Deverill

Come on, I'm supposed to read and remember every entry in every forum? I had just woke up from a nap. I know you aren't a her but my brain was in a fog. Sometimes I think I know everything but can only remember about 1% of it at any given time. As I have heard said - "my mind is like a steel trap, it's just rusted shut at the moment."

The link:mysite.com feature of Google does not act sanely. Some say it shows only PR4 or better sites, others say not even that is definite. The best thing is +squort.+com which shows 19 links currently. Now that's funny! You gotta know where Boojum is coming from to appreciate the humor but it's great! I'm not sure Rush could stand to be in the same room with her and can pretty much guess that it's mutual, eh, Boojum?

To elaborate a tiny bit on "for SEO purposes." We need to restrict any links that are not family oriented. If you have a nudie picture site then you need to not put the address in the forums. Another thing is that search engines try to determine your intentions by the sites you link to. If we put a ton of links in here to link farms or other "low class" sites then TCH suffers with the search engines and anyone who reads the posts will think less of us than they should. Also, we want this to be a productive place, not a free for all place for people to link to their sites just for profit. If half the links were junk then our overall value would drop tremendously. Finally, TCH is a business and we need to keep things "pretty much" web oriented. Of course we go off on tangents all the time but I'm sure you have all seen threads closed that ventured down a path that leads totally away from web hosting (religion and politics are 2 that come to mind immediately.) It's not just about SEO but it is also about having a nice clean home for our family to come home to and not have to worry about doggy doo all over the front hallway.

You thought wrong. This is a forum for our family members to discuss web-related issues. The techs visit the forums but they spend most of their time monitoring the help desk which is set up for help, as the name implies. Lisa did her job and put the message where it belongs. If she knew the answer to your question I can guarantee you she would have given it, as would any of us mods, but we are moderators and not technicians. There are no "back of the bus" forums and your comment about the track record of backend issues may have something to do with the fact that many of those require techs that have knowledge and passwords to solve and they are resolved in the help desk Didn't mean to give an honest answer to you... A kind post will attract more replies than a nasty, impatient, accusational one.

Robert, I looked on Yahoo and MSN for your first keyword phrase "free online multiplayer gaming" and you showed up at #3 on each. You are at #6 and #9 without the quotes even. Where do you want to be, on the main page in big red letters? j/k I also looked on Google and couldn't find you in the first 5 pages for that term. For what it's worth I am experiencing the same kind of thing, although not quite as successfully for my search terms, and attribute it to the low number of backlinks making Google unhappy. In your case, maybe the MSN/Yahooers aren't as interested in gaming as Googlers?

Go to the TCH Help Site page on email setup. There is a box to check for SMTP authorization. In Outlook it is in the account settings - outgoing server - "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication" and click on the "Use same settings as my incoming mail server." Your last message makes it sound like it's not checked and TCH's email servers won't allow anonymous email relays for spam reasons. Let us know if it doesn't work or you already have it checked.

Kevin, Mail is not my strong point but nothing jumps out at me. You should probably submit a ticket to the helpdesk and have the technical guys take a look. Hope it works out for you soon.

Annie, do you have any references about the outgoing link thing? I hadn't heard that and am curious about it. Just a few comments from previous posts - I'd gotten a bit behind on this thread. Pagerank from the Google Toolbar is unreliable. What the toolbar reports is not necessarily what Google uses internally and some even think it is a decoy by Google to keep webmasters/SEO folks off balance. The Rustybrick link is a farce in my opinion. They do not have access to the millions of sites that Google does to come to the new value and even if they did I'm sure they don't have the processing power to calculate it. Remember what they say: Pagerank does not usually closely match visits either. Remember that Google is just one of many ways people can get to your site. There are other engines, bookmarks, links from others and just typing in an address. Google pagerank is also not the same as your placement on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) either. Pagerank is Google's measure of how popular your site is based on links to it. Your SERP position is decided by hundreds of factors such as text on your page, title, alt tags, and even pagerank. There is a tool called the "Website Position Reporter" that will use the Google API keycode to tell you your rank in the SERPs. There are also online places that do the same such as www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ which will tell you where you stand on a given key phrase. One caution about watching your SERP position on Google... if you do it every day you will get seasick because it fluctuates pretty badly at times. If you drop way down, or out of existance the most important thing to do is nothing. It is probably just a calculation phase they are going through and in almost every case you will bounce back in a week or two unless you were penalized for spamming (which is rare.) Another thing is that when a page is first ranked it usually gets a boost toward the top of the SERPs for awhile and then settles back down to the "real" rank. I would not put too much stock in pagerank since it is only one measure Google uses and probably hundreds of thousands of people don't even use Google. For instance, one of my sites has had 42 visitors that found us from Google but 35 from Yahoo and 52 from MSN. It is good to get links from other sites if you want to get listed higher in Google. It helps people find you when they are on other sites and see the link to you. For Google it's better if the site is relevant to your site and they use your keyphrase in the words that link to you. For everyone else it helps if someone is looking at local schools and they see a link to your school supply site so relevance is good regardless. Never forget that Google is not the only game in town! If you had a brick and mortar business, would you only put ads on one board in one grocery store or would you consider radio, tv, signs out front, business cards, word of mouth, etc? The same with a web page/online business. Well, it's a long post but I hope it helps some!

Glad you're back - we missed you! You should see some of the tourists here! It's always sunny and being closer to the equator than where most people are from makes the sun more intense. They ride around on scooters all day drinking and without shirts on and by the end of the day they don't need to turn on the lights - they are glowing enough as it is!

Read Head Guru's post about 4 messages above yours, Alan. There is more to it than just boosting package limits. HG really hates for his servers to be overworked and us customers getting less than perfect service so he watches for all kinds of unexpected things to happen when they are reset.

I would say that is true of the pharmacies in the US, but I'd think that these mail-order pills from certain other countries would be questionable at best.

One thing that was a tipoff to me was the password protected attachment. If they had to password the thing because of security reasons then why did they send the password to it in the same email as the attachment? Ok, so I'm a hacker - you just gave me the password to the file bozos. See, it doesn't make sense. These virus guys usually do stupid things like this to scare people or set them off balance so they will open the virus.

Netsol is the default for lots of folks. Awhile back they were THE place to get your domain name registered. Since then there are a bunch more at much cheaper rates but the one with the reputation and "big name" is Netsol. We have an "internet department" at my day-job and they have probably without exaggeration hundreds of domains registered and every one of them is causing them to hemmorage $35/year when others can be had for $10 or less. Of course, when I brought it up I got blank deer-in-the-headlights looks and then a "who do you think you are? WE are the internet department!" attitude. <sigh> It's all about reputation (earned or not!), uneducated users and marketing hype. Unfortunately...

SmartFTP is available in PC-only flavor. I had about 10 minutes today to set up a mac and couldn't even figure, in that amount of time, how to do a ping so I can't help you with whether there is an equivalent built-in ftp utility. The principle is the same, if you doubt your utility get another one and try it.

The hyperlinks is already taken by a guy that tried to sue but I never heard anything more about him. Maybe he has cement shoes at some lake?

With your doubts about fetch you could get something like SmartFTP or use the dos command line ftp if you're familiar with that just to see how it works out for you. If it works then go back to Fetch and try one more time. If it breaks then Add/Remove Programs it.

If it is that broad then there will be no more program development because pretty much everything that can be is at that level. All of the controls and such on our programs and websites pretty much exhaust the possibilities - it's only the unique combination that makes this program different than that one. I hope they never get the idea here in the US to do that, but it would be messy enough if other countries do.

Cool, I'm off to patent "Goto" (Patent Pending) Seriously, though, aren't we burdened enough by the morass of litigation now? We have people suing for spilling hot coffee on themselves and they sue McDonalds for making them fat -- it would be impossible to have progress if we have to do patent searches on code and worry about getting sued. Does this mean we have to make all of our source code available to the patent office so they can be sure we aren't violating someone's patents? When this happens wouldn't it become public information available to anyone? (Yes, I am speaking in US-centric terms but it's probably similar in other countries.) This reminds me of the time a friend and I got tired of seeing "Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T / Bell Labs" and decided to trademark the word "trademark." Pure foolishness.

I have no personal experience with it but hear a lot of good things about Macromedia's Contribute product. Check that out and if it fits the bill see if the school will go for helping out with the costs - it's not your $20.00 shareware type app. Sounds like a big project! Let us know when you get it going so we can see it. Sounds like fun though! Best wishes on it. By the way, you definitely want to look at CSS and templates to see how you can make it as easy to manage as possible.

Great work, Rick! That would be a nightmare to find. What are you using to upload the files, Booj? There's something squirrely in there because it shouldn't come out like Rick described if it's really doing the Ascii thing unless it's on your hard drive that way. What editor are you using? Does it support Mac/PC/Unix end-of-line (CR versus CRLF)? I'm just throwing out things that come to mind. I used to work a lot with unix and it did that kind of thing to me sometimes. Hope it helps - don't give up!

Use <?php for the 2nd line and <!-- Googlebot Detection PHP --> for the comments and it's almost identical to mine.

public_html is a link to www (or vice versa), they end up the same place so there's no problem there. Make sure you submit a helpdesk ticket with the username password so the techs can get to the bottom quicker than we can without it.

The 404 is saying there is no file in your www/ folder named index.php or .htm or .html unless your .htaccess is broken. Are you sure your filename is index.php and it's in the www folder?

The X-headers are added to every email leaving the TCH servers. It is to let someone know where to report spam if they get it. Nobody is a default account - if your php is not set right it is probably where that's coming from.

Wow! That's a great improvement! Thanks Kevin!