Thank you very much.

For months I was thinking it was normal due to the mere fact that Microsoft has acquired of some search engines including Yahoo’s directory over the years. I was not aware that even Google itself was intrigue on this issue and they have conducted a test by inserting fake search terms and fake search results on their database. This dummy data was used as a test medium to confirm the theory that somewhere inside IE8 or Windows itself is a recorder of Google search terms and results. The test will prove true if the bogus search terms will appear on Bing and eventually the search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling—tarsorrhaphy—along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction. This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.” — Bing Corporate Vice President Harry Shum

As a rule of thumb, this is semi fool proof for the following reasons:

• A website that never existed won’t ever be indexed
• A search term that is bogus won’t ever be used to search on Bing in an almost at the same instant when it was search on Google.

The results:

This may be a coincidence so more searches are performed and this time using an existing website with an added credit union name search. Frankly speaking, due to different search algorithm, the following images should be different.

If you are to read their privacy policy, Microsoft states that they are capturing some (at least as they claim) of your browsing data unless you switch certain features off. IE8 always spook me due to hidden connection to Microsoft which was being tracked by Kaspersky firewall even if all the features was turned off on my side, I was just trying to imagine that it was the update service that is calling home.

Microsoft has posted its explanation of how it uses more than 1,000 different “signals” to create its search algorithm. They also claimed that they are not copying anything. An excerpt of a blog post from Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President:

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

Sources:
Google’s official post
Microsoft’s response

Generations ago, the first day of the lunar year (or the first day of the Chinese calendar) was being used to take a break from a very long period of planting and harvesting cycle.

A festival was being held to on this day which is just a few days after the harvest and a few days before the planting season. Some even called it as the Spring festival which may last up to 15 days.

The preparation usually takes a month earlier just like the New Year celebration that we got used to. The houses are being cleaned from top to bottom in beliefs that this will drive away bad luck, doors and windows are also being repainted.

Today base on the Chinese calendar is the Year of the Metal Rabbit, the 4th animal in the Chinese Zodiac. People that are born on the year 1915, 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999 and 2011 have this zodiac.

The Rabbit is believed to be the symbol of elegance, mercy and peace. Sensitive and gentle are the people who are born under the Symbol of the Rabbit. They are often cautious and are very emotional and mostly are shy, kind and tender. They make good friends and great partners in relationships.

Grab this special offer from Cebu Pacificr

The Philippines’ largest national flag carrier, Cebu Pacific (CEB) celebrates Chinese New Year by offering seats to Greater China as low as P888. The seat sale starts now until February 5, 2011 or until seats last, for travel from May 1 to June 30, 2011.

For a ‘Go Lite’ seat sale fare of only P888, you can travel from Clark to Macau and Hong Kong and from Manila to Taipei.

Changing the default index file

DirectoryIndex index.html

This code changes the default index file. An index file is the first page that will be loaded up hen visiting mywebsite.com or even mywebsite/foo/. In this case visiting mywebsite.com will load up mywebsite.com/index.html.

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm

You can also give a list of options such as shown in the snipper above. This command will search for index.html, index.php and index.htm in the exact order. If you have index.php and index.html sitting on the same folder, the one that will be loaded is index.html.

Custom error pages

ErrorDocument 404 errors/404.html

You may want to display a custom error message in cases a server error. The snippet above will redirect the error code on the left to the page on the right. I suggest using a static page for the error documents to avoid causing indefinite loop or an error causing an error.
For ease of use I have listed the other client errors below.

• 400 Bad Request
• 401 Unauthorized
• 402 Payment Required
• 403 Forbidden
• 404 Not Found
• 405 Method Not Allowed
• 406 Not Acceptable
• 407 Proxy Authentication Required
• 408 Request Timeout
• 409 Conflict
• 410 Gone
• 411 Length Required
• 412 Precondition Failed
• 413 Request Entity Too Large
• 414 Request-URI Too Long
• 415 Unsupported Media Type
• 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
• 417 Expectation Failed
• 418 I’m a teapot
• 422 Unprocessable Entity (WebDAV) (RFC 4918)
• 423 Locked (WebDAV) (RFC 4918)
• 424 Failed Dependency (WebDAV) (RFC 4918)
• 425 Unordered Collection (RFC 3648)
• 444 No Response
• 426 Upgrade Required (RFC 2817)
• 449 Retry With
• 450 Blocked by Windows Parental Controls
• 499 Client Closed Request

Error code 418 (I’m a teapot) is a test error and will be extremely rare to have since it is not part of the official distribution.

Restrict Access

deny from all

The snippet above is the most famous way to restrict access on folders used by programmers. It plainly tells the server to block everyone from reading the files on the same directory level of the .htaccess file and everything on its subfolders.

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.0.0/24
# this would do the same thing..
#allow from 192.168.0

You can also give selective access to files. Pay attention to the order clause, it tells the server to apply the deny rules and then apply the allow rules. Writing the order in reverse will translate into “allow access to 192.168.0.* and then block everyone including the allowed IP range.” 192.168.0.0/24 is a wildcard and is equal to the range 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.0.255.

order allow,deny
deny from 192.168.0.1
allow from all

This code snippet simply blocks 192.168.0.1 and allows access to everyone. Notice the order of allow then deny.

Redirection “Permanently Moved”

Redirect 301 /old/foo.html http://yourdomain.com/new/foo.html

This is the safest way to redirect and tells the search engines and even your browser that the new address for /old/foo.html is /new/foo.html, the requirements for this kind of redirect is that you need to give the full URL of the old file excluding the domain info and the full URL of the new location on the right. You can also redirect to a new domain and search engines will remember this.

HTTP to HTTPS

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

This code forces all http connection to load the https version of the site (example foobar.com will load up as https://foobar.com). As an alternative, you can check for port number.

Non WWW to WWW

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^foobar\.net$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.foobar.net/$1 [R=301,L]

You can also force everyone to use the www.version of your website. This is important for those webhosting that maps www.foobar.com and foobar.com into different folders. A good webhosting should make www subdomain as a webmask or alias of the main domain. This will also save you from domain restriction problems in your flash files when someone visits http://foobar.com instead of the expected http://www.foobar.com. The extra www in front of the domain name triggers cross domain scripting on flash files.

Prevent Directory Listing

Options -Indexes

The snippets above prevents directory listing.

IndexIgnore *.zip *.txt

You can also do a selective listing like the snippet above which exclude all zip files and text files from being shown. The wildcard character * is supported as a filename.

IndexIgnore *

Using * as a parameter effectively prevent listing of all files and the snippet above will act as if no files are present on the folder. The first example displays a forbidden error.

Modify Upload Specifications

php_value upload_max_filesize 20M
php_value post_max_size 20M
php_value max_execution_time 200
php_value max_input_time 200

The above code changes the default values used by php file uploads. This may cause server error 500 if you are not allowed to change them which is the case 75% of the time.

The list is still pretty long and I have only listed the safe one that you can use.

Additionally, the JW Player™ supports RTMP, HTTP, live streaming, various playlists formats, a wide range of settings and an extensive JavaScript API. The JW Player’s™ skinning functionality allows you to completely customize its look and its plugin architecture allows you to easily extend the player’s functionality.

A new 50% discount coupon was now released for the month of January was active for a week now as of writing. The discount code is jandisc5011 enable you to get a full 50% discount on all the longtail product line including modules and skins.

For those who have missed the previous 50% discount, this is your chance to secure a license with a huge saving. As an advice, it is wise to buy in 10packs or 50packs since all licenses are permanent and you can add more websites on your available license slots.

An initial account will give you 2GB of online storage for free with an option to go paid increasing your file storage up to 100GB. The application works on Windows, Mac and Linux and on selected mobile devices. There are 2 types of sync mode, an automated one that will pick up new files and modified files automatically. The second mode is selective where you choose what will be sync, this saves bandwidths specially if you are storing big chunks of files.

File sharing is also available where the files can be accessed online and converted into public shares. Shared files/folders will appear as a new folder entry on your friend’s accounts where they interact with the files. For those that are worried on allowing a stranger to access their files, Dropbox also have the feature to monitor who is accessing your files and keep them out or give them access.

Who will need this service?

Imagine bringing a report to present at your company meeting, you will either bring a laptop or a mobile disk perhaps. What will happen if on your way to the office you have encountered heavy rains and your mobile disk or laptop got wet? It is a disaster.

Imagine that you are on a vacation and you are taking photos and videos as you move along and you face a small problem, your video recorder or digital camera got their disk full. What if on your trip your beloved “mommy” keeps on calling about your trip?

From my years of working with software for desktop and online/portable medium, I keep on seeing a very distinctive trend of people sending files on their emails so that they can access it somewhere else. I think it is cute but how about having a file that was actively being modified from time to time? How will you deal with these things?

With Dropbox, you only need to install a client copy on your other computer preferably your work computer to sync with your home computer or vice versa. One of the best part of using Drop box if you are a blackberry user is that Dropbox supports blackberry. Using selective sync, you can have that specific file on your blackberry.

Share your vacation folder with your mom and she can see all your vacation videos and photos on the comfort of her own home. No need to send a postcard.

Are you in need of more space?

Dropbox offers more free space on top of that 2GB free by referral program. (if you like this post kindly signup under my referral link http://db.tt/I9r4IHX and we will both get a 250MB bonus space)

https://www.dropbox.com/edu – People who have a .edu email will get double the referral space bonus by confirming your email on this page
https://www.dropbox.com/free – Earn extra space by linking your Twitter and Facebook account with the service and earn 128MB per offer.
https://www.dropbox.com/gs – Take the tour and earn 250MB space, it requires sharing files to your friends Dropbox account.

The hurdles gets on moving to securing your files, protecting the server, making sure that everything runs and that you have enough bandwidth or disk space to carry everything out flawlessly. Sooner or later you will hit a certain condition where uptime will be questioned. Are you 100% sure that your website is live 24 hours a day and 7 days a week?

Introducing the Robot.
Fortunately, you no longer need to sit in front of your computer checking at regular intervals to make sure that your website is live. “Uptime Robot” a web application from WebResourcesDepot & SSLmatic will dutifully alert you if your website suddenly went down so you can take an action at once.

How does it work?
The Robot will visit your website and reads the status headers for code such as “200” or a status of “OK” and a status of “404” or missing page. A status code between “400” and “500” indicates that the page is not loading. To ensure that the your website was not encountering temporary congestion or sudden internet interruption, the Robot will perform extra checks for 3 minutes until it gets an “OK” status or alert you via Email or SMS that your website is down.

Will it mess up my tracking stats?
Uptime Robot won’t affect your tracking statistics since it will only download the HTTP headers, be warned though that this will counts as hits on your server log and they can be counted as normal hits by Webalizer and AWStats and other similar server log statistics software.

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A common user will use script base forwarding by manipulating the headers, it will work but the robots will get confused and may mark your site as spam. The best way to redirect in a search engine friendly way is to utilize error 301 (Moved Permanently).

Here are the steps that you need to do:

• Make sure that you have a Linux or Unix webhost, the OS can be optional as long as you have Apache as the base server.
• Consult your webhosting company if they support .htaccess file, a few years ago support for this file is not supported on most shared hosting accounts.
• Open your ftp software or file manager in case you prefer a file manager
• Navigate to the web root, in case for php hosting it is either public_html or httpdoc (httpsdocs for SSL directory)
• Locate if you have a file named .htaccess (take note of the . and the blank filename).
• If you have an existing .htaccess file, download the file and create a backup.
• Add an entry taking this format redirect 301 /odlfilename http://domainname.com/newfilename

The code above will tell the server to generate the error 301 and informed the robots, spiders, crawlers, search engines and ordinary visitors to be forwarded to http://domainname.com/newfilename. If a robot, spider or a crawler gets redirected, it will notice the code 301 and will flag the URL for an update. This way you will maintain your page ranking if you keep the keywords and done slight modifications on the tile (to the extent of maintaining the parts that are being search).

Take note that it is impossible to create a file without a name on windows computer, just create “new.htaccess” file and then rename it after uploading and remove “new”.

The pattern for the web redirect rule is

 redirect 301 /oldfilename http://domainname.com/newfilename

The new location should be a full URL including the domain name and http or https.