I think he does a great job to help you understand some of the hidden costs of various different flavors of hosting. The rule today is still the same, the most expensive form of hosting, is your server, your location, and the least expensive is their server, their location.  Because of all the hidden costs of home servers.  But if you want control, nothing can be better then your own home.

• Fedora Core
• CentOS
• Ubuntu
• Windows

If you host, or have friends who host wordpress sites, then you know that upades are frequent, and its time consuming to upgrade each site.  I wanted to find a way to automate the process using a command line script, but before I thought about writing one, I thought someone else must have done this before.  Turns out they did.

Aaron Toponce wrote a wonderful script to do the upgrade, and as many of the comments on the site point out it has some serious flaws, but for anyone with some understanding of scripts, its a great start, thanks!

The main issues I found with it,  was the security issue, specificly that the backups are all stored in the public folder, and that was easy to remedy, however someone already did that too.

Jerry Bell updated the script and he also made some other enhancements, but not the one that I felt was most important.  The issue is, that it does not disable, and re-enable plug-ins.  Now, as far as I was able to determine, its not the most important thing to disable them, but it seems to me if wordpress claims it must be done, it should be done.

A little more research, and I was able to determine that the reason the scripts do not disable the plug-ins, is because you have to do it in the database.  Jeff Star pointed out how to disable & enable the plug-ins using the database.

Putting it all together

Using these resources I built a script that will:

1. Download the latest version of wordpress
2. Backup all the databases
3. Backup the files and folders
4. Disable the plug-ins
5. Upgrade the wordpres directories
6. Restore the files and folders
7. Enable the plug-ins
8. Clean up

Here is the final script.

To help out, self assigned SSL certificates can really go a long way.  Most of the time there is a charge from the ISP for installing the self assigned SSL certificate, but it may really be worth it, so that development of the site can continue.

Here is a great link to a site that shows how to make many different self assigned certificates for a variety of operating systems, if you have access to do so on your server, they can be helpful.

http://www.sslshopper.com/article-how-to-create-a-self-signed-certificate.html

Of course self assigned does have some problems, specifcly the dreaded invalid SSL certificate window.

You can still continue to test the site, by accepting the certificate, and that is the best part of Self assigned SSL certs, they let you use the site as if it were a valid site.  You may also have other warnings that may come form internet security software, but generally speaking, they all have a way to continue to use the site.

Here is a great screen cast that can help you to install your own Google Wave Server.

This is about page tracking, and analysis.  Answer the question, ‘Who is visiting my site?’  You also get data helping you know what sort of things they do once they have arrived.  Years ago the best tools for this was webtrends, and for those who could not afford it, or who’s host did not have it pre-installed, there was the option of weblogsfrom the server.  If you could not get those, the last thing you could do was build your own tracking, by adding code to each page, and storing the results yourself.  Of course that required a lot of analysis to make it at all useful.

Here are the top free solutions:

1. Google Analytics - The leader in statistics, mostly because of the tie in with AdWords.  But this free solution offers 5M impressions, much more then the rest, but the downside is that it does not offer real time statistics.
2. W3Counter – Another free alternative.  I think this has the best graphics of any of the competitors.   Very easy to set up & configure.
3. StatCounter – Free and accurate, with real time statistics.  This is an excellent tool.

Feel free to use more then on, I often do.

An old SEO technique, that used to work, but is now dead in my book, is 301 Redirects.  The basic use of a URL redirect, is to allow web site owners to change a URL, and forward the old URL to the new URL.  The reason is to prevent 404 Errors, and to allow web site owners to make website changes, and still have the users bookmarks function.

What happened, was people realized, if the had a page that had a high ranking in a search engine, they could sell that location, using a redirect to another site.  Then the user with the other site, would essentially have a high ranking in a search engine immediately.  This worked, but not anymore.

Search engines had to get smarter, and now they check if the link that are returning in a search has a 301, and if so, to where, and if that new page is not similar enough, it looses ranking.  Now you might say, similar enough?  I would say I am not an expert on the subject, but the idea of purchasing some domain to redirect to your own to boost up your ranking is not the best method.

Anyway, if your clients, or you, are interested in it, here is how to setup the redirect on the original server.  By the way, this also works for legitimate changes, like URL shortening, and domain moving, just in case your here for that.  Some people might ask, what if I have an HTML only page, how can I redirect then?  The answer is, you have to use the actual web server to do the redirect, I did not cover how to do that here.

(Languages are alphabetical.)

ASP

Below is the only content that you can have on the page, if you have automatic headers or footers, or anything like that, it will not work, this should be the entire page.

<% @ Language = vbscript %>
<%
   Response.Status='301 Moved Permanently'
   Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage'
%>

ASP .NET

Below is the only content that you can have on the page, if you have automatic headers or footers, or anything like that, it will not work, this should be the entire page.

<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
   Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
   Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage");
}
</script>

ColdFusion

Below is the only content that you can have on the page, if you have automatic headers or footers, or anything like that, it will not work, this should be the entire page.

<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage">

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
  response.setStatus(301);
  response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage" );
  response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

PHP

Below is the only content that you can have on the page, if you have automatic headers or footers, or anything like that, it will not work, this should be the entire page.

<?php
  header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
  header('Location:http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage');
?>

Ruby on Rails

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage"
end

The first step to creating a custom user experience for mobile devices is to determine if you want the view to be automatic, or manual.   Manual methods including allowing the user to select to view your site as mobile, either with a link/button or with a different URL, for instance m.google.com.  The second method is to sniff the browsers user agent, and determine the type of browser that may be visiting your site, and alter the site accordingly.

The specifics of how to do the sniffing vary by server type, but there is plenty of simple methods for determining the browser, the next step is to determine how your going to change the website.

The first method is a whole new website, once the user selects mobile, they are transfered to a completly new website that is designed for the mobile user.  You may even decide to create multiple new websites designed for various different user agents.  Another method, is to use style sheets alone to change the look and feel of your site for mobile users.

The second option is, of course, a lot less work.  But it only works when your website has been created with this in mind, and does not often work well as an after thought.  Of course the type of website makes all the difference.

I hope more people build websites with mobile users in mind, or at least offer some portion of their website content in a mobile friendly manner.

]]> http://theinfluence.net/mblog/?feed=rss2&p=16 0 http://theinfluence.net/mblog/?p=12 http://theinfluence.net/mblog/?p=12#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:53:46 +0000 Michael Lynch http://theinfluence.net/mblog/?p=12 As promised, here is a re-post of how to get Safari to masquerade as an iPhone, so that you can test your websites user agent sniffing.

1. Open Safari’s Preferences dialog.
2. Enable the development menu in safari Preferences.  First select Advanced, then make sure the  “Show Develop menu in menu bar” is checked.
3. Close the Preferences Dialog
4. Now go to the Develop menu in safar to select the iPhone as the user agent
5. Optionally, you may want to shrink the window down, so that you can get a better feel for the size of the web that your browsing.

That’s all there is to it, enjoy.

Thanks for everyone’s continued support, I hope you like this new version of the web blog.