Webolio: My own views on the web

What would people not do to get traffic…

Simo — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:01:59 +0000

What would people not do to get traffic to their site!

Today I saw a spike in traffic on one of the blogs I contribute to http://blog.expulp.com and went to check where the traffic was coming from. Turns out it’s all coming from some Forex site that’s been doing referrer spamming to my blog, as explained here: http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/.

Definitely not a big deal but certainly annoying.

2012 search predictions: the experts’ view – Econsultancy (blog)

Simo — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:01:08 +0000

Via Scoop.it – Human Powered Search

2012 search predictions: the experts’ viewEconsultancy (blog)I’ve been asking a number of search experts to look back to last year, as well as giving their predictions and hopes for 2012.
Via econsultancy.com

What is The Future of Human Powered Search?

Simo — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:55:35 +0000

Via Scoop.it – Human Powered Search

Mahalo popularized the term “human powered search” when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low.
Via http://www.readwriteweb.com

New venture in the making. Meet expulp.com

Simo — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:55:51 +0000

Launching my new venture Expulp, and sharing tips that I found useful along the way:

http://blog.expulp.com/2012/01/10-steps-to-promoting-your-site-before-its-out/

Disabling ftpd on Ubuntu

Simo — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:19:40 +0000

I wanted to disable FTPd on Ubuntu 10.10, but couldn’t figure out which ftp program I had installed. After checking the /etc/init.d folder, /etc/ folder and running a ‘find’ on anything that resembles an ftp program, here is what I found:

ftpd is part of openbsd-inetd, a service that is started automatically and can be configured via /etc/inetd.conf.

To disable FTPd:

1. Comment this line under /etc/inetd.conf (via sudo or as root)
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.ftpd

2. restart inetd (via sudo or as root)
/etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart

et voila!

Youtube: finally a decent UI!

Simo — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:49:40 +0000

Youtube is launching a new UI… I always thought their UI was a hack job, but that is changing very soon. They have a new UI deployed. Not yet for public, maybe it’s in the process of being A/B tested.

To get the new UI, follow the instuctions below:

1. Go to youtube.com
2. Press Ctrl + Shift and J in Chrome to open the “Developer Tools”. In Firefox Press Ctrl+Shift+K to get the console.
3. Click on the “Console” and key in:

document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”;

4. Reload and enjoy!

Here is a snapshot of the new UI:

Youtube New UI

On Partnerships…

Simo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:26:30 +0000

Building partnerships is an exercise web entrepreneurs should master. When venturing with someone into a new business, be it an investor, a co-founder or an employee, make sure you are with the right person:

Trust is important. If trust cannot be established for any reason whatsoever, ditch this relationship and move on.

If you get frustrated too much too often because your partner cannot appreciate or understand something you’ve done or a decision you made, then it is not worth investing any more time in this partnership…

…which leads me to this: always have an exit clause on your partnership agreement. Not having one leaves the door wide open for legal conflicts in case stuff doesn’t work out.

Always consult a lawyer before starting a partnership. NEVER do this alone. This will save you countless dollars and trouble down the road.

A partnership is like a marriage and remember, only fools rush in.

My Cari.net dedicated server is down..and so is cari.net!

Simo — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:16:55 +0000

Don’t want to be bitter but I am starting to get fed up with cari.net…The dedicated server I bought with Cari.net 2 weeks ago has been down on three occasions so far!!! that’s a lot… lucky I only use it as a dev environement at this point. Imagine if that was my production server.

What sucks the most is that I wasn’t contacted at any point regarding a scheduled/unforseen outage on all three occasions. The last one was just the worst of all, my servers has not been accessible for the pat 15 minutes?! so is cari.net anyways!

That without counting the fact that it takes me sometimes 10 seconds to open an ssh session (I have a 18Mbps connection at my home office)

Let’s hope these issues are addressed promptly and a valid explanation is provided! otherwise, my cari.net adventure will have to end right here.

PHPMailer and smtp on 1and1 shared hosting

Simo — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:08:15 +0000

I use phpMailer on my 1and1 shared hosting account. Recently, I could not send email anymore.

I tried debugging and this is the error that phpMailer throws:

Language string failed to load: connect_host

After googling for a solution and trying different smtp servers, accounts and smtp ports, I decided to switch to sendmail and it worked like a charm! All I needed to do was replace $mail->isSmtp() with:

$mail->isSendMail()

sendMail is located in its default location on 1and1 servers : /usr/sbin/sendmail, so no change of settings was required.

Conclusion: 1and1 probably closed its outgoing smtp ports on its shared hosting servers. Consequently, if you use PhpMailer, don’t use smtp mode anymore.

reading docx files using openoffice

Simo — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:59:13 +0000

Found this today… I tried using OpenOffice to open a docx file (which is a Microsoft xml format of their doc files) and this was of a great help. It basically tells you how to enable OpenOffice to support docx files. Pretty neat:

http://www.blogmanno.com/?q=node/64