Deverill

In the time I've been here I've never seen the kind of problem you are asking about causing problems. If it's legal then it's ok. If it's a burden on the server and thus other clients then it is moved to a dedicated server or moved. If it spams it gets deleted. If it's illegal it's deleted. Pretty much, the mindset of Bill (the owner) and management is that if it impacts other clients it either has to move or be deleted. Definitely a case of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one." when it comes to websites affecting other clients. One site wreaking havoc on or for others will not be allowed.

Just nosing around the net and I found an interesting product... Swishzone.com has a new flavor of the Swish product called Swish Presenter that will convert Powerpoint into Flash. May be worth checking.

Excellent point Rob! There are not many rules that have remained constant other than links and decent content for the visitor. Everything else changes on a monthly or few-monthly basis so any book will be at least somewhat out of date as soon as it's printed.

Yeah, Google. I just entered link:ford.com into Google and the top of the results returned was a PR1 blog site. Don't get caught up by the PR... it's not a useful guage of page importance to Google. Google certainly counts pages with less than PR3 but the "Link:" feature has pretty much always been broken in that it gives flakey results. Now, if you want to see what's linked to you just enter into Google the search +yourtchsite.+tld so to see what's linked to TCH you could enter, as an example +totalchoicehosting.+com Just to put your mind at ease about dynamic links, I went to Google and put a bit of HP's disclaimer into it: "Prices, promotions, specifications" The 6th result returned on page 1 of the results was www.ztgroup.com/Default.aspx?tabid=47&productID=10800 Apparently Google's not having any problems with dynamic pages Hope it helps!

You really should be sending email to yourTCHaccount@yourTCHdomain.com to avoid any issues.

Welcome Mark!!!

By the way, here's a link to the East Coast Datacenter HG referred to... complete with some photos.

The data center is the company that houses the computers all of TCH's websites and other services run on. It is basically row after row of computers in an temperature controlled, power conditioned room or rooms with a staff of people there to fix the computers when they break. The upstream is the company who provides us a connection to the internet. It's like your DSL, cable or dial up provider at home but on a vastly larger scale. The upstream is where the issue lies and it is they who are working on solving it. It is basically out of TCH's hands since it's not our computers or cables that have the problem. The upstream probably serves hundreds or thousands of customers as big and bigger than TCH so I'm confident they are doing everything they can to solve it quickly. Hope it helps clear up some of the terminology.

I agree with Lise... only post a question so we can all benefit from the answer. As far as do/don'ts there are two things... changing rules and misinformed people believing hype. Incoming links are very important. Revisit after is a suggestion at best... certainly not worth much if anything. Meta tags probably won't change your placement in SERPS, but they sometimes provide the description for your site. This, of course, is very basic info and not well detailed, but it's a start. Hope you find it helpful. Any questions please feel free to ask.

Not any more. Spiders can follow dynamic links as long as they are not tied to session id's or are overly complex. True, templates have nothing to do with dynamically created content unless that is the method the template uses. Includes for headers and such are a different animal because the server builds the page before feeding it to the spider and the spider doesn't even have a way to know if it was a static page or built with PHP Includes. In fact, even if the content is included, the same holds true... as long as you go to www.mytchsite.com/index.php (or similar filename, htm, html, etc) to get to the page it looks like a static page to the spider.

Yes, there are many ways to do it. I usually use the above methods but one thing I did on one site was pretty cool (I thought.) I set up a file called page.php and in that page I have the header, footer and navbar. I also have an include that reads a filename from the URL used to access page.php and then goes out and includes that filename as content. All my links are like http://www.mytchsite.com/page.php?artichokes and then the page.php simply does the framework and loads the file "artichokes" into the center section. It's like using includes for the header and footer, but backwards. It was fun learning how to do it and it makes the individual "content" pages look cleaner but in the end it's just another way to do something.

It is definitely rumored that Google will begin selling computers with their own OS on them. You're probably right about this. As for OO vs MS Office, just look at price! Google's computer for instance would be a lot cheaper with something like OO on it, as would any. All we have to do is bust the MS pre-loaded/bundled monopoly and it's a done deal. I agree about desktop and toolbar. It may suit some, thus my post, but I'll probably not be using it unless they come out with a really compelling reason.

Thanks for sharing your opinion of TotalChoice Hosting. Sorry to see you go but sometimes if it's not a good match then that's what should happen. As for 'know[ing] the meaning of "customer service."' I submit to you the following: (emphasis mine) I personally am glad that the management is so careful trying to keep my (and others) life easy, even at the cost to some of the hardcore bleeding edge developers out there... and I'm a "computer-guy" - I'd really hate to see the trouble some of the people would have if they were beginners and TCH stayed on the forefront of upgrades and "gee whiz" things. Anyway, we all have opinions... best of luck in the search for a new host with Ruby and don't forget to check back here after it becomes "widely adopted". I'm no spokesperson for their offerings, but TCH may actually offer it at that point but it's not there yet, at least according to one proponent - (see the Clearing The Tracks section.)

Slashdot has an article about Google Pack, a bundle of apps Google is making available. It is at pack.google.com and has Google Earth, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar for IE, Picasa, Google Pack Screensaver, Firefox, Ad-Aware, Adobe Reader 7, a 6-month trial subscription to Norton Antivirus 2005, and an update facility for updating these packages and getting new ones as they are added. It's a convenient bundle for folks just becoming aware of these apps and the updater has potential as well.

Lately!? "Meddle not in the affairs of dragons; for you are crunchy and taste good with hot sauce."

I'm not up to speed on CSS like I'd like to be - time and all - but check out the CSS Clear property. It can be used to make columns extend to the same length by my understanding. Google it and I'm pretty sure you'll find what you need.

Ok, I did some research and here's what I found out about Google. 1. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. A penalty results in pages being removed and they don't do that. 2. Duplicate content may get higher rankings than your original site in some cases and Google will not show the same page over and over again. Therefore others may show up and yours won't. 3. If some links are to yourtchsite.com and some links are to www.yourtchsite.com then you won't get full credit for those links as if they were all to the same variety. This means that your site with 100 links may get the same "credit" for it as another site with only 50 links to it if yours are with www and without.

That's not really a glitch as much as it is the way parsers work. The same is true of language compilers such as C. Once the parser gets out of sync, so to speak, it can't get back on track. Pretty common problem. Nearly impossible to fix short of creating an AI Expert System to do it.

Same here, Mike. I don't want to make it sound like all my stuff validates - it doesn't. But I have at least 80% of my newest site that does validate and, like you, have small errors to cleanup here and there such as my web editor program (Scream) sees me type <br and a space and it automatically puts the / in there for me... sometimes I type it too which is, of course, an error. I'm not sure it's vital right now to validate because the browsers still need "tricks" to work right, but I do expect in the near future for them to become so compliant that it will help.

Well... I wouldn't go that far as to say it's no good, but many would. Ok, here goes (remembering that W3C is the organization that sets the standards: 1. http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Doctype - Why specify a doctype? Because it defines which version of (X)HTML your document is actually using, and this is a critical piece of information needed by browsers or other tools processing the document. 2. Was there a missing <HEAD> tag or was it in an incorrect place? 3-17 are generally caused by the DOCTYPE not allowing certain things. 18. The description pretty much says it. There could have been misplaced elements, overlapping elements, etc. It could also have been a "cascading error" caused as a side effect of a previous error. In C programming I always tell students, fix the obvious errors, missing semi-colons, etc and then fix the first error reported... everything else may be a side effect and actually be correct. I'm no validation freak, but I do know that if you ever expect things to look the same in the browsers there are 2 things that have to happen. 1. We have to comply with the standards set forth. 2. The browsers must comply with the standards set forth. Everything else is either luck or a kludge and may break tomorrow even if it does work today. I just ran their own page through and it says that you can use this code: ><p> <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"><img src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict" height="31" width="88" /></a> </p> Where did you get you code from? How much of that do you think is on purpose so AOL users will use the AOL track-where-you-went browser rather than "shelling out" to IE or some other browser? Wonder if Microsoft paid someone to make their site incompatible with Firefox. It's sure going to be fun watching the reports when it's found out if they did!

Thanks for the link Raul! I had basically done that through the synaptic gui but it did miss a couple of utils that way. I don't use them now but who knows... it's good to be squared away in case I do. By the way, When was the last time you saw "You must reboot your computer for the changes to take effect."!!!! Windows - every time Linux - never Gotta love it!

If that is true then most every site here at TCH is in trouble because they are set up that way by default. I dabble in SEO, by no means am an expert, but it makes no sense to me as long as all of your links are written the same. Ideally you would put the whole (with www) URL in your site (internal links) and give that URL to others to use to link to you. I would not ask that it be set to work only one way or the other, if it's even possible, because how many times have you typed google.com? I do it all the time and I'm pretty sure a lot of folks get to any of my sites by saying the-name-of-my-church.org or the others without www. Remember, the engines only see what's out there so if you always use WWW then they'll be happy

Remember, though, that you are responsible for any adverse effects that may happen on the server. AWStats is a pretty intensive program and running it "too much" could cause higher CPU usage and the consequences thereof. Not a scare, just use it wisely.

I'm in good company I see. At work I have to use XP - too many programs aren't written for linux that we use such as our work order system. At home I have one game that I need XP for that I can't part with - otherwise it's Kubuntu all the way. I had all day Monday fighting with my printer (Epson Stylus) until I ran across instructions on how to upgrade the kernel to Breezy Badger from Hoary Hedgehog (gotta love those names!) and it was all better. I'd hate to have tried it as a non-power user though - either me or it wouldn't have survived it. I do like the updates better than the microsoft way - if for nothing else, most apps are included so you hit update-all and it's done.

Take that validation thing seriously. Even if things look ok on your page, bad code can cause it to break next time the browsers are updated to the standard. Everything it complains about is an error in the code and can eventually, with lotsa patience , be fixed. Start at the 1st error and work your way down and when you are done your code will be so much better, possibly faster and definitely more likely to work next month.