SEO Web Re Design and Re Development – Is It Always Needed?

An excellent Post by Search Engine Land writer Evan LaPointe: Stop Treating Your Website Like A Broken Old Boat

Whenever I analyze a site, I look at the structure, CMS (if any) and design. Some of the time, the site is built well and has future expansion in mind. Usually, anything built on a community supported open source CMS will do well for years to come seeing as how popular they have become. This also means I probably wont recommend a site redesign.  CMS’s like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are excellent candidates for growth and are the easiest to perform SEO actions. The relative simplicity of content uploading also allows the client to maintain the site while the the SEO focuses on other challenges.

Getting Wireless LAN Working in Linux using ifcfg and wpa_supplicant over WPA2_Personal with AES

This took me almost a full day to figure out so I figure I write down what I did for reference and for others benefit, seeing as I optimized my titles, tags and content. Makes it easier to find this site when using the searches I did to get to the information. I had to piece this together from multiple posts and instructions as each one didn’t work exactly right.

So, I recently got AT&T uVerse, and after configuring it accidentally with a WEP Open Shared Key, realized that not only is it not secure, but some devices have major problems connecting to it. Sometimes I would have a visitor with a laptop come over and the wi-fi just wouldn’t work.

I know Windows 7 has some issues connecting to an older less secure network, in fact, I have found myself having to manually configure networks sometimes in order to get it working if a network is using WEP, the automatic detection just fails. On my network however, even windows XP was failing, so it was time to change. I decided to go with WPA2_Personal using AES Encryption.

Everything was fine, all myd evices connected happily, even the linux box…taht is until I decided ot try to configure it using ifcfg and not Fedora’s built in whatever it is…

I knew how to bind eth0 style devices to my network, but I had never had to do it wirelessly, needless to say the need arose only because my wife decided that it was not acceptable to have a long wire running from the bedroom to the living room to use the extra PC as a server…hence the wireless solution! (At least now I don’t trip over the cord at night!)

I wont bother to bore with the details of the errors I was getting, so, after much frustration, here is how I figured out how to do it:

Manually Adding IP Address Range to Linux – Fedora and Redhat – Thanks @Softlayer

Thanks to Softlayer for this handy tutorial, worked like a charm adding my new IP Range.

1. Determine what existing range files exist:

# cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/

# ls ifcfg-eth1-range*

You will see at least one file, possibly several. Find the highest number following the “range” and add one to it. This will be the new range number.

For example, if you see ifcfg-eth1-range0 and ifcfg-eth1-range1, your new range number will be “2″ ie: ifcfg-eth1-range2 .

2. Determine the next available interface number (clone number).

# ifconfig | grep eth1

You will see a list of interfaces that looks like this
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:A3:29:70
eth1:0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:A3:29:70
eth1:1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:A3:29:70
.
.
.
eth1:8 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:74:A3:29:70

Find the highest number after the “eth1:”. Add one to it and this your new clone number. In this case it would be 9.

3. create a range file for the new range number. (for this example, we will use range3)

# vi ifcfg-eth1-range2

4. Write the following lines to the range file. (replace the dummy ip information with your desired ip range and the CLONENUM_START value with the one calculated above)

IPADDR_START=’123.0.0.1′
IPADDR_END=’123.0.0.10′
CLONENUM_START=’9′

5. Write and quit the range file, and restart your network.

# /etc/init.d/network restart

6. Your new ips should now be visible by running:

# ifconfig

Dedicated vs Virtual Servers – Softlayer vs MediaTemple Review

Dedicated servers are amazing. I recently got one from softlayer.com. I have learned tons about Linux in the past few months (crash course basically, thanks Google)  and setting up servers for web, as well as making sure they are PCI Compliant. A dedicated server is amazingly fast for hosting WordPress sites and other database intensive apps.

I had a dedicated virtual server from MediaTemple, which after playing with SSH, suddenly rebooted itself at random one day when no one was using it and shut down. MediaTemple claims  ”updates” that I installed had not processed until the reboot…of which I had also never scheduled or done…This is kinda bogus anyways since Linux doesn’t really need a reboot to install new software downloaded. Thank goodness I had already backed up all my databases and files, and was already in process of moving them to Softlayer because of MediaTemples difficulty in obtaining PCI Compliance without an “exception” letter for their forcibly opened PLESK port 8443 (you can block it on the server, but they still keep it open for you, even though it doesnt work. This is not PCI Compliant but OK if you send the PCI compliance company a letter.) PLESK is so Sluggish anyhow I am getting used to SSH commands and it is great!

So, lesson learned, PLESK, cPanel, etc. can bloat your server when your tryign to use SSH to admin your server. On to Softlayer! Dedicated Goodness.

Scams, Marketing Masters, Gurus, Self Help, Make Money Online Eating Chips and Soda on Your Couch – See! I can Stuff Keywords too!!!

So I was researching this guy XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX, looking for negative reviews to show this lady who asked me about him that hes just another Marketing “Guru” with nothing new to say. Surprisingly I cant find anything negative on Google after searching 40 pages, nothing that didn’t have huge retort to it. What was amazing is how bloated the internet was with keywords stuffed SEO Copy with the word “XXXXX XXXXX Scam” that was in fact explaining how it wasn’t a scam. This was crazy! I was shocked and appalled. Whatever little content and advice based on his system I found, was irrelevant, outdated, or already known by myself and I assume the large majority of internet markers.

So what did I do? I went to bing.com and typed in “XXXXXX XXXXX Scam”, and found negative reviews from page 1 on!!!

What the hell Google?