Boojum

Holy anteaterburgers, Head Guru! I once got myself a decent mix of first- (reddening of the skin) and second-degree (peeling) on the entire left side of my body on Acapulco in 1986. (Ironically, I was on the USS Mars then and had had no shortage of sun; in fact, I'd just recently been collecting some rays on top of the ship's flight tower on the Indian Ocean—and, as we know, there is no shade on the Indian Ocean.) But I have never had a third-degree (complete carbonization of tissues) burn. For which I am quite thankful. Bill, I sincerely hope you've seen a doctor. A third-degree burn is very serious, both in the short and long terms. Among other things, your risk of melanomas is now substantially increased. Also, the risk of infection persists for some time after the injury, so keep the site scrupulously clean. Best wishes.

I am trying to use a .php include file to replace the menus for my various subdomains as well as the primary domain (each requires a partially different menu). It works all right as long as I use the code <?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/inc/menu-ho.php"; ?> for example. But if I replace the above with a version including the full URL, e.g., <?php include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."http://www.squort.com/inc/menu-ho.php"; ?>, I get an error when I try to open the page. Now, this would be no problem if I were just using the primary domain. But with subdomains, everything needs to be coded with absolute URLs, so I'm concerned that this include technique won't work for my subdomains—which constitute the bulk of my site. Is there any way around this problem?

No. Never. Not in a vigintillion millennia. The link is from Rush Limbaugh Online, which is a parody site working to overtake the actual Limbaugh sites in popularity. Funny stuff.

Actually, I think my miserable Google pagerank is real. I checked "link:www.squort.com" at the Google site, and found that they list zero links to my site. This would also conform with the known facts, including my apparent disappearance from their index, the fact that until last week my site did not appear in Google's results for "squort" at all, and the total cessation of all Google traffic since that time. This despite the fact that several quite high-ranking sites do actually link to mine. I note with some satisfaction, however, that my most popular page currently ranks fifth in results for terms as broad as "u.s. invade" (with or without the quotation marks). A bit suspicious, though, this matter with Google. A bright but somewhat unstable Indonesian chess player (and computer programmer) of my acquaintance once had a tantrum at my expense and privately announced that he had "declared war on me." He later regained his composure for a while, but during a subsequent blowup privately notified me that he had learned my IP number, and that "it would be trivial for [him] to delete [my] site from Google's index" and added that he would also make sure my most popular page "disappeared." By this, I assumed he meant from the results pages. Google, of course, denies that any such thing could happen and says I must have fallen afoul of some sudden new problem indexing "pages with Flash content," as their e-mail said. Now, it may well be that Google is right. Perhaps they have perfect, unhackable security and use foolproof procedures that absolutely foreclose any possibility of tampering, as indeed their information pages claim. By much the same token, it may well be that the blue pancakes from Venus will overrun the earth starting tomorrow at 6:27 a.m. GMT. It is noteworthy that Google isn't aware of any of my incoming links, even though some of them do appear even in its results pages for "squort." And perhaps (indeed, statistically it is very probable that) this is all pure coincidence, which the Law of Very Large Numbers tells us has a greater reach than we might think. But it still makes me wonder ....

Eden.

I'm sure this question has been answered somewhere and I'm just missing it, but: What exactly is a robots.txt file?

Gikkkkkkkkk! Page rank=1. Actually, I find this odd, given that I've had over 300 visitors so far this month, and my overall monthly average is over 400. Somehow, though, Google dropped me from its index in the last two months or so, while my most popular page, which had appeared on the first page of results for inquiries about the U.S. invasion of Iraq quite consistently for months, suddenly faded from the results. My traffic plunged—and is only now reviving, thanks in part to Yahoo, MSN and other search engines that have picked up some of the slack. I still wonder what I have to do to get Google to restore my site to its proper place in the world, so to speak.

Here's a fine neophyte question: How do you find out your Google pagerank?

Scams.

Why not? Most bad spellers, it seems, live right here in the good old Untied Stakes of Amiracle. Isn't that right, Mr. Quayle? And by the way, what century did Quayle live in?* ===================================== * Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle was asked about the Holocaust by a reporter. Quayle donned an appropriately somber look and replied that it was "a very dark episode in our nation's history." Upon being reminded/informed that the Holocaust had not happened in the U.S., Quayle hurried to set everything to rights by pointing out: "I meant in the history of this century. We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century."

Would this be Robertsville Junior College near the community of Robertsville, Liberia?

My computer is always deleting letters on me too. Other times, it decides, spontaneously yet compulsively, to change Aptos into Patos, Capitola into Captiola and Watsonville into Watsovnille. (You can probably guess how much fun that was while I was editing for the Capitola Courier and the Aptos Times.) It has also described, more times than I like to recall, the occupation of farmers as agrigulture.

Please add my site to your web-hosting family. My URL: http://www.squort.com My site name: Squort.com Site Description: An eclectic site, Squort.com includes news, news analysis, essays, political commentary, humor, downloads and information about me and my family, along with a new section about my hometown: Santa Cruz, California. Link back to TotalChoice: I've done you one better (actually 43 better): I've posted a link back at the bottom of every page of my site. This is a delayed reward (it took a long time to produce the new site version) for all the help and guidance provided me by my many knowledgeable fellow customers as well as TCH staff members. Oh, and Mitch: Please do perform a search-engine analysis on it. Spasiba.

Hmm. Now I'm guilty of my own spelling error—this time in the topic title. Which apparently can't be edited. Arrgh!

I know this is a fairly picayune thing to call attention to, but as a longtime editor and copy editor, I tend to notice errors. Near the top of your main index page, the second topic listed is "TotalChoice Web Hosting Polices." And I can't help wondering who these polices really are. If they're the Spelling Polices, someone here may be in trouble.

Is SmartFTP Mac-compatible? (Note that the other workarounds suggested do not apply here, being designed for a Windows environment.)

BBEdit Lite 6.1. Which has been fairly reliable so far, to my knowledge. Fetch, on the other hand, is more than a bit suspect. Nonetheless, if anyone can offer me a good, practical solution to this issue, it would be most appreciated; I would eventually like to track Googlebot's visits. (Meanwhile, I deleted the php scripts from the pages and re-uploaded them, and they appear to work as designed. woooot Nearly killed myself doing it, but the new version is up. Come check it out!)

I'm using Fetch (don't know if you're familiar with it) as my FTP program. Now the question is: How do I go about actually correcting this parsing problem? For the moment, I have decided simply to remove the code. If someone can suggest a way to repair it, I may try reinstalling it later, but for now it is more important to have working pages. Thanks for your suggestions in any case.

Not without manually counting lines—and my eyes are far too tired for that. Again, though: The code is exactly as I presented it. There are only a few lines there. I would hope we could somehow isolate the problem without counting lines in my pages.

Rick: I have uploaded the file I'm currently testing several times, and I'm sure it's in ASCII mode; however, the line numbers vary by file anyway. The problem has been isolated as occurring in the php script shown in my previous posts. Therefore, there must presumably be something wrong with the code as cited. Trouble is, no one seems to have fingered the culprit yet. Oh, well. The script would provide a useful service, but it is hardly essential. I need to get some rest (I've been up all night ... again), but when I return, if there doesn't seem to be a better suggestion, I'll just delete the code from all my pages and upload them again.

The script now reads: <!-- Googlebot Detection PHP --> <?php if(eregi("googlebot",$HTTP_USER_AGENT)) { if ($QUERY_STRING != "") {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF.'?'.$QUERY_STRING;} else {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF;} $today = date("F j, Y, g:i a"); mail("pointzero@neteze.com", "Googlebot detected on http://$SERVER_NAME", "$today - Google crawled $url"); } ?> <! --END GOOGLEBOT DETECTION PHP --> But I still get the same error.

Jim: I tried substituting the exact phrases you suggested, but I still get the same error message. Is there anything else that I might need to change?

Aha! It appears that the php part is the source of the problem. Can anyone see the fatal flaw in the following code? <! GOOGLEBOT DETECTION PHP> <? if(eregi("googlebot",$HTTP_USER_AGENT)) { if ($QUERY_STRING != "") {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF.'?'.$QUERY_STRING;} else {$url = "http://".$SERVER_NAME.$PHP_SELF;} $today = date("F j, Y, g:i a"); mail("pointzero@neteze.com", "Googlebot detected on http://$SERVER_NAME", "$today - Google crawled $url"); } ?> <! END GOOGLEBOT DETECTION PHP> If not, perhaps I'll just delete the code from all my pages. But if anyone can help me fix the above code, it would be appreciated; the Googlebot notification would be a useful addition.

1) Jim: I have uploaded all my files, from the beginning, to the public_html folder, not the www folder. Does this need to be changed for a .php file? 2) MikeJ: Hmm. The only actual php in the file is code I copied from this forum (to have Googlebot visits reported to me via e-mail). Is that likely to be the source of the problem? ----------------------------------------------------- I hope to solve this issue soon; my entire site is effectively nonexistent right now.

"A plethora of Roberts," you say? That reminds me of the time I visited a friend of mine a few years ago. There were seven people in the living room. Of that total, four of us were named Brian. Ah, the joys of having a ludicrously common name.