I liked Friendfeed, and wanted to add it to a blog (not this one). They have widgets you can use.

Problem is, the widgets don’t produce code that can be seen by spiders in your page source, unless those spiders are a bit more intelligent than I thought. Which also means the spiders won’t see the page as updated.

I wanted ONE page on a blog to have the feed from Friendfeed, I didn’t want it in my sidebar.

The only thing I’ve seen that works, easily, is Lifeline.

AND, it adds the welcome feature of stripping out Nofollow from the links you’ve added to your feed!

It’s not as pretty as the widget - no Youtube thumbnails, for instance, and the caption you add to the links aren’t included. So I think it’s a good idea to add a smaller widget below (without the feed) in addition to the spider fodder.

Solved: The site now ranks in Google. Don’t know why it behaved so weirdly, but I’m told it happens.

I found that Google sometimes doesn’t return text search results beyond the first few words on the page. Here’s my method and results:

I’m currently testing for the http://www.unbreakableteacher.com/ domain, which is a website for a Native American who is a guide and instructor for the contestants on a TV game show, Unbreakable, in an episode shot in the Everglades.

It’s a new domain registered in the beginning of October.

The first few days it was in the top of the Google results for the two keywords in the domain - found by freshbot following a link.

Then it disappeared. The only way to even get it to come up was to search for the entire domain.

After I put the actual design in place with some more pages (including pages with basically nothing on them), Google indexed most of the pages. The only page to have a cache was the index page, but all pages had a blurb.

Now I started to do text searches for phrases on the pages. Nothing came up.

I started doing the same thing, only with site:unbreakableteacher.com in the search. And I found something curious. If I searched for phrases near the top of the page, I couldn’t get very far before it returned no results. The title of the page is 47 characters, and then there are the keywords. The Meta description was shown, and I could search phrases as long as the last word wasn’t further into the page than character 43 of the Meta description.

But I could search for single words further down the page, or even several words - it returned results easily.

But if I use those exact same search words without specifying site:unbreakableteacher.com, the page is not in the results.

However, a blog I’ve had for a few years got a different treatment. I wrote a blog post yesterday, and it’s not only in Google today, I can search for phrases at the bottom of the post, and it comes up, no problem.

Update: Guess what, THIS post got indexed by Google within an hour of me writing it, and I can search for phrases far down the page, no problem. However, both the blog index and the blog post are returned by Google without a cache.

Update November 4:

I still sometimes see the old content in Google’s index, meaning there are datacenters that still have the old index. But even so, it appears the additional pages on the site are dropped from the index. On other other hand, I can now find the site by searching for the domain name, without specifying site: first. And if I search for site:www.domain.com and phrases, I can find them even far down the page, while site:domain.com still has the same behavior. I still don’t get any results from the site, though, even if I search for unbreakableteacher. It’s pretty normal to get the domains first in the results if you search like that.

Update November 7:

The site is now searchable and ranking well in Google!

I had a harddrive fail yesterday. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d seen the signs for a day or so.

But I know from experience that non-techies tend to be completely unrealistic when harddrives fail, so I’ll describe what happened, so maybe others will be able to save their data before it’s too late.

This was a laptop. An old one, with an old harddrive.

The first thing that happened was that I was a bit less careful when moving the laptop than I usually am. I thought, hmm, that might not have been smart. In general, you should not shock a harddrive. An average harddrive will survive some shocks just fine, while another - much less severe - will kill it. It depends on the angle of impact, what direction it’s moving, whether or not it’s on, whether or not it’s accessing or writing data as you move it. The worst time to drop a harddrive, is when it’s writing to disk.

And keep in mind that laptops are moved about a LOT more than desktop computers. The more you schlep your laptop around, the shorter lifespan your harddrive will have. Expect to replace your laptop harddrive at least once in the life of the computer. And make sure all your data is backed up. As the harddrive nears the end of it’s life, some data may become inaccessible, but you may not realize. So checking the data is something that was done a lot in the past.

Get into the habit of listening to the harddrive, as it boots up and as you work on the computer. If it starts sounding different, it could be going bad, and you’ll need to do backup IMMEDIATELY.

What happened with this one, was that I was watching video on it, with the video file on the harddrive. And it would stop playing now and then. If I waited, it would start playing again, but I had to rewind a bit to get what I’d missed in the meantime. I didn’t know why in the beginning, this was a Linux machine, so I wondered if it was OS related, or if it was going warm. But then I noticed that the harddrive light (the light that shows you’re accessing the harddrive) was staying solidly lit while the video was stopped.

That’s when I knew the harddrive might fail.

The second day, again watching a video, after having jiggled the harddrive connection (in case it was caused by a loose connection), it happened again, and this time the video didn’t come on. I moved the mouse, and suddenly I’m met by a black screen with white error messages. I was in the middle of a video, and hoped I could get it to work again, so I tried to reboot, but got the message there was no boot disk.

Harddrive history.

Don’t feel bad for me, I had nothing on that machine I didn’t have a copy of, as far as I can remember.

I just wanted to share how that happened, and to be careful if it happens to you.

I’ve just uploaded a new design to the blog, and also to the front page of the website.  Feel free to give me feedback on it!

I’ve used Artisteer, a program for making Wordpress templates. The only item I prepared myself was the image of myself. I tried to cut out all the background and make it invisible. Not easy to do when you’ve got hair as fluffy as I do, and the background is White! I saved it as PNG, which preserves the invisible background, and then imported it into Artisteer as a photo that was floating on the header background. That way any embellishments on the header won’t be over the photo of me.

The rest is done in the program. All the color choices were made one by one - there’s no way to set a custom color palette. I would have liked that, because it’s a chore to change all those colors to my palette. But apart from that it’s really easy to do, if you choose a pre-existing palette, and don’t fiddle as much with the photo as I did - there are built in photos of generic people in the program, along with landscapes and cityscapes for the header background - it could take you ten minutes flat to build a template.

When I was done with the Wordpress template, I made a few structural changes, and saved the same project as HTML. I did a nondestructive edit, and copied the project file to a different name, just in case I wanted changes to the blog template without affecting the HTML version.

The HTML output needs a lot of work once you’re done with it. You need to change the menu choices - in HTML, and you should change headers here and there and content. But once you’re done with all that, you’ve got a file you can use as a template for other pages on your website. Just remember that if your site has a folder structure, you should use absolute links in the menu, or the links could easily break deep down in your site.

I also opted to move the css and js files to a subdirectory, as well as change the name of the folder of the images to layoutimages, to avoid any conflict with existing files in my site.

The really painful job is of course the cleanup of all the outdated stuff my website has accumulated in the course of the 10 years it’s been online (total, including before I bought the domain name), and also convert all the pages to the new design. I fully expect to make several versions of the design and do some fancy copy and paste of code to make it all work. That’s the beauty of it, you could have two columns on some pages, and three on others - the overall design would still be the same.

I’ve never used sub items to menu links before, and especially liked that. I had a lightbulb moment when I wondered what to put under the CONTACT menu item that was created automatically. Should I keep it? I realized I could put Facebook, Myspace and Flickr links in the sub items, and just point the main item to the front page. Brilliant.

Frankly, I wasn’t that concerned with getting a video camera on my cell phone. The still camera was very important to me, but not the video camera. I’ve since realized how useful it is. I’ll tell you why:

My DVD-player was starting to act up, and finally the time came when it refused to read a DVD for the first time. It was time to take it back to the store under warranty. So, what to do. I figured I’d save the store some work, and document it myself. It would sometimes read a DVD, and sometimes not. I simply filmed the whole process from putting in the DVD, until it threw up a “no disc” message. The first time I did it, the player actually recognized the DVD, but some other things were funky. So I deleted the take and tried again, this time starting with the funky bits, then ejecting and re-inserting the DVD. And this time it didn’t recognize the same DVD.

When I got to the store, I showed the video (not very sharp, but sharp enough to see what was going on) to the clerk, and he asked me some pesky questions to see if it was user errors or not. My answers convinced him, and he sent it for repair or replacement.

But the point is, because I documented the error, he didn’t have to hook it up and turn it on, then try to mount a DVD. It saved him a lot of work, while giving me the assurance that he saw what I saw - who knows, if the player cooperated in the store and he was really annoying, he might say there’s nothing wrong with it? I’m guessing some documentation might help people with more timid personalities, because there’s no room for enterpretation if it’s an on again off again fault with a product?

I’ve used the still camera to document other malfunctions before with good results. But for this particular problem, a video camera was the only thing that would really prove it.

I was talking to a chiropractor a while ago. She’d said that it was important to get up and walk or do excercises regularly if you sit in front of the computer for hours. The ideal is to get up and walk around a bit every 20 minutes (and maybe do excercises like neck rolls etc). If you don’t remember to do that, at least go for a 15 minute serious walk one or two times per day.

I made a crack comment about gamers. I’ve got friends who are gamers, and I know they sit for hours on end without getting up. And some do allnighters, especially if their league is in another time zone.

She said parents came to her, with or without their children, distraught about their kids’ health. Serious gamers, and with back problems at a young age.

So I made another crack - with kids, walking around isn’t going to cut it. It’s too dull. How about another game? Buy a dance mat? (Originally developed for Playstation 1&2, there are also versions for the computer) See youtube video of an arcade version, you can have fun even if you’re not good at it!

She flipped over the idea, and is now thinking of getting one for her 8 year old daughter!

BTW, if you decide to get one for yourself check on quality before you buy. A grown up may want a metal or hard plastic version, not those things that slide around. Oh, and a mother who had a seriously hyper 4 year old said the dance mat was the only thing that could tire her kid. After watching this five year old pro, I can believe it.

So, kids, parents, grown up computer addicts: Get moving, before you develop serious problems. I saw a net friend had written a recommendation for a physical therapist recently. I assume his computer use had been at least part of the cause for several surgeries and other back and neck issues. This therapist was working with stuff he could use at home - personally, I like the big excercise balls you sit on (see sissel-online for excercises, or even better, look up an excercise class locally). Great for core strength - fixing up abs and back, so you’re stronger and less likely to get injured. Also, MBT shoes are great for posture or back problems - and especially for store clerks who need to stand around all day.

Personally, I have amassed quite a bit of home equipment over the years. My favorite is the treadmill. Norwegian winters are harsh, and with that thing, I don’t have to worry about slipping and falling, and can walk or run at any speed I want.

I was called in to check on a friend’s WiFi setup. I couldn’t get it to work, and finally told him it looked as though the wireless on his router was fried. I asked him to check the router and continue troubleshooting.

He roped in a friend to help him, and had the friend set up the router at his place. It worked. They took it back, it didn’t work. So obviously, the wireless wasn’t fried. Something was wrong with the location.

So they removed power to circuit after circuit in the house, before walking into the living room. The friend asked “What’s that?”, and pointed to their wireless Audio-Video link. It connected the TV in the living room with the TV in the kitchen, so they didn’t need more than one set top box. When they powered down the AV link, WiFi worked.

They solved their problem by setting the AV link to another frequency. It had a choice of four settings. It had been set on one, and that was apparently the same frequency as the Wifi router.

So, AV links can create interference that makes your Wifi router seem dead. Food for thought!

Sometimes it gets rather funny.

I was talking to a customer who thought my mailserver had “a moment” and rejected his mails. Turns out it was his computer that had “a moment”.

And in the conversation, I mentioned that Outlook can sometimes be a bit temperamental. And he said, yeah, he uses Thunderbird at home. And I said, heh, I use Pegasus mail. And he said he’d heard of that program when he was studying IT a long time ago.

A little game of “mine is longer than yours” relating to e-mail programs.

And Pegasus really is the safest alternative, unless you want to get dirty and use Pine or similar…

So there…

This trick is for WinXP. I haven’t tried other versions.

Occasionally, we get customers that don’t have Windows CD’s. Some never had them, and some have imaginative stories as to whose fault it is they don’t.

These days most computers have the license key on a sticker on the computer itself, so that bit is (usually) covered. If it’s not on there, then at least WRITE IT ON THERE when you get the machine. A CD marker or a face down sticker might work.

But an OEM license doesn’t work with a non-OEM CD. So just plonking any windows CD in the CD-player won’t work. So what to do?

You could try finding a Fujitsu Siemens owner with the same windows version as you have (home or professional). The recovery CD doesn’t have any drivers on it, and will accept your own license key.

Hopefully some above average end user will appreciate this tip from the trenches…

If you’ve got a qmail server with a large number of users spread out over hundreds of domains, how will you figure out how many users you have? I don’t know of any official way, but there are ways to guesstimate.

Let’s say you’re using vpopmail. Let’s say there’s a file called lastauth - telling you when each user last checked e-mail and from what IP address.

Then you could get a guesstimate of the number of users by doing this:
find /home/vpopmail/domains | grep lastauth > yourfile

This will take quite a while, if you’ve got many users.

Then check number of lines in that file, by typing:
wc -l yourfile

Finally remove yourfile

And no, I don’t provide support on this. This is for qmail admins, not regular users.