Jerry Leventer

When you upgrade Wordpress to version 2.3, this will provide automatic settings to fix the canonical URL issues.

Canonical URL’s is not a difficult concept to understand once you look at what the SEO issues are.

If your home page is located at http://www.YourSite.com/ then Google and other search engines will index that page. However, if the search engine also finds your site at http://YourSite.com/ that will appear as a separate page, and could be filtered as duplicate content. If twenty people all link to your site with one or the other URL, that’s fine. But if ten link to one version of the URL and ten to the other, the overall SEO value of those links becomes divided. Your PageRank and your keyword rankings will suffer.

In previous versions of Wordpress, before the upgrade to version 2.3, you had to enter code into your .htaccess file to achieve the desired canonicalization of your URL’s.

That code, combined with permalink structure, would look like the following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
# - BEGIN - CANONICALIZATION
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jerryleventer.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.jerryleventer.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# - END -
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Needless to say, the fix provided in Wordpress version 2.3 provides a much needed solution.

You can read more in this article at Wordpress.org .

[tags]Wordpress, Upgrade, Canonical URL[/tags]

Here are a couple easy steps you can take to prevent your Wordpress Blog from being “hacked”.

1) It is easy for someone to view your themes and plugins folders if you don’t do this one little thing.

Launch your favorite text editor and save a new file as index.php.

Then paste the following code into it:

<?php
// Redirect to specified URL
$URL = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header(”Location: $URL”);
exit();
?>

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1996:� The largest Internet collaboration, “24 Hours in Cyberspace,” took place.

1978:� The proceedings of the United States Senate were first broadcast on radio.

1974:� After 84 days in space, the crew of the first American space station Skylab returned to Earth.

1971:� The Nasdaq stock market index opened.

1922:� President Warren G. Harding introduced the first radio into the White House.

1879:� Sandford Fleming proposed adoption of Universal Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute.

Happy Birthday:
John Grisham (1955)
Mary Steenburgen (1953)
Nick Nolte (1941)
Ted Koppel (1940)
James Dean (1931-1955)
Jack Lemmon (1925-2001)
Jules Verne (1828-1905)
Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782)

RIP Anna Nicole Smith (d. 2007)

[tags]This Day In History, Technology, Internet[/tags]

As I’m about to upload a video to YouTube, I decided to read their Terms of Service. I fould this paragraph, and I believe it is the most important item to read as far as how it affects your rights when you submit a video.

Basically, the YouTube Terms of Service are telling you that when you submit a video to their site, you are allowing YouTube to maintain a copy on their server forever. If you remove your video from the YouTube site, they still have the right to keep the video. What exactly they can do with it for their own purposes remains a bit unclear due to the legalistic jargon. So, here it is for your reading pleasure…

C. For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions.

However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted.

The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.

[tags]You Tube, Terms of Service, Video Upload [/tags]

Here’s a tip that may be useful to those of you who have lots of programs installed and are using the Classic Start Button view.

When you select the programs list from the Windows XP Start button menu, are you unable to view all the programs?

There are two ways to solve this problem.

1) Temporarily set your display to a higher resolution.

If your display is set to 1024 x 768 you may be having this problem. To set it to a higher resolution, do the following:

- Press Winbutton+d to “Show Desktop” and minimize all open windows.
- Right click on a blank area of the desktop and select “Properties”.
- Select the “Settings” tab.
- Slide the slider to 1280 x 720.
- Click OK

The problem with this solution is that you may not want to have your resolution set that high. The main disadvantage is that all the screen fonts become very small and difficult to read.

Therefore, there is another option.

2) You need to access your Start Menu options.

- Locate a blank area of your Taskbar and right click.
- Select “Properties”.
- Select the “Customize” tab.
- Click the “Advanced” tab.
- In the “Start Menu Items” area, scroll all the way to the bottom.
- Three items above “System Administration Tools” you will see a check box called, “Scroll Programs”.
- Be sure that box is checked.
- Click OK, and click OK again.

Now test it to see that you can view all your programs by using the scrolling list, and that’s it.

[tags]Windows XP, Start Menu Programs, Technical Tips[/tags]

I joined Sherman Hu’s Wordpress Tutorials in 2006. In 2007 he began his Huddle webinars for his members. Like everyone else I know who is attemting to find the best tools to get the job done, he has had his successes and failures.

Here’s what he has to say:

I’m returning home to Glance (desktop sharing) and “The Basement Ventures” (bridge lines).

In addition, several regular attendees requested options to listening to the audio on the web/computer, instead of dialing in by phone. After considering my options, I’ve settled on Skypecasts (from Skype.com) as the way to listen to the Huddle as a webcast. This will be a new feature to our Huddle, and fingers-crossed, it’ll work well to be a regular feature. Details will be in the column to the right.

Click here to visit Sherman Hu’s Wordpress Tutorials.

[tags]Sherman Hu, Wordpress Tutorials, Conference Rooms, The Basement Ventures, Glance, Desktop Sharing, Bridge Lines, Skype Rooms, Skypecasts[/tags]

I heard about a social networking tool called Zango and did some research on it. Here’s what I found …

Zango, formerly known as 180solutions and Hotbar, is one of the world’s largest distributors of adware. Last November (2007), Bellevue, Washington-based Zango settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission for $3 million. The FTC said, “ they used unfair and deceptive methods to download adware and obstruct consumers from removing it, in violation of federal law.”

Source: http://www.redherring.com/Home/23403

[tags]Zango, Facebook, Spyware, Adware, Fortinet[/tags]

I was watching Andy Jenkin’s StomperNet video about how to avoid having your pages filtered for duplicate content. One of the warnings is not to have stop words as the only difference between titles on two pages.

In order to know what those stop words are, I have listed them here.

You can see the StomperNet post here:
http://www.StomperNetBlog.com/

This Day In History:

1912: British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had been there a month earlier.

1896: The X-ray machine was first exhibited.

1778: James Cook became the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the “Sandwich Islands.”

Happy Birthday:

Actor/Director Kevin Costner (1955)
Inventor Ray Dolby (noise reduction) (1933)
Actor Cary Grant (1904-1986)
Comic Actor Oliver Hardy (of Laurel & Hardy) (1892-1957)
Author A. A. Milne (Winnie The Poo) (1882-1956)
Alexander Graham Bell’s Partner, Thomas Watson (1854-1934)
American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

[tags]History, Birthdays, Famous People[/tags]

2007: Comet McNaught made perigee after coming close to the sun

2005: ESA’s SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovered elements such as calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron and other surface elements on the moon

2001: Wikipedia went online

1986: HBO and Cinemax paid cable television services initiated scrambling their national satellite feeds

1943: The world’s largest office building, The Pentagon, was dedicated in Arlington, Virginia

1936: The first building to be completely covered in glass was completed in Toledo, Ohio

1885: Wilson Bentley took the first photograph of a snowflake

Happy Birthday:
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Lloyd Bridges (Sea Hunt, 70’s TV show) (1913-1998)

Source: IDG Connect

[tags]This Day In History, Wikipedia, Martin Luther King Jr, Lloyd Bridges, Sea Hunt TV Show, Lunar Orbiter[/tags]