LinkSleeve Moved to New Server

Excitingly, LinkSleeve, the distributed anti-link-spam service offered for free by Virante, has been moved to a new dedicated server. We have also updated the codebase to use a new database schema that should up response speeds and lower outages. No tags for this post.

Weather Specific Backgrounds on Ubuntu with Apache, PHP, Cron and Weather.com

It has long been a goal of mine to create a system for my laptop which allows my background to mimic the weather where I live (Durham, NC). When it is raining outside, I want a background of rain. When it is sunny, the sun. So, here is a basic step-by-step guide I used to cobble this together. 1. Install Apache on Ubuntu. * JTirrell below makes a good point for those who don’t already need Apache: “Why install apache at all? php5-cli and just run the php file like a script.” Open up a terminal and type in the following, being sure to use your password after entering in the command. Afterwards, you should now be able to open up http://localhost/ in your browser. sudo apt-get install apache2 2. Install PHP Open up a terminal and type in the...

The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization

I have long speculated that on-page optimization was trivial. It meshed with my understanding of how a suspicious Google engineer may treat the content of a page in relationship to its rankings. Why trust anything a webmaster says about his or her content (keywords stuffed into H1, meta, or bold tags)? Why trust anything on a page that a user won’t get to preview before visiting (anything outside the Title and Meta-Description, by-and-large)? However, despite my speculations, I lacked the data to truly start making conclusions about the usage of keywords in specific tags. Until now. First, I am pleased to say that our micro-experimentation has found similar results to SEOMoz’s macro-experimentation. In particular, their finding that the H1 tag was no...