www.google.ie and it responds to pings by ip address. If you get a response, you are connected to the Internet. To stop the ping, hold down the ctrl key and hit the z key. Note - you can also use the Ping tab of the Network Utility app in OS X (Applications -> Utilities -> Network Utility) to do this.

If you do have a connection and want to check if your dns is set correctly, type in “ping www.google.ie”. If you get a response, you should now be good for browsing. If you don’t get a response, you probably have a dns settings problem.

Most wireless routers can act as dns servers, so if you have a dns problem, check the ip address of the router in the Airport TCP/IP config screen and add it to the DNS Servers field.

If you still have a problem, then the wireless router isn’t set as a dns server. In this case it is a little more difficult - you need to know who the ISP of the wireless router is and add their dns server’s ip address to the dns server field. Now, you can add as many servers as you want to this field, so if you can get a list of the major ISPs dns servers, it might be well to add them to this field - it shouldn’t be too hard to get this info - Google for it, or ring the ISPs helplines!

If that fails, move on to the next wireless spot - it is probably not worth wasting any more time on this one!

If you have a good dns connection (i.e. pinging www.google.ie responds) and you still can’t browse, then it is likely a browser config issue. Make sure there are no Proxies set in the browser, try resetting the browser to default settings, or try another browser.

I think this should cover you for most eventualities - if there is anything I have missed, feel free to let me know through the comments and I will update this post.

Changing the header image in Kubrick

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/5/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 10 Comments

I changed the header image on this site recently. I had been using the default blue image which ships with Kubrick (the default theme which ships with WordPress 1.5).

I am not a graphic designer and I don’t have graphic design tools at my disposal so I needed a method of doing this which was idiot-proof! Fortunately I came across Owen Winkler’s fabulous Kubrickr - Kubrickr is a tool that lets you replace the image at the top of your WordPress 1.5 blog with a nice photo from Flickr.

Here is how it works:

  1. You browse to the Kubrickr site
  2. Type some words that relate to your blog into the search box and click Submit (at this point Kubrickr searches through the images on Flickr for tags which match your search term)
  3. Scroll through the search results until you find a suitable image, select it and click Submit
  4. On the next screen, drag a selection box inside the image to mark the area you want to use for your header image and click Crop
  5. When prompted, save the file to your local disk
  6. Using your ftp client application, log into your blog, locate the existing header image (/wp-content/themes/Default/images/kubrickheader.jpg) and rename it
  7. Now upload your new kubrickheader.jpg file and hey presto! new header image in place.

So easy, even I could do it!

The only quibble I have is that the grey borders on the image don’t quite match the grey of the blog’s background. Other than that, I love it.

Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) using Permalinks

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/5/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging, Search Engine Optimisation and WordPress
. 61 Comments

Permalinks are a feature of most blogging applications - they are are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, categories and other lists of weblog postings. For instance, the Permalink for the listing of all the posts I have written in the Search Engine Optimisation category is:

tomrafteryit.net/category/search-engine-optimisation/

In WordPress, you can control how your Permalinks look and this can have a significant effect on your site’s search engine optimisation. For example, if you don’t change the default Permalink setup on your WordPress blog, the link to your posts will look something like:

http://domainname.com/index.php?p=49

where 49 is the post number.

However, if you go to Options -> Permalinks in WordPress and change your Permalink structure to something like /%year%/%postname%/ or even just /%postname%/ the title of your post will become part of the url for your post. If you use keywords and keyphrases which you want your site to be found by in the post title, then you will increase your chances of being found by people who search for that keyphrase. For example the url this post is:

tomrafteryit.net/boost-search-engine-optimisation-seo-using-permalinks/

Of course, if you combine that with the advice on category name selection I mentioned yesterday, you get a double whammy!

One word of caution - if you just use /%postname%/ as your Permalink structure, this may cause you problems - according to the Codex page on Permalinks:

the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the wp-admin folder

In my own case, my Permalinks are set to /%postname%/ and consequently I can’t access my Awstats folder. I have set my Permalinks to /%postname%/ because that structure gives the maximum SEO benefit - the further down the URL your keyphrases are, the lower they will appear in Search Engine results.

The way around the Awstats issue for me is to change the Permalink structure to /%year%/%postname%/ briefly, access the Awstats folder and change the Permalink structure back. This method is unsatisfactory because anyone following a link to a Permalinked article on the site will get a 404 while the structure is altered, but it is the best I have come up with so far.

Logged in as . Logout and anonymous comments

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/5/2005
in Blogging and WordPress
. 14 Comments

I noticed recently that people commenting on this site were not leaving their names. That is not so unusual except that there were so many anonymous comments.

I decided to look into it to see if I could see why. I am always logged into my blog admin site so when I browse to a blog post, I don’t need to fill out the Name, Email, etc. So to see what others see when they browse to a post on this site, I browsed to it in a browser I don’t normally use (Camino in this case).

However, when I browsed to one of my posts in Camino, it appeared I was logged in to my admin section - the following message was in place of the normal fields - “Logged in as . Logout”. In my normal browser (Firefox) when I am logged in, I usually see the message “Logged in as Tom. Logout” so it appeared to me that there was a WordPress User with a blank username somehow.

I checked the Users section of my Admin interface and sure enough the blank user was there - not sure how it got there, possibly created in the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.5.1.

I deleted the user, and thankfully when I refreshed the view of the post, I was now presented with the familiar fields for comments. Now it will be easier for people who want me to contact them back to leave their details - apologies for any inconvenience.

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