WHT crippled by database attack
by Brian TurnerIf you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!Popular webhosting forum, WebHostingTalk.com, is in recovery after a hacker made a “deliberate, sophisticated and calculated” attack on the backup system in place, deleting onsite, offsite, and operational backups of the site.
The attacked then proceeded to delete three […]
December 12, 2008
Wordpress 2.7 released: now with auto-update!
by Brian TurnerWordpress 2.7 has been officially released, and it looks as though the sneak preview of Wordpress 2.7 we posted a few days ago was right on the ball.
The admin interface may look more cluttered at first, but it really does improve usability by reducing the number of clicks required for any single action.
The big news […]
December 10, 2008
A sneak peek at Wordpress 2.7?
by Brian TurnerI’ve been taking a look at the interface on Wordpress.com, and the format of the admin panel has changed from the 2.6 version to something completely different:
If this gives us a sneak peek at Wordpress 2.7 then it certainly looks like a more intuitive navigation system is in place and a release actually worth looking […]
December 5, 2008
What newspaper sales stats tell you about content
by Brian TurnerA report in the Financial Times today providing stats on the fall of newspaper sales shows a very interesting trend.
Take a look at the following stats, showing year on year falls in sales:
The Independent: -8%
Daily Express: -5%
The Guardian: -4.2%
Daily Telegraph: -3.9%
The Times: -3%
Financial Times: -0.7%
It didn’t state stats for the Daily Star and Daily Mirror, […]
November 15, 2008
The Big Secret for Adsense Earnings
by Brian TurnerThere is a lot of focus on monetising websites via Adsense, but what many people don’t realise is that there are four key factors in developing income from Adsense:
1. Integration
2. Traffic
3. Sector
4. Audience
There is a lot of focus on integration of Adsense ads and generating traffic, but often little focus on sector and audience, despite […]
November 13, 2008
Steal my content? I’ll kill your Adsense!
by Brian TurnerContent theft is an annoyance at best, but it’s especially frustrating when people still your content and then place Adsense all over it.
Often it’s automated, but sometimes it looks stolen by human users.
Either way, it’s not invited, it’s unwelcome, it’s illegal, and I’ll get you back for it.
Dealing with stolen content
Sure, I can run […]
Improve code, reduce bandwidth
by Brian TurnerI was struggling with a problem last month - one of my sites was pulling in excessive bandwidth compared to its user base, and I couldn’t figure out why.
I combed the site stats for signs of a bot, and was surprised to find my own server was using up the most bandwidth.
It took a little […]
November 11, 2008
The Simplest SEO Mistake
by Brian TurnerSEO is a specialist field of internet market that covers a range of issues from relatively basic, to complex.
However, the most common SEO error I see if that of canonical issues.
Remarkably, I’ve seen this happened under a lot of quite experienced SEO.
Which suggests that sometimes its the basics that trip us up more than the […]
September 16, 2008
Financial sites only like IE?
by Brian TurnerBloomberg has become the latest site in the financial sector which doesn’t like browsers outside of IE.
At present, any attempt to access Bloomberg.com in Mozilla Firefox 2 results in a blank white page.
It looks like this is probably due to the redirects for its advertising section not being compatible for Firefox.
It’s not the first […]
September 13, 2008
How Google destroyed $1 billion of United Airlines
by Brian TurnerThere are few better reasons for keeping careful control of your content than the story of how Google News left United Airlines losing $1billion in share value.
The situation:
- The South Florida Sun Sentinel website has a “most read today feature”
- The South Florida Sun Sentinel website is crawled by the Google News bot
- The […]
August 18, 2008
vbulletin updates: 3.7.2 Patch Level 2, vb 3.7.3, vb 3.8 and vb4.0
by Brian TurnerMass email from vbulletin received tonight which announces a new patch (3.7.2 Patch Level 2) for the current build.
In addition, vb 3.7.3 will be released on August 26th.
The patch doesn’t require a complete reinstall, thankfully - just download the patch and upload to your vbulletin forum install, and it should be reasonably simple.
Meanwhile, public plans […]
July 11, 2008
Evening Standard brain farts URLs
by Brian TurnerThe London Evening Standard is the latest major site I’ve seen to cock up its URLs.
At present, the business news front page looks like this: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/
But if I try to click through the link to the story about the US considering a $2500 billion bail out, I get the following URL - which simply reloads […]
July 10, 2008
Image copyright infringement: £1200
by Brian TurnerDamn, another brown envelope, another legal notice.
It turns out that on one of my sites I’d used a thumbnail image to accompany an article. Getty Images just wrote to tell me “Oi, thanks, that’s one of ours - remove it and pay £1200 in damages for unauthorised use, please!”.
Another stupid mistake on my part.
The site […]
July 8, 2008
How to build an empire of keyword domains
by Brian TurnerAnyone who uses Google can see that for the past 12-18 months at least, keyword domains have been getting some extra love from Google.
There are some general rules I’ve observed, though:
- Google seems to prefer .co.uk over other .uk domain extensions (forget .me.uk for a start)
- Google doesn’t mind limited prefix/suffix use
- Google doesn’t like […]
May 23, 2008
Piratereports.com aggressively chases vbulletin use
by Brian TurnerPiratereports.com, the company which polices vbulletin licencing ownership, has certainly appeared to be more aggressive at chasing up vbulletin licence violations this year.
Because I manage so many vbulletin licences (over 20 at present) it means keeping the records constantly updated can be a challenge, not least when domains are rebranded and boards moved to new […]
May 1, 2008
vbulletin 3.7 released with price increases
by Brian TurnerJust a quick heads that vbulletin 3.7 has finally been released - but alongside price increases which will come into force from June 2nd.
While Jelsoft have yet to release details on the price rises, now probably seems as good a time as any to renew any inactive owned licences.
The launch of vb 3.7 brings together […]
Google is Venice; Webmasters are Constantinople
by Brian TurnerGoogle is Venice; Webmaster are Constantinople: Or, How Adsense is destroying the webmaster economy and making webmasters subservient to Google.
Timothy at Marketocracy has recently finished reading John Julius Norwich’s “A History of Venice”, and as an investor draws parallels between Venice’s defensibility and Google’s defensible market lead on the internet.
Aaron Wall extends the comparison by […]
March 31, 2008
Say goodbye to Cpanel X
by Brian TurnerCpanel X was the theme that brought webhosting admin panels out from the dark ages. However, this iconic and easy to use interface is on it’s way out due to security issues.
Cpanel X was an admin interface that made managing the backend of a website fun and funky. With its sleek silver and blue design, […]
March 29, 2008
Mystery: Google indexing site searches
by Brian TurnerGoogle appears to be indexing keyword searches on Wordpress installs without any normal cue being given. Are we looking at an indexing error, or is the data coming from Google Analytics?
Was searching through one of my sites on Google last night - Wordpress driven and running GA -
when I found a whole load of keyword […]
November 2, 2007
Google announces OpenSocial APIs
by Jan HarrisGoogle is announcing a Web standard called OpenSocial which will enable programmers to build social applications for multiple Web sites at once.
OpenSocial is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces), with which Web developers will be able to create applications for any sites that accept the OpenSocial code, including social networking sites and blogs. […]