The Words my Personal Review

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Last friday I went to see The Words movie with my girlfriend, expecting it to be a lot better. I had high expectations mainly due to its well put together trailer. This movie in my opinion had a lot of potential but there were several parts which I found boring, I also found the movie to be very predictable.

This movie in my opinion would have been a lot better if they simply made it about the story which was being told in the beginning. It was a story, within a story, withing a story.

Here is the trailer, still worth seeing if you like movies with strong morals. My rating (6/10).

Plot: A writer at the peak of his literary success discovers the steep price he must pay for stealing another man’s work.

Downtime due to SEO-Ultimate plugin

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The downtime we had was caused by uploading a file improperly.

The error was:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF in /home/*/wp-content/plugins/seo-ultimate/modules/author-links/author-links.php on line 1

This can easily be corrected by changing the mode that files are uploaded, from auto or ASCII to binary.

Once that is done, this error will go away.

Basic SEO techniques to increase traffic to your website

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This article on basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques will cover google page rank and your page content.

Note: SEO is not a quick task and takes a little work, but it will pay off in the end.

Google Page Rank

First thing lets create a bench mark. At the time of writing this article this site has a Google page rank of 0, which basically means its untrusted or unpopular. You can test your own sites by using the same tool I used.

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Note: Please note that a page rank is not the only factor to determine where your site is placed, but this a basic part of SEO that anyone can do especially if its just submitting your website to directories. If your too lazy to do this, getting to none basic techniques would just be too much work for you. This is a good starting place for many small webmasters.

So in order for me to improve on this rank I have to get other sites to link to my pages. Sites that have a top level domain TLD of .edu and .gov are of higher trusted status. The reason being is because as an individual you can not just go and buy one, generally the information on those TLD are of higher importance. Getting back links on .edu and .gov is beyond the scope of this article so I will not be get into more detail.

A good way to get people to link to your website is to get them to recommend your content. Try to be part of a community which would be interested in your website that way they might link to your website. You also want to make sure you have dofollow links otherwise the link on that site will not count as a recommendation.

Places you can put your link for free link backs.

  • Forum signature
  • On help or question websites, when someone asks for a specific problem you can write an article answering their question.
  • Directories
  • Paid advertising

The best link backs are ones where its 1 way, this means they link to your website and you do NOT link back to their website.

Google also considers the place of the link important, links which appear higher on the page will be more important then the ones which appear at the bottom of the page.

Now lets talk about the content on your pages.

  • Search engines can not see what your image is! If you have images on your website you should always have alt and title tags this will give the search engine a little more information about your image/page.
  • Keyword density. If your keyword is important you should try to include it as much as you can, as relevant as you can. For example this article talks about basic SEO techniques. Focus mainly on search phrases rather then keywords. Phrases are easier to win top spots.
  • Use relevant headers tags, <h1>, <h2>, etc when you can.
  • Do not use flash, seriously wtf.
  • Make sure your content is unique, do not copy and paste, no one likes mirror or spam sites. Its pointless and search engines do not like them either.
  • Update your urls to not use numbers to view different pages but rather update them so they have the relevant page keywords. For example change http://codesociety.net/?p=40 to http://codesociety.net/basic-seo-techniques-increase-traffic-website/
  • Try to make content that people want to talk or reference.

Since this article is about basic SEO techniques to increase traffic, I will end with a list of free directories you can submit your website too, in order to get free link backs.

http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html

http://www.joeant.com/suggest.html


http://busybits.com


http://linkcentre.com/addurl/


http://www.webdir.biz/submit.php


http://www.green-list.net/submit.php


http://www.netinsert.com/en/insert.html


http://www.lsblogs.com/


http://www.netinsert.com/en/insert.html


http://www.shoppingcorner.co.uk/submit.php


http://www.theredtree.com/submit.php


http://www.canadianlinks.net/submit.php


http://www.shoppingdirectory.nu/submit.php


http://www.australiandirectory.net/submit.php

Linux Command Reference Sheet for Webmasters

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This is a quick reference for the most used linux commands by me. I will update this as more command become important. For now this is most web developers need.

This will list all the files in the current directory.

ls
ls /path/to/directory/to/list

This will allow you to change directory.

cd /path/to/directory
cd ..                  Go back 1 directory 
cd ~                   Will take you to your home directory

This will allow you to change users. You will have to enter the user’s password if you are not the root. (Super user)

su username       Change to the user username
su -              Change to the user root

This will allow you to change the password of the current user.

passwd
passwd username   You must be root to specify username

To create a directory.

mkdir dirName            This will create the dir in current directory
mkdir /path/to/directory

To delete a directory.

rmdir dirName            This will create the dir in current directory
rmdir /path/to/directory

To create or edit a file using vi.

vi /path/to/file

To change the permissions of the file or folder.

chmod [permissions] [path/to/file/folder]
chmod 0777 /home/test

To change the owner of the file or folder.

chown [owner] [path/to/file/folder]
chown silvio /home/test

To change the group of the file or folder.

chgrp [group] [path/to/file/folder]
chgrp apache /home/test

How to dump a Subversion repository

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This is for using Linux based operating systems, like Fedora 16/17 and CentOS.

Step 1: Switch to root

su -

Step 2: Create a dump file.

svnadmin dump /path/to/svnfFolderName > fileName.svn.dump

And you are done. If you need help importing please take a look at this blog entry (Importing a Subversion SVN dumped file) or if you need help creating please take a look at this one. Adding New Repositories for Subversion.

Importing a Subversion SVN dumped file

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You must create the repository folder first, if you do not know how please follow this guide: Adding new repositories for subversion

Step 1: Switch to user root

su -

Step 2: Import your dump into your repository. cat sends the contents of the file into the screen, then the pipe allows us to run another command which tells it to send the data to the svnadmin load command instead.

cat /path/to/file | svnadmin load /path/to/svn/FolderName

All done!

Adding New Repositories for Subversion

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This will tell you step by step how to create new repositories for many linux based operating systems, like Fedora and CentOS

This post assumes you already have subversion installed and configured on your server. If you do not I will eventually have a post explaining how to install and configure it.

Step 1: Switch to user root

su -

Step 2: Create a new folder with all your other repositories.

mkdir /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 3: Make this into a version control directory

svnadmin create /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 4: Set the Group and owner of the folder and all files recursively

chown -R apache.apache /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 5: Set the permissions on the files giving access to the owner and group ; read, write, and execute, and everyone else just read and execute

chmod -R 0775 /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 6: Enable web content outside of normal apache directory

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 7: Enable commits over http

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t /path/to/svn/folderName

Step 8: Restart apache

This works on most linux based operating systems

service httpd restart

if not use this:

/bin/systemctl restart httpd.service

This new repository should be ready to go!

If you want to import a pre-dumped file then view this post: Importing a Subversion SVN dumped file