Reaper-X .:[ ID ]:. » Webmaster Tools

Defensio Spam Filtering Solution

Reaper-X — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:30:28 +0000

Looking for a replacement to your current spam filtering system ? then i’d suggest you to try Defensio Spam Filtering Solution (free of course unless you get more than 50K comments per month)

Okay … i assume that you’ve installed another spam filtering system like Akismet, or Akismet in conjunction with Spam Karma that behave exactly like Defensio (a centralized spam filtering solution except for Spam Karma of course), so what’s the point to switch into another spam filtering solution if you ask me ?

The answer is easy, Defensio has better management interface so you can easily distinguish spam comments and innocent comments that is caught by your spam filtering solution, so you can restore those comment easily if there are innocent comments get caught by Defensio. And like most (if not everyone) knows that there are no spam filtering solution that gives you 100% accurate result (heck even GMail spam filtering mark message sent from WP mailing list as spam) so in the end it’s up to the users itself to mark the message manually, and in this case Defensio gives you a good user interface so you can manage your spam list

(you can sort by spaminess, post date or comment date)

But what if i already use another spam filtering solution that has good management interface (Spam Karma for example) ? well than the answer is depend on your decision, but if it’s for me … i prefer a centralized solution / remotely hosted solution that doesn’t take up any unnecessary server resources especially in this case

Other than that, Defensio also gives you two rss feeds (one for spam comment that get caught by Defensio, and the other one is for innocent comment) that you can check via your favorite rss reader … but since that is private, i can’t show you on how it look like

That’s all about their positive points, and now here comes their negative point :

I sometime get a small number (usually between 1 – 6) of comments in my moderation area that Defensio can’t process (most of them were spam), although i’m not sure on why this is happening but after reading their post i can assume that probably their server was down or something. But thanks God because of the process button … i can process all of them easily …
You’ll need to train it first (which is true especially on your very first day of using Defensio) in order to get optimal result … or at least that is based on my experience

And that’s it basically about their negative point, but as a side note, when i first activated their plugin i get an error message saying that Defensio can’t be activated because they use short open tags at one of the file, although this can be fixed easily but i’m not sure if casual users who use shared hosting and using strict php configuration (that is defined by their host) can fixed this (for most people first impression does matter) ;)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Webmaster Tools, Wordpress

Hiding Affiliate Links using htaccess

Reaper-X — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 12:43:58 +0000

Today i’m going to tell you on how to hide your affiliate links or any other links you want to hide (see the right sidebar of this site) using a simple htaccess redirect trick, just in case you didn’t know about it, and of course i’ve only tested this on Apache HTTP Server only (Windows and Linux version) so if you’re using any other webserver to serve your webpages … i’m quite sure that this trick is not going to work, and you’ll have to use some redirect script to do it

But as a side note, this redirect trick (or any other redirect trick using php, etc) may or may not working especially if your site mostly visited by tech savvy users even if the affiliate website itself didn’t show your referal link, because they can always see it through the HTTP header

Redirecting from the root of your domain name

Step to do it :

Open or create new .htaccess file on the root of your www / public_html directory and add this line :

Redirect /myaffiliate http://www.myaffiliatewebsite.com

the above line mean, if you type http://www.yourdomainname.com/myaffiliate it’ll be redirected automatically to www.myaffiliatewebsite.com using 302 Found HTTP Header

But what if you want a 301 Moved Permanently HTTP Header instead of 302 HTTP Header (almost every redirect trick i’ve seen so far is using 302) ? … if that’s what you want … then you can use this

Redirect 301 /myaffiliate http://www.myaffiliatewebsite.com

Redirecting from subdirectory

Step to do it

Create new directory (for example : redir)
Create new .htaccess inside and add these into your newly created htaccess file

Redirect /redir/affiliate http://www.affiliatewebsite.com

The above line mean, if you type http://www.yourdomainname.com/redir/affiliate it’ll be redirected automatically to your affiliate link

Redirect to multiple product in the same affiliate website with a single line (useful on site like Amazon)

Let’s say you’ve become an Amazon Affiliate, and you want to link to that product page without adding new line into your htaccess file … then you can add this line into your .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^show/(.*)$ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/$1/YourAmazonID [L]

What the above line do is, whenever you type http://www.yourdomainname.com/show/ANY-AMAZON-PRODUCTID it’ll be redirected automatically to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ANY-AMAZON-PRODUCTID/YOUR-AFFILIATE-ID

Another example on how to make your Amazon Link look pretty is you can also use this :

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([^&]*)$ RewriteRule ^products\.asp$ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%1/YOURAMAZONID? [L]

Basically what the above code do is, everytime you type mydomain.com/products.asp?id=AMAZON-PRODUCT-ID even without the existence of products.asp file on your webserver, it’ll be redirected automatically to the Amazon link using your Referal ID :)

As a note, Mod Rewrite must be enabled on your server to do the last redirection trick

That’s it … i hope this small tips can be useful for you :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Apache, Guide, Webmaster Tools

Live Search Webmaster Portal from Microsoft

Reaper-X — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:12:58 +0000

Microsoft has announced that they’re currently accepting private beta requests of their upcoming Live Search Webmaster portal which is basically the same like Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Siteexplorer

And according to the Live Search Weblog, the upcoming webmaster tools from Microsoft Live Search are going to provide you with these features :

Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot effectively crawling and indexing your site
Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
Statistics about your website
Consolidation of content submission resources
New content and community resources

They say it’ll be available for public in late Fall, but to those who’s interested on participating in their private beta program. You can try applying to be their a beta tester by sending an email to lswmp@microsoft.com

0x87485B96 | Tags : SEO, Webmaster Tools

Reinvigorate Snoop : Look at your website stats from desktop

Reaper-X — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:25:23 +0000

Do you frequently check your website statistic manually and currently looking for an alternative method to check your website statistics especially the referer address, and the current page your visitors viewing ? and even better you can look at the updated data without refreshing the page or without logging in into their website first

If that’s what you’re looking for, then maybe you should try to signup with the web stats tracking service from Reinvigorate. Although they’re currently only accepting beta registration (try applying with them), but i'm sure you wont regret it since recently they introduced a new feature to check your website statistic using their new Desktop Application program called Snoop (still in beta stage and even better it does not use installer so you just need to run it directly from where you extracted it) :P

Currently by using this program, you can get live data on who’s accessing your site (if you use their name tag feature), the currently accessed page, their ip address, and their referer (if there’s any). Although i hope in the future maybe they could also implement showing the visitors browser user-agent directly from Snoop or if its possible perhaps maybe they should change the currently viewed page into currently viewed url and also made a direct link from it :P

And the conclusion is, i really like the idea on checking website statistic from desktop without the need to login first from it’s website since i never saw / use anything like this before

As a reminder, Reinvigorate is still in beta (program or their website) … so you’ll need to wait before getting accepted by them but i think it is worth the time ;)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Freeware, Software, Webmaster Tools, Website Monitoring

Digg Protection using htaccess

Reaper-X — Tue, 15 May 2007 11:00:22 +0000

Today i just saw a referer to this site coming from Digg Upcoming page (i guess someone submit this blog to Digg website) although i doubt that it’ll reach the main page, but i think it is better for me to prevent this site from going down (the worst case is my page changed into my host suspended page) just in case someone submit this site to various big website and it appear there

And now this is the method is use to try to redirect everyone who came to this site from big site such as slashdot. Btw i found this method via PlanetOzh at Joseph Scott’s Blog which is taken from Ottodestruct (although i get 404 error not found message when i tried to visit the page mentioned in Joseph Scott’s blog) … and of course Full Credits goes to them because all i do is just adding “/” add the end and modify it as necessary to use in this site also changed the port to 8090 because coral cache use that port now instead of the old 8080 :)

So here’s the code :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !(^|&)coral-no-serve$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?digg\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?slashdot\.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?slashdot\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?fark\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?somethingawful\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?kuro5hin\.org [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?boingboing\.net
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com.nyud.net:8090/$1 [R,L]

As always the IfModule used to prevent your site goes berserk by returning HTTP 500 Error Code when modrewrite is not loaded in Apache. And i already tested this on this site, by faking the referer address to www.digg.com and digg.com without www (and as you can see, that this method only work to those who’s not faking / forging their referer)

And of course there’s downside when using this method which is already explained here :

The problem, of course, is that Coral runs on port 8090, and how many people will be blocked from that?

But i think it is still better than you got suspended by your host because your site causing high load on their server (if you’re using shared hosting) :D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Guide, Linux, Web Servers, Webmaster Tools, Website

Wordpress dot com Stats Tracking or Reinvigorate ?

Reaper-X — Sun, 06 May 2007 07:15:50 +0000

Today i just saw something interesting on my dashboard … and that is the previosly stats tracking software which is used by every blog hosted at wordpress.com now can be used on self hosted blog too. But i'm sure you already knew about this anyway since this is a global news that is broadcasted on every wordpress blog

But after finished downloading, uploading and configuring the stats package, i saw there’s a new email message in my inbox which is from Reinvigorate stats tracking service (currently in beta stage) and they say i’ve been invited to join their private beta (i'm really grateful for this, because finally they accept my site)

I like the wordpress.com stats because i’ve been there before but the new stats tracking package from Reinvigorate also looks nice (even better this stats tracking can also shows you the ip address of your visitor, trends, keywords used by your visitor, hourly / monthly / daily statistic, and such stuff) other than that i really like their site design

I guess for now i'm going to use them both, but at later time i have to decided which stats tracking package i should remove from this blog, because if you’re using to many stats tracking service (in this case i mean remote stats tracking) there’ll be a possibility, it’ll slow down your blog loading time

0x87485B96 | Tags : Internet, Personal, Webmaster Tools, Website

SSH Access and WGET on Hostgator

Reaper-X — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 03:57:52 +0000

Previously i have said that Hostgator doesn’t allow you to have SSH access for your shared hosting account, but since Hostgator allows you to use Ruby on Rails on your shared hosting account, this policies have been changed completely. Because now you can get SSH access (Jailed SSH), or if you’re also interested on using Ruby on Rails web framework for your website, you can also use it (although i havent tried Ruby on Rails yet, … and to be honest i'm still playing and learning Ruby on Rails right now) and that’s all thanks to Hostgator by allowing the use of SSH access

Beside by using SSH (with WGet) you can also install various script easily without the need to upload each files again using FTP program (well this is really useful for me, because of my slow internet connection)

How to get SSH Access on your shared hosting account ?

It’s real simple, you just have to send a photo id to the Hostgator support team and provide your hosting account information.

For example, i'm sending out my KTP (Kartu Tanda Penduduk, the personal identification card used in Indonesia) information to the Hostgator Support team, and then you just have to wait for them to activate your ssh access

After Hostgator activated your ssh access, you’ll notice that if you try to use WGet you’ll see the permission denied message, that’s because you do not have the necessary priviledges to use WGET by default so in order to get WGET activated for your account, you can tell them to activate WGET too (if it is for me, i sent them 2 email message, the first message to activate my ssh access, and the second email message to activate WGET)

How to fetch / retrieve files from remote server using WGET ?

The easiest way to retrieve wget from remote server is by using this command :

wget http://remoteserver/sample/files.tgz

and to extract it you can simply type this :

tar zxf files.tgz

What about SVN ? can you use it too on Hostgator ?

Yes, you can use svn too. But if it’s for me i only use SVN to fetch the latest files from SVN repositories on remote server.

To fetch it (checkout), you can simply type this command :

svn co http://svn.server.com/files/trunk

And to update it, you can just type this command :

svn update

What about Ruby on Rails ?

You can use it too, but because i'm still learning about this topic, i prefer not to say it here maybe at a later time when i reached the begginer level (currently at novice level now) i could post another topic about this. So if you’re interested on learning about Ruby on rails you might try visiting their official website instead

Well .. that’s all about it :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Guide, Internet, Linux, Web Hosting, Web Servers, Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases

Reaper-X — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:58:19 +0000

Yesterday Vanessa Fox of Google announced that Google Webmaster Tools now reporting the anchor phrase used on various site that link to your site and this is really important for seo. Here’s what Danny Sullivan (the GodFather of search engine) said about this :

How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking

As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors -- often the most important factor -- for how you will rank in Google.

Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you'll rank well for particular words.

And what about this site ? what is the most used phrases that link to this site ?

Unfortunately .. the most used phrases that goes to this site are only .. Reaper X, Reaper X ID, and Reaper X ID Reborn :( (test) and that’s why i ranked really well using that words but .. i'm sure no one are going to use that keywords when searching

So if you’re interested on linking to this site .. maybe you could use some other anchor text instead ? :P

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Internet, SEO, Webmaster Tools, Website

SiteNotifier, a Web Monitoring Service

Reaper-X — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:37:55 +0000

SiteNotifier is a web monitoring service for your website. Unlike other similar web monitoring service, the site monitoring service from SiteNotifier is looking at your page source code to make sure that your page loaded properly. And that means you’ll have to enter the most used words on your site to make sure they monitor your web page properly

Currently they’re offering 6 type of site monitoring service from the free version that can test your site uptime up to 3 checks a day to 5760 checks a day

In order to use it. You just have to insert your website address, report name, mostly used words / phrase on your page. And here’s what their interface looks like :

Personally i like Sitenotifier service, but the only thing i can suggest to them is maybe they could increase the 3 checks a day for the free version to 6 / 8 checks a day. Because i found there’s a large gap between the basic and free version. But overall, they have done a great job to make their interface clean and simple to use even for a new webmaster

0x87485B96 | Tags : Internet, Webmaster Tools, Website, Website Monitoring

Sitelutions Free DNS Service

Reaper-X — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:24:29 +0000

Today i just tried switching my current Nameserver address for my other domain from the default (using registrar nameserver) into using Sitelutions Free DNS Service

My personal opinion about Sitelutions Free DNS Service is, they gave you full control over your domain name(s) and you can edit various records on your domain name such as editing A, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, AAAA, SOA of your domain name

Although they did a great job on providing tool to edit various aspect of your domain name, personally i do not really like their interface at all. Because you have to go back and forth just to add / edit your DNS settings (i prefer my registrar (Namecheap) interface to edit my domain name records). And maybe they should improve their interface

Well that’s all about it .. but just in case you’re searching for another alternative to your DNS hosting, and you’re searching for the free dns service, you might try looking at this page (he give a good comparison between various free dns service)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Internet, Journal, Web Servers, Webmaster Tools, Website

Better badware notifications for webmasters from Google

Reaper-X — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:59:36 +0000

Google recently added a new feature by sending you an email message containing a detailed information if there’s badware found on your site. And here’s what Google said about this :

Webmaster tools notifications

Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Email notifications

In addition to notifying webmaster tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the webmasters of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a webmaster's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future.

So far i haven’t received any of the notification about badware problems on my site (hopefully i wont receive an email message saying that mysite has been infected by badware problems or distributing badware), so i can not give you a more detailed explanation about this. Fortunately Matt Cutts already wrote about this badware problems before, so it’d be best for you to read it on his blog

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Network and Security, Webmaster Tools, Website, Website Monitoring

Using Feedburner MyBrand ? Why not

Reaper-X — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:10:14 +0000

Feedburner MyBrand is a premium FeedBurner service that allows publishers to showcase their feeds by serving them from their own domain. And i think most of you already know that if there’s premium words attached to every service, that means you’ll have to pay for it

Now the question is, why you should use Feedburner MyBrand instead of using the default feed address from your blogging platform or the free feedburner address ?

1. Easy to set up and easy to manage

Your blogging platform software doesn't provide stats tracking, and you’ll have to use another service / software to track it. And if you decided to track everything using various free stats tracking script on your own host, you’ll have to set up everything first, and managing it so it not causing more load to your host or server

2. More visibility to your domain

If you choose to use the free service from feedburner, you’ll notice that the url of your Feedburner address would be like feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed-name . And what’s the big deal with that address ? here’s a good explanation written by Jennifer Slegg from Searchengineland (tip #22) :

Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domain… that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google's Blogger & Wordpress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.

She said don't always think your free blog hosting will be around forever. And of course this applies to Feedburner too (see Danny Sullivan post about this for more info), and so that’s why i prefer to use my own domain name, instead of using feedburner address. And if you ask me why i choose Feedburner MyBrand instead of using default feed address from Wordpress, see point #1

3. Do i need to use it if my blog only has a small number of subscribers ?

Well .. actually it’s up to you, whether you want to use the default feed even without tracking it's statistical data, but if it's for me i’d rather choose to use hosted service from elsewhere (Read: Feedburner) simply because by using Feedburner i can also track who’s scrapping my site content without permission and try to make money from it (by placing Adsense next to it, of course) ..

4. How much does it cost ?

$2.99/month for up to 3 feeds
$6.99/month for 4-9 feeds
$13.99/month for 10 or more feeds

Well .. if it's for me, i signed up with the plan number 1 .. :P .. and that’s all about it, if you need to get more information about Feedburner MyBrand you can read more about it here

0x87485B96 | Tags : Advertisement, Internet, Opinion, SEO, Webmaster Tools, Website

Google Apps offer Premier Edition

Reaper-X — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 11:06:54 +0000

I think most of you already know about Google Apps but to those who didn't know or simply never heard about Google Apps, you can read my previous post about Google Apps

Okay back to the topic, right now Google offer the premier edition of their hosted email service and many other service after passing the beta stage, for free until April 30th, 2007

But what did you get from the premier edition of Google Apps ? here’s the summary from CNET :

The new Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user account a year. It includes around-the-clock telephone support, and 10GB of storage per user compared with 2GB. The new edition also includes a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail and application programming interfaces that businesses can use to migrate data, enable single sign-on and do other integration. A free version targeted at educational institutions, Google Apps Education Edition, offers the same features as the premier edition except for the storage size. There is also Google Apps Standard Edition, which is free, but lacks the features of the premier edition.

I’ve been looking at various features they offers but if it's for me .. well .. seriously im not interested on using their Premier Edition of Google apps, simply because the only Google Apps feature i'm using right now is only their hosted email solution with maximum capacity of 2GB / E-Mail address. Other than that, 2GB is already enough for me beside i never reach that limit .. of course that is for me

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Internet, Internet Tools, Webmaster Tools

Alexa Traffic details now showing a detailed information

Reaper-X — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 04:01:11 +0000

After previously Alexa allow you to create your own alexa toolbar with your Amazon Associate ID attached into it and of course with your own logo. Now Alexa showing a detailed information from which country your site visitors are coming from instead of just a standard graphic which i don't find it useful (at least for me). And of course this is a really useful features and i’ve been waiting for something like this for quite sometime now :)

Here’s what the country statistics in Alexa looks like (i tested it on my site) :

Reaper-X.com users come from these countries:

United States 31.6%
Indonesia 15.2%
United Kingdom 7.6%
Croatia 3.8%
Australia 3.8%

Reaper-X.com traffic rank in other countries:

Indonesia 1,237
Croatia 21,873
Australia 74,268
United States 143,770
United Kingdom 147,058

Surprisingly the Alexa statistics show the same information like my own stats tracking page, and my google analytics account for the top 5 countries with the exception my own stats tracking showing Canada as the number 4 instead of Croatia :? ..

I don't know which one is showing the correct results .. but at least for the other country they’re showing the same results :P .. but as a reminder, Alexa collect information about every site statistic from their toolbar. And almost every webmaster out there said that the Alexa results inaccurate

0x87485B96 | Tags : Alexa Rank, Internet, Webmaster Tools, Website

Signed up with Feedburner PRO

Reaper-X — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:56:39 +0000

I just signed up today with Feedburner TotalStats PRO. At first i thought their statistic service is just like any other stats tracking service (well for the standard / free version they do offering some stats tracking just like any other free stats tracking service) .. but i think if i buy the pro version i could get more information on my site statistics

Like most of you already know that every web stats tracking software couldn't provide an accurate statistical information. But at least with that a web statistical information, you can get an idea on which part of your website are performing well .. and that’s the reason on why i choose to signup with Feedburner pro account

Although my site feed subscriber is nothing when compared to many other blogs (my current feed subscribers is as high as 93 subscriber). I think it's worth the money to get that pro account, simply because i want to compare my web statistical information from my Google Analytics account, built in statistical information from my webhosting and few other statistical tool as well :-P

Fortunately Feedburner offering 15 day free trial (they’re not going to charge me if i'm canceling my pro account within the trial mode), and that mean if i don't like their stats tracking tool .. i can cancel it at any time .. lol (but we’ll see about that, because if they provide good service, i might think of buying Feedburner MyBrand for this site too .. and of course i’ll stick with their stats tracking tool as well) :-P

0x87485B96 | Tags : Internet, Journal, Personal, Webmaster Tools, Website