Here are a few tips on increasing your Twitter effectiveness
1. Repeat the same tweet day after day. People may forget your information, they need to hear it multiple times.
1b. Corollary: If your information is really important, post the same tweet multiple times per day.
2. Post inane information, such as what you had for lunch. People [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Web-design category.
How To Succeed At Twitter
Making the 4G Blacklist Easier to Manage
Jeff Starr wrote back in March about his attempts at keeping scammers and crackers and other undesirables away from his web sites. He’s published his suggested settings for the Apache web server at The Perishable Press 4G Blacklist.
I’m not a fan of adding lots of stuff to my core system files. So I [...]
Recommended Server Software: Pixelpost
If you are an active photographer, you should definitely look into using Pixelpost to manage your online photo collection. I’m using it for my Fractal of the Day web site.
From the Pixelpost introduction:
Meet Pixelpost, a small photoblog application that’s a no-brainer to set up and use. It’s perfect for anyone wishing to regularly post [...]
Step on the Tasap Spider
I recommend any non-Chinese web site block the TaspaSider, from http://www.tasap.com. It does not request robots.txt, and requested 387 pages from one of my web sites in 74 seconds. The user agent was “Tasapspider/0.9 (http://www.tasap.com)” and the IP address was 218.28.29.234.
Update 2010-03-05: Also blocked 218.28.29.236.
DoFollow Rapist
Be on the lookout for a “seo” rapist. This guy (his blog doesn’t deserve a link) is writing a new custom search engine of only blogs that don’t nofollow. His spider hits your site, then within seconds every URL in your sitemap is hit, leading to high bandwidth and server resource usage. I recommend blocking [...]
Making Dokuwiki Easier: Add ?do=edit to URLs
I use Dokuwiki for one of my site’s wiki systems. And I’ve removed many of the admin functions from the templates, since I’m the only one who can edit the site. I created a javascript bookmark that adds the ?do=edit to the url so I can easily make changes to the page.
javascript:location.href=decodeURIComponent(window.location.pathname)+’?do=edit’
Using 301 vs. RewriteRule
A few weeks ago, I wrote out a series of steps aimed at Fighting Bots Via Their Bad Requests. After watching my logs since then, I’ve noticed I made an incredibly stupid mistake. Bad bots do not follow 301 redirects! What does that mean?
If a regular browser encounters a web page, image, or document and [...]
FaceBook Username
Facebook has allowed you to set up a username for your account. So you can now see my Facebook pages at http://facebook.com/planetmike.
Facebook, Meet 2009. 2009, Meet Facebook.
I agree with Kevin Burton’s thoughts at Facebook Pages are Just Blogs. I just wish I had written out the part about Facebook lacking RSS or other feeds first. I hate Monday mornings when I load up Facebook and have to hit the silly “Older Posts” button a bunch of times to catch up with [...]
Fighting Bots Via Their Bad Requests
Last week I started looking through my “page not found” (404) errors. It’s been interesting to say the least, with nearly 800 bad requests since then, most of which have been various attacks in trying to mislead people. I address most of these attacks or probes by re-routing the request to a robot block system [...]
