Deverill

The links from your page do have an effect on your ranking, but it's a relatively small effect. The biggest thing you can do is get a lot of relevant links TO your page. It seems you only have about 50-ish from a real quick Google search. The more people linking to your site from relevant sites, the more important you seem and the more likely Google will send people to your site. They figure that if no one is linking to you then you have nothing good to say.

Just briefly outline the problem (they won't read a novel about it) and give them URL's to the particular problem thread and your client's site - make it easy for them to see what's happening... don't make them work for it. Then keep your fingers crossed. In a case of defamation I'd consider having your client hire a lawyer to send a cease and desist letter - it's probably $25-$50 to do it. It will almost always stop them dead in their tracks and sets it up for a court action later if necessary.

I found a solution! I'm posting it here so anyone else that is seeking the same thing and stumbles across this post can have it:

Unfortunately, that's using function calls that only exist in Windows. Back to Google for me...

Welcome fivesparrows. It looks like WysiwygPro has written a function to go through the entire page and filter out those non-utf8 characters. If you could get that function and all the ones it depends on into a separate file you could probably include it yourself but that may be a lot of work. If I had to guess I'd say that perhaps FP or Windows itself has a setting for international users that is causing the problem by allowing those "special characters" into the source file and then when it reads it they, for some reason, don't make sense and are interpreted as (A)'s. It is a very important clue that they are using a utf-8 filter to fix the problem though.

I can't try it till I get home, but thanks Bruce! It's a different approach than the ones I found using the /proc/PID directory. In this particular application and due to security issues /proc is unavailable. I've bookmarked that site too so the benefits will continue. Thanks for the help!

Thanks Thomas! New version? You mean we don't have to wait 3-5 weeks for a patch to come out? Oh, yeah, that's right, it's open source - not Microsoft!

None of the buttons work or show graphics on either of the pages in IE for me. Are your friends running the same version of IE as you? I have the version 7 beta on my computer here at work and it doesn't work at all on your site. Maybe they have version 6? In Firefox everything works fine.

I'm not too concerned with Google itself - it's in their best interest to keep it secure and make everyone happy so they'll keep using it... but there are so many places to insert an attack between the user and Google that automatic storing and use of CC numbers scares me. Of course the crooks won't use it because anything stored on Google can be subpoenaed.

Does anyone here have some experience with Unix/Linux and C programming (or C++) that can answer this? Given program named "e" that can be run with /usr/bin/e (or whatever path), ./e, ../e, or just plain e if it's in a directory in the path. How does that program find out it's full pathname? Any help appreciated!

Cool stuff but scary. I trust Google, but with all the security holes in IE, Win, etc, how long before someone gets a hook into my credit card number?

Thanks, Tompa, you made my morning a little happier.

Thanks guys for the help. I have narrowed the problem down to Telia.net and it seems from a google search that it's not the first time. It's just something we live with on the Internet. Now to explain that to my client.

What are you posting into? Is it MT, WP, something entirely different?

Thanks Thomas! That's just what I need. If you don't mind, what's the ping average time?

Hi Gang! TCH is awesome and I know that without a doubt. My pastor, on the other hand, is in Israel now (on dialup I think) and is getting timeouts trying to bring up the church's website. I know how horrible some networks can be and how bad dialup can be so I'm telling him that it's because he's in Israel on a bad network. He's asking me if it's not time to change hosts. I don't want it to come to that. If you would, please do a traceroute to cwckw.org if you are outside the USA so I can show him that it's not a problem with TCH. I do NOT want to be forced to leave TCH or lose an account! He says he can get to other sites and he could get to ours earlier this week and it's never happened to him before... things change. Who knows, maybe the last suicide bomber compromised the phone system. It could be a billion things but I need your help proving to him it's not TCH. Thanks for your time and help on this!

After you get your site established, however, don't use this trick because the search engines will come by, see the pages are gone, and possibly remove you from the listings. (And for anyone else reading this considering a "temporary updating page").

Indeed it was, Mike.

Glad you got it working Darnell!!! If you ever have some time and interest in changing it a bit, I used to use Front Page quite awhile ago and it works great with FTP - you just gotta set it up right.

I have some friends that like to have some Columbian-produced coke... but I guess that's not the same thing.

Oops, forgot to follow up... Here's one that should be easy: "You of all people know how fast the weather can change."

Thanks Tim, to you and the other techs involved. This has to be a lot of work to boost everything like this - especially the reseller accts. It's not been that long anyway... especially for something free!!!

Darnell, why are you trying to transfer your files via http? I'd suspect that no one who frequents these forums uses http to transfer files to the site but rather ftp which is the "normal" way it is done. If ftp does work then is there a reason you are using http and add a network instead of ftp? (I'm not trying to pick on you... just understand what you are trying to accomplish.)

Another thing about the www is that if you have some links to your site with the www and some links to your site without the www, the search engines won't rank it as well as they would if they all went to one or the other. At TCH it doesn't matter which you use - they both work and both go to the same web page on your site.... just be consistent in everything you do for your own sanity and better search engine ranking.

Has to be Pleasantville. (If so I'll do a quote as a followup.)