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Richy's Random Ramblings

Snippet: Smegging Brilliant

August 6, 2003
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I’m just getting a few emails tricking through my mail system which indicates that my domain has been used in a “joe job” for sending spam. Basically, this means that a spammer has forged one of my domain names for sending out spam to people.

Damn.

If you’re not sure what a “joe job” is, have a look at the spam jargon file which defines it as:

To ‘joe’ someone is to forge e-mail messages or Usenet postings so as to make another person or domain appear responsible for it. Usually done in order to harass the person or domain being joed. Named for joes.com, an ISP which was damaged as a result of being joed.

At the moment I’m only getting vacation/auto-responder replies, but as soon as I get my hands on the spam and I’m able to trace it to the source…Grr….

Snippet: It’s 1.30am…

August 6, 2003
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It’s 1.30am on the night of the hottest day of the year so far – so why on earth am I STILL working? I’ve handled around half a dozen technical support queries (most of them through our “Live Support service”), fixed a minor long standing bug in our helpdesk, checked settings in the billing system, rolled out Live Support to another site, have a “conference chat” with one of our suppliers and…

I’m a mug aren’t I? (and, no, not a cup of tea – mug such as “fool/loony”). I’ve got CODE to write AND blog entries to make (I’ve found a funny TV advertisement I want to blog about AND a new search engine which I quite like)…

Search: Choosing a good Search Engine Optimization Company

August 4, 2003
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Huh, just came across something that slightly cheered me up. I just saw an advertisement (provided by Google Adsense: see top of the page) for a company offering one of the services I do for a job (search engine optimisation and placement). I went to their site to see how good they were (as I hadn’t heard of them before) and…

They’ve got a “Google PR” value of “0”, I can’t find their site on Google search for their company name (never a good sign) and finally some of the techniques they “suggest” are good for a site (such as “dynamic meta tags”) would, most likely, get your site banned from the search engine. A good SEO (search engine optimizer) will optimise a site in such a way that it’ll work as a “static site” OR dynamically driven (ok, some “hacks” may be needed to avoid query strings). I also checked their “recommend client” site: no optimisation (bar the “now-redundant” meta tags) and site can’t easily be found in Google!

Therefore, I’d like to suggest the following to anyone considering employing a search engine optimization company: First of all, can you easily find them in the search engines for a) their company name and b) one of their keyphrases (sometimes this is harder to figure out as it may not be easy to see what they are targeting).

Secondly: Do your research. If they suggest creating hidden pages/links, cloaking/fast redirects, duplicate pages (or anything else on Google’s “Do not do” list), then steer clear of them as the site could easily be reported for spam

Continue ReadingSearch: Choosing a good Search Engine Optimization Company

Snippet: When Coding…

August 3, 2003
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When you are writing a template engine for a new site, and want to test a bit of logic: the following will fail:

{%if 1>2%}
Logic works
{%/if%}

Why? Well, 1 is not greater than 2! Took me nearly 15 minutes to try and figure out why “Logic works” wasn’t showing – the logic was working, but my brain obversely wasn’t at that point!