As far as SEO plugins go there are a few available and they all are pretty good.  Some definitely perform much better than others though.

Here is a list of the general SEO plugins (in no particular order):

1.  All In One SEO Plugin

2.  Platinum SEO Pack

3.  Headspace2

4.  Gregs High Performance SEO

5.  SEO Ultimate

So far I have only tested the performance of two of these plugins.  Based on the results though I was completely surprised at the performance of one of these plugins.  I am going to test each plugin and see how well they perform from a resource utilization perspective.  This testing has nothing to do with how well these plugins perform from an SEO perspective.

I think this is a good idea, but unfortunately it puts people short on cash at an unfair disadvantage.  These days though you can get great speed and tons of space for next to nothing per month.  So I guess it really is not that big of a deal.

Personally I think that Google has realized that there are tons of programs available for “Autoblogging” and its funny how when these plugins are loaded on someones sites how slow their pages load.  One reason is most of the autoblogging platforms are resource hogs.  The other reason is that people who tend to use autoblogging platforms also tend to over-do-it on the plugins as well.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

It is amazing how more often than not these are Word Press sites.  Me being a Word Press aficionado am a little frustrated by this problem with Word Press.  Now to be fair it is never just Word Press by itself (there are a couple of exceptions to this of course).  It is more often than not a plugin or two that are causing issues.

The worst offender by far is the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.  This thing eats up CPU cycles they are just sitting around doing nothing all the time.  I realize that this plugin can potentially have quite a bit of usefulness to your visitors.  So in that respect I don’t see why instead of trying to do it on the fly it doesn’t start running through the wp-cron file, limit itself to a few articles at a time and add some metadata to a table somewhere that is used to pull the posts from the database when a visitor appears.  Or why Ajax couldn’t be used to display the information a little later after the page has been loaded.  Spreading the load out over a longer period of time.

Oh well.  In this respect I am going to be doing a series on Word Press plugins and the ones who perform better than the rest.  I am going to start out with SEO plugins of course and work my way from there.  If you have a series of plugins you would like to compare than just let me know and I will check them out and post the results here on my blog.

I am a very independent person.  Just acknowledging the fact that I am having some medical problems was extremely hard for me to do.  I do not like weakness.  To me being sick is a sign of weakness.

I am so blessed to have an angel on my side.  I haven’t had health insurance for over 8 years now.  The jobs I have had either didn’t offer it or it was way too expensive.  My last job for my family they wanted me to pay $1000 per month.  This is not a trivial sum of money.  Even making as much as I was making that was still 1/4 of my salary.  It just was not possible for me to pay for the insurance.  So once my angel heard what was going on he (God bless him for it) stepped up and offered to pay my medical bills.

So now that the money was out of the way I have been to two different doctors now.  One internal medicine doctor who did some testing and the results were a high ANA count.  Or Anti-Nuclear Antibodies.  It was only 140 (or 1:400).  Depending on how the test is performed this is either normal or very low end high ANA count.

High ANA is a sign of Lupus and a handful of other diseases.  So I was referred to a specialist.  The specialist pretty much told me right away it was not Lupus.  There is another condition called mixed connective tissue disease.  It is a combination of multiple different conditions.  I did get more blood work done.  So this blood work will hopefully help narrow down the possibilities here.  We will see what happens.

So either way I realized with no savings and living off consulting income the stress levels were not going to improve.  I applied at a hosting company to do Linux support.  Of course I got the job and they quickly moved me to the security team after training.  That is the only position at the company that has real world experience attached to it.  That is pretty meaningless to me but at the same time the job is actually pretty fun.  I get to see all of the latest and greatest infections and how these guys are infecting the servers.

So look for more good stuff coming from me here in the very near future!

1.  Need to install some pre-requisites.

aptitude install libalgorithm-dependency-perl libapache-session-perl libapache-sessionx-perl libapt-pkg-perl libarchive-tar-perl libcache-cache-perl libcache-simple-timedexpiry-perl libcalendar-simple-perl libcarp-assert-more-perl libcarp-assert-perl libclass-accessor-perl libclass-autouse-perl libclass-container-perl libclass-data-inheritable-perl libclass-factory-util-perl libclass-inspector-perl libclass-returnvalue-perl libclass-singleton-perl libclone-perl libcompress-zlib-perl libconfig-tiny-perl libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdatetime-locale-perl libdatetime-perl libdatetime-timezone-perl libdbd-sqlite3-perl libdbi-perl libdbix-dbschema-perl libdbix-searchbuilder-perl libdevel-stacktrace-perl libdevel-symdump-perl libdigest-sha1-perl liberror-perl libexception-class-perl libexporter-lite-perl libextutils-autoinstall-perl libextutils-cbuilder-perl libextutils-parsexs-perl libfile-find-rule-perl libfile-flat-perl libfile-ncopy-perl libfile-remove-perl libfile-slurp-perl libfont-afm-perl libfreezethaw-perl libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl libgd-graph-perl libgd-text-perl libhtml-format-perl libhtml-mason-perl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libhttp-server-simple-perl libinline-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libio-stringy-perl libio-zlib-perl libipc-sharelite-perl liblocale-gettext-perl liblocale-maketext-fuzzy-perl liblocale-maketext-lexicon-perl liblog-dispatch-perl libmail-sendmail-perl libmailtools-perl libmime-perl libmldbm-perl libmodule-versions-report-perl libnet-daemon-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libnumber-compare-perl libparams-util-perl libparams-validate-perl libparse-recdescent-perl libpath-class-perl libplrpc-perl libpod-escapes-perl libpod-simple-perl libpod-tests-perl libprefork-perl libregexp-common-perl libset-intspan-perl libsub-uplevel-perl libterm-readkey-perl libtest-classapi-perl libtest-exception-perl libtest-inline-perl libtest-pod-perl libtest-simple-perl libtext-autoformat-perl libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-glob-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-quoted-perl libtext-reform-perl libtext-template-perl libtext-wikiformat-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl libtext-wrapper-perl libtime-modules-perl libtimedate-perl libtree-simple-perl libuniversal-exports-perl libuniversal-require-perl liburi-perl libwant-perl libwww-mechanize-perl libwww-perl libxml-libxml-common-perl libxml-libxml-perl libxml-namespacesupport-perl libxml-parser-perl libxml-rss-perl libxml-sax-perl libxml-simple-perl libdbd-pg-perl

I don’t think this is all of them because based on some steps below I am still missing dependencies.  We will get to those later though.

2.  I then downloaded the latest 3.8 release to my home directory with the following command:

wget http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/release/rt.tar.gz

3.  Then I extracted the archive.

tar xzvf rt.tar.gz

4.  Run the configure script

cd rt-3.8.6

./configure

5.  This is where I ran into problems.  That is obviously why they have this command.

make testdeps

I got several missing dependencies and so I ran the following command to solve the problem.  And it worked.

make fixdeps

6.  Now after all of the dependencies have been met it is time to run the installation.

make install

7.  Now we need to configure our database.  The default location for the config file is here:

/opt/rt3/etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm

The default settings are all stored in /opt/rt3/etc/RT_Config.pm.  You can copy and paste the correct settings you want to change into the /opt/rt3/etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm file.  Here are the ones I changed:

8.  Now back in the source code directory.  Run the following:

make initialize-database

You will have to type in your mysql root password here for this part.  It will automatically create the database for you.  So don’t use one that has already been made here.

9.  Now you will need to configure your Apache server settings for your new site.  Here is an example using mod_perl 2.x

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName rt.n-demand-designz.com
DocumentRoot /opt/rt3/share/html
PerlRequire “/opt/rt3/bin/webmux.pl”

<Location />
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
SetHandler perl-script
PerlResponseHandler RT::Mason
</Location>

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/rt.ndd.com.error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/rt.ndd.com.access.log combined

ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

10.  Now you just need to restart apache.

11.  Installed!  Now it is time to start configuring Request Tracker!

On to the list!

1. Meta Robots – This tool is great!  Who wants to create meta tags.  Such a chore.  This little gem does it for you based on the keywords in your article!  Would rather do a little editing than create it from scratch!  Here is a direct download like for this one: download

2.  Aizatto’s Related Posts – This is another lazy webmaster tool.  Will find other posts with related keywords on your blog and link them automatically.  Here is a download for the latest version as of this post: download

3.  Cross-Linker – Yet another lazy webmaster tool.  If you constantly link keywords to webpages,  Internal links or external, then this plugin is a dream come true.  Pick your keyword and the link you want it to represent and viola.  Your pages automatically have links on them.  No highlighting and creating a link everytime.  Here is a direct link to the latest and greatest version:  download

4.  WordPress Affiliate Pro – This has got to be the best plugin ever for WordPress.  Who wants to manage affiliate links on their site?  This plugin allows you to easily type in a keyword and your affiliate link and viola.  Immediately that keyword anywhere on your blog is a new affiliate link for you.  Here are a few videos for you to check out as well:

Introduction Video

Reporting Walkthru

This is not a free plugin, but it is worth every penny!

5.  Article Marketing Automation -  This is not really a plugin per se, but it is the bees knees.  If you have been looking for free human generated content that is guaranteed to be unique, then this is your solution.  You can have an unlimited number of blogs on there post as many articles as you want.  All for free.  I mean seriously, how much better does it get?

Oh well, I have a ton of other Plugins for WordPress that totally rock.  I will save them for later though.  Best of luck and feel free to hit me up if you have any questions on any of these plugins or how to effectively use them on your site!

First a few prerequisites.

1.  You need to ensure that OpenSSH is installed on your box.

2.  You need to have connected to at least one machine.  You need to make sure that your .ssh folder is in your home directory.

Now on to the good stuff.

Here is how I do it:

1.  First you need to create a private DSA key with OpenSSH.

ssh-keygen -t dsa

It will prompt you for a password.  This is your backup to a compromised system.  You can use one if you wish, you don’t have to if you don’t want to bother with a password. This creates one file in particular that is important:  ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.   The other file it creates is just id_dsa and it is in the same location as well.  One is a private key, id_dsa, and the other is a public key, id_dsa.pub.

2.  Now you need to place your public key in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file on the target computer.  Depending on your setup there are a couple of ways to make this happen.  First way is to just scp the file to the new box.

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub account@my.server.com:/home/account/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Second way is to append the public key to the authorized_keys2 file on the remote machine:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh account@my.server.com -C ‘cat – >> /home/account/.ssh/authorized_keys2′

That should pretty much do it.  Pretty simple thing you can do to help secure your machine and make connecting to your remote boxes quick and painless.

Heres the list!

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

This time however, there was not a premade template that would even come close to what was needed for the site.  So coincidentally speaking with a friend, rechols, he mentioned Magento.  I had never heard of it before so I decided to check it out.

I was immediately impressed with the tutorials on creating templates on their site.  It is very thorough and is a great start on how to create, modify and use their templating system.  Their system is well thought out, but it is still pretty complicated.

We will see how converting my HTML template over to Magento works out.  Layout is definitely NOT my thing.  So I am not expecting it to go too well!  I have documentation to follow, so if it doesn’t turn out right it is my fault!

My father was always very interested in computers.  It probably had something to do with the whole robot invasion that killed off all the cowboys.  My uncle, one of my fathers older brothers, worked at IBM for quite some time even as my father was pretty young.

Luckily he purchased a computer for the family in 1981.  It was some Japanese system that ran CP/M .   I remember playing cannons with him when I was six years old at the dining room table.  My mother hated that thing on her nice table.  The floppy drives perpetually went out of alignment though and sending the unit back to Japan for repair quickly became prohibitively expensive.  So in 1983, thanks to my uncle working at IBM, we got a brand new IBM PCjr.

I still miss that machine.  I remember playing Alley Cat, Math Blaster, some typing tutor game, and many many games on that thing.  It had cartridges that had the BASIC rom in there you could boot up to and program away.  I still remember and can picture my father telling me how to use the thing.

It came with PC-DOS 2.1.  He told me to take the boot disk and put it in the only drive we had, the 5.25″ floppy drive.  When the A:\> came up he told me to do the following.  Type dir.  See the files that end in .exe, .com and .bat?  If you type the name of that file in something will happen.  Try it and see.  The he told me that some files could be read as plain text.  Use type to view those.  Then he left me alone.  That was my formal computer training.

My father joined the local HAL-PC user group.  He and a friend started up the HAL-PCjr SIG.  It was the first SIG in HAL-PC.  I met so many cool people there, David and Gilbert were two very close friends of the family.  I learned about the Modem and BBS’s.  At that point forward I was totally hooked.  100% completely head over heals in love with these things.  I still haven’t stopped downloading, loading, configuring and testing software.  I have probably done that task more than any thing else that I have done in my lifetime.  Including sleeping.

I have used more operating systems than I can ever rememeber.  I have used every version of every Microsoft Operating System created since DOS 2.1.  Installing and learning Operating Systems is another hobby that has consumed a massive amount of time in my life.  Not only do I do it for fun, but I also help out quite a few friends as well.

My desire to help others understand or get through the nightmare of technology has always been one of my passions.  Hopefully I can help out a person or two along the way.