Wanna Be Geekster

Word Press Plugins Series

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:22:44 +0000

I never realized what a mess some plugins make of Word Press. Especially some of the more popular plugins that a ton of people use on their blogs.

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.

Google is now using page load times for ranking your sites

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:45:00 +0000

Just to validate the fact that having a website that is a resource hog is a bad idea I wanted to post a link to this great (although short) article by Google. They are now using page load times as a metric in ranking your site.

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

How important are page load times?

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:12:50 +0000

Working at my new job I have a new found respect for what it takes to have websites on shared web servers. I see all too often how improperly configured web applications cause high loads on the servers. I get to deal with irate customers who are complaining that we temporarily shut their sites down because they are not behaving in a manner that would allow them to stay on our shared servers.

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.

Personal Situation

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:44:42 +0000

Well back in December the company I worked for got shut down. On December the 17th no less. Well things were going great though despite of the situation. I decided that consulting was the way to go and just went for it. Well about two months ago I finally had a real blow out. I slept non-stop for about 4 days. I realized I was having some major health problems.

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!

Request Tracker

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:00:45 +0000

I am offering maintenance contracts to a few businesses now and I want to be able to keep track of any issues they may have for billing purposes as well as the many other obvious reasons you should keep track of this information. I have been looking around for quite some time now and have not found the right application to use. I was searching through synaptics for another application and came across Request Tracker. Here is what I did to get it installed:

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:

Set($rtname , “your.domainname.com”);

Set($Organization , “Company Name Goes Here”);

Set($CorrespondAddress , ‘rt@your.domainname.com’);

Set($CommentAddress , ‘rt-comment@your.domainname.com’);

Set($OwnerEmail , ‘username’);

Set($MaxAttachmentSize , 10000000);

# THE DATABASE:

Set($DatabaseType, ‘mysql’); # e.g. Pg or mysql

# These are the settings that will be used when

# ‘make initialize-database’ is run, you MUST set

# these to what you want.

Set($DatabaseUser , ‘rt_user’);

Set($DatabasePassword , ‘password’);

Set($DatabaseName , ‘rt3′);

# THE WEBSERVER:

# Leave this blank if you have this configured for the web root.

Set($WebPath , “”);

#Set($WebPath , “/rt”);

Set($WebBaseURL , “http://your.domainname.com”);

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

ServerName rt.n-demand-designz.com
DocumentRoot /opt/rt3/share/html
PerlRequire “/opt/rt3/bin/webmux.pl”

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
SetHandler perl-script
PerlResponseHandler RT::Mason

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

10. Now you just need to restart apache.

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

Some cool little utilities I found

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:55:15 +0000

People keep complaining about the mail server and when I go look through the log files and do various testing procedures it seems as if nothing is wrong really. Needless to say I was searching through Google and found a nice little script that will search through your mail logs and give you some detailed information in a human readable format. Seems as if there are quite a few neat little scripts on this page. Oh well, it is worth checking out if you manage any Linux mailservers.

Will’s Really Useful Engines

Oh no! Not another Word Press Plugin Post!

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:59:43 +0000

I know this has been beaten to death. But maybe at the end of my post I will give you my bash auto-install script. I can’t say that it will be perfect, but if you have SSH access to your box, it will definitely be worth checking out!

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!

MySQL Dedicated Box

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:50:19 +0000

I am trying to build a new dedicated MySQL box on a Sun x2200 server. I have been going through Operating Systems like mad. Solaris, OpenSolaris, Debian, Gentoo. Amazingly Gentoo so far has been the easiest to get everything setup and working properly. Even better everything is compiled and optimized for my hardware specifically.

I never thought it would be this difficult though. I really like my Sun hardware and love ZFS and the clustering capabilities of Solaris. Oh well, can’t win them all I guess. I am happy with Gentoo though and the performance is more than acceptable.

How to use authorized_keys2 with SSH for security

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:34:19 +0000

Using authorized_keys2 file instead of passwords is a huge time saver. Also a little bit more secure. As long as you keep your key files secure on your computer.

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.

Blog and Ping

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:11:57 +0000

I am a big fan of web marketing and making money online. I remember purchasing the work from home magazines when I was a kid and always dreamed of MLM in my spare time. Never got anywhere with any of it. But I have learned quite a bit over the years. I have learned that I am not a good sales man. I actually have a conscience. One trait a salesman cannot have is a good conscience. Oh well, one of the hallmarks of getting your blog noticed by the search engines is Ping Services. I am compiling lists from various places in this post. 1. To help others. 2. For my self when setting up new blogs for me or my clients.

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/