Posts by Dani

Have been surfing around forums for forum owners tonight, and an ENORMOUS problem seems to be bot spam. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself and all of the custom tools that I wrote to keep bot spam at bay since switching off of vBulletin. :) It's really seeming like we are leaps and bounds in front of just about everyone else in the industry here, with most other big forums paying monthly fees to services like Akismet and/or continuously dealing with the issues that we dealt with on vBulletin and left behind us in 2012.

Low level languages are close to the hardware. They directly deal with the computer's memory, CPU, etc. Then, higher level languages are built to automatically use the functionality of the low level stuff, so that you don't have to keep rebuilding the wheel ... the higher you go, the more abstracted away you are from the inner workings of what's really going on under the hood.

For example, a low level language might be used to create mouse drivers and instruct the computer that moving the mouse should move the cursor around the screen.

Then another language might be used to design a web browser. When writing the web browser application, you just need to write instructions saying how the computer should behave when the mouse clicks on a button or a link. You don't have to go back to the drawing board and start giving it instructions on how signals are passed between the mouse and the computer, the keyboard, display drivers for the monitor, etc. That's because your web browser application is written on top of your operating system, and therefore it's abstracted away.

Certain languages are considered more low level (such as Assembly or C) and certain language are considered more high level (such as the languages of the .NET framework).

As more people become mobile and access the web via smartphones and tablets, sometimes even more so than desktop computers, Google strives to deliver results that are tailored to the situation. For example, if I'm wandering around the streets of Manhattan and looking for a good restaurant on my iPad Mini, I want results that are going to be tailored towards a tablet form factor.

It's important that your site is accessible via all different resolutions (perhaps using responsive design) and is optimized for the screen resolution of your target audience.

You earn reputation points when other people vote on your posts and leave a comment. Your reputation increases by the amount of rep power they have, which is based on their reputation.

Google already talks about using ATOM activitystrea.ms for the social hub in Google Analytics. Does Google also use activitystrea.ms in its search algorithm? How beneficial might it be? I know they put a lot of emphasis on microdata as of late but this is a different beast entirely.

Agree with using GWT.

I don't know? You tell me. How will you?

What's your question, exactly?

Sorry for my blunt response ... I'm half asleep and trying to get some stuff finished before bed.

When googlebot crawls your webpage, it stores a copy of the webpage in its cache. Then, when someone performs a google search, google searches its cache for a relevant page. Googlebot revisits your site on a regular basis and updates its cache. The cached copy (which isn't always the most up to date) is what Google uses when determining whether your site should be shown in search results.

I also want to point out that the main benefit of tagging comes from using tags that aren't keywords found in the posts. For example, tagging articles related to DaniWeb's API with the tag daniweb-api. Without a human doing that, that's something that no search functionality would ever be able to do.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not condoning downloading a pirated eBook version. Just want to reminisce in the frustrations that a university's library isn't always a replacement for their bookstore, told from someone who's alma mater had an 11-story library crowned with an observation deck and separate law library, and still didn't even touch on any of the textbooks required for my courses, which were of course all for sale for many hundreds of dollars at the university bookstore.

OK, wasn't a bug after all. Apparently upgrading Firefox corrupted the DaniWeb cookies. You need to clear all cookies, or at least all cookies originating from .daniweb.com or www.daniweb.com, and then it should work.

I got this fixed and it wasn't even a bug in the first place. Apparently upgrading Firefox corrupted DaniWeb's cookies. The cookies needed to be cleared to something fresh to work.

A non-user friendly URL might be something like this:

www.daniweb.com/topic.php?t=12345

It gives no insight into what the page is about, and is just a query string of random numbers.

A user-friendly URL might be something like this:

www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/seo/user-friendly-url

Here, the URL gives insight into what the specific page is about as well as the directory structure (navigation hierarchy) of where it is in relation to the site as a whole.

I try to accomidate when I can. This was a pain in the neck to do, and was definitely a one time only thing, but I looked into it, and it was doable, so I gave it a shot.

Personally I like Calibri as well, but I like sans-serif fonts better for the web :)

I'm not sure why you're complaining that code doesn't look good in Arial. Of course it doesn't. Code should always be in a monospace font, which it is on DaniWeb.

Perhaps you can use a custom browser stylesheet to change all Arial font anywhere on the web to your font of choice. It's a built-in browser feature for most modern browsers.

Points earned are not immediately available to prevent gaming the system. We give moderators sufficient time to handle trolls, spammers and people voting up their own posts from multiple accounts.

No, that's not technically possible. Google is only able to retrieve front-end stuff, such as HTML / CSS / JavaScript, same as a web browser, and that's what it caches.

Yes, feel free to add your own additional directories and subdirectories. For example, when your controllers call the views, instead of passing in just the name of the template file, such as 'foo', you can pass in 'directory/foo'.

Or our databases forum http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/databases/16

Either way, use odbc as a tag keyword.

They might be doing 301 redirects from the old domain to the new domain. This is telling Google their site has simply moved, and it will help them for a time being. They will still need to supplement this with a constant stream of new backlinks however.

Aside from that, they might just be ranking on the 1st page for obscure keywords, or for their own company name, where there isn't much competition.

You are good to go :) Be sure to log in with your new username from now on.

I was about 13 when I created DaniWeb.com as a personal homepage about my dogs. Then it evolved into a more popular dog-related site getting about 10,000 visitors a month (which was a lot of traffic for 1996!).

When I was 19, I was in college pursuing a Computer Science degree, and I repurposed the domain name to be a message board and tutorial site about technology and programming. And the rest is history!

Fiverr.com?

I have a Verizon FiOS Internet line coming into my office here at DaniPad, and it has a block of 5 static IPs (x.x.x.18 - x.x.x.22) that I'm paying for.

The line is connected to a switch. Also connected to the switch, among other things (such as our security system), are the uplink ports of two Linksys routers, an EA6900 and an E1200.

The EA6900 has been statically assigned the .18 external IP address. My workstation and my server are both directly connected to this router, and each has been statically assigned a 192.168.1.x IP address, and wireless has been disabled.

The E1200 has been statically assigned the .20 external IP address and also has wireless disabled. A wireless Cisco Meraki device that has been assigned a 192.168.1.x IP address is connected to this router. All of the members of DaniPad connect to the Internet through the Meraki via the Meraki's DHCP server. They are all assigned a 10.x.x.x IP address.

Also connected to the E1200 is a wired network printer that has been statically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.110.

All of the members who are connected to the Internet with a 10.x.x.x internal IP and a x.x.x.20 external IP are able to connect to the network printer with IP address 192.168.1.110.

I would like to connect to this printer as well. However, I'm assuming that in order to do so, I need to set up some sort of VPN between the Linksys routers. However, I want to continue …

I wouldn't consider myself addicted to Facebook, Twitter, etc. although I do use them throughout the day. However, I use them primarily as a tool to keep in touch with business colleagues and promote what's going on with DaniWeb. If it weren't for DaniPad / DaniWeb, I would probably rarely use them.

So, in other words, to clarify what Adrian is saying, it only loads the images on the page that the browser can see at the time, instead of all of the ones on the entire page. As you scroll, it loads more.

Why can't you use both? It's always a great thing to have a well rounded marketing campaign. I agree with what everone else says in that PPC can be more costly, but can produce more new leads, while email marketing would be a good way to touch existing leads every so often.

The reason for our policy is to retain full exclusive rights to be able to do whatever we want with anything posted on DaniWeb. This means we have a legal leg to stand on if someone duplicates all of our content en masse and we wanted to prosecute because it was hurting our business. This means that our moderation team can modify content at its discretion. This means that we can choose or not choose to delete content. And this means that, should I ever sell DaniWeb in the future (no plans to, mind you), I would have the legal right to be selling our entire database of content, for new owners to do whatever they wanted with. They could choose to publish every post in a hardcover book if they so desired. Whatever. (Otherwise all DaniWeb LLC would have to its name is the platform and mailing list.) For the most part this is just me trying to protect myself by giving DaniWeb LLC freedom to explore avenues in the future without being restricted by copyright and licensing issues.

Focus on good, quality content ... especially really informative content you can't find anywhere else, or content on controversial topics that people are going to have a gut reaction to want to reply to or share with their friends on social media. That's a great way to get traffic coming in.

If your site performs well and you want to try your hand at selling direct, try BuySellAds.com

I only wish I knew what techniques worked today :) I'd be in a hell of a better position than I am!

Also, keep in mind, the functionality that you are unlocking is not stuff we want a newbie to do ... such as contribute editorial, etc. It's done to save the moderation team from extra work.

I'm happy with Windows 8. Happier once the Start menu gets reintroduced, but honestly I don't see a huge difference. I don't know what all the fuss over the dashboard-thingy is all about.

Why should we change it? We want to make sure that you have a complete understanding of how the website functions before giving you access to things such as the ability to post editorial, etc. We've found that newbies don't really understand how these features work and it creates a burden on the moderation team.

Well that's the trade-off with any caching mechanism ... faster in exchange for potentially stale content.

We use Memcached very heavily to cache database queries and things of that sort. We use an adapted version of CodeIgniter's caching mechanism, which is capable of handling any mime type, to cache our RSS feeds, API calls that don't use an OAuth token, and our tag clouds (which rarely change). We can cache our tag clouds, even though they're just a portion of the page, because they're injected via an IFRAME ... err, actually, using jQuery.load(), but same difference.

Firstly, it caches the entire fully-rendered page, which means that it isn't a good solution for logged in pages that are user-specific, because you can't use it to cache just a portion of a page.

Secondly, the file cache gets stored in the file system, so make sure you aren't caching hundreds of thousands of pages, because that can significantly slow things down instead of speed them up. And I believe there's a max limit to how many pages can be stored in a single directory depending on the file system, as well.

Thirdly, a limitation of CI's built in file caching system is that it is hardcoded to only spit out HTML files. I actually had to modify it myself to allow the caching of other mime types, so that I could use it for our RSS feeds, for example (which, IMO, is a very good use of file caching!)

Grey hat SEO doesn't exist. Either you're within the boundaries of what search engines find acceptable, or you're not. If you try to push the boundaries by trying to game the search engine in ways that haven't been ruled illegal yet, it's just a matter of time before your tactics do become ruled illegal and you're the first one to get caught and made an example of.

As almostbob points out, you want to have a Google Webmaster Tools account where you can make sure that google currently understands your site structure and your navigation.

Beyond that, I would inspect the sites that are newly ranking above you, and see if you can compare what they might be doing better. For example, do they load quicker? Do they have fewer ads above the fold? Are their articles longer?

Use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to track what keywords you used to rank for, and which you now do, and that should give you a significant amount of data to figure out which other sites' webpages to investigate and compare head to head against your own pages and for which keywords.

Google Panda has been a domain level penalty ever since it came out in February 2011, so that's not really anything new with Panda 4.0.

But, yeah, like Albert says, get rid of low quality content. The problem, as it's been explained recently already elseweb, is that Panda aims to kill off thin content and duplicate content. Duplicate content is easy to understand. Google's definition of thin content, unfortunately, not so much. For example, what specifically constitutes thin content? Where's the line drawn in the sand? How do you know if your web pages are culpreit?

Backlinks are links from other webpages (on other sites) to your webpage. Traditionally, the quality and quantity of backlinks were considered a 'vote' for the quality of a webpage by Google. However, they have made an official statement recently that backlinks will be less important to the Google algorithm moving forward.

BTW I'll take all of your socialism comments to simply mean that I know how to do the running a community thing well :)

Oh, I forgot to mention!! Contributing editorial articles and code snippets also earns you money when people vote on them.

I should mention, you can post code from the editor on iOS devices by indenting each line with at least 4 spaces.

Our editor toolbar is not compatible with many mobile devices, and we take this as an acceptable loss because I don't see many people painstakingly typing out long code snippets from their iPads. It's not like there's a code editor on your iPad that you can copy/paste code from.

That being said, you might want to subscribe to our mailing list (option available in member profile). All posts relevant to the sections you are active in on the site get emailed to you, and you can reply directly via your email client to post.

Some counters got out of sync. I manually ran the script to recalculate everything and the last page of the article is working now. However, I don't know what could be causing the other problems you're experiencing :(

OK, so I'll take this thread seriously since Bob clearly isn't :)

If I'm understanding your question correctly then no, the SEO techniques that you most likely read about on the web are no longer nearly as effective as they used to be. Google took firm action against content farms and buying/selling backlinks and all those other "blackhat" techniques you most likely read about SEO (such as posting in forums to build backlinks, etc.). Most recently, they've gone after guest posting in blogs pretty hard.

That isn't to say that the concept of SEO doesn't still exist. Today, SEO means having lightweight, clean HTML code, a fast-loading website, and an even presence across social media and other traffic mediums, to name a few things.

Yeah, I don't even understand what accumulating Facebook likes does for a business (even as far as social media is concerned)? For example, liking a page doesn't put it in their stream at all, right? Not even the 2-5% but not at all?? Maybe if there was a way to send out a mass message to everyone who liked my business page or something like that. Is there anything that FB lets us do with all those likes we've accumulated?

If someone just clicks the up or down arrow, you just get a vote, it's anonymous, and it can affect your post quality score, but it doesn't factor into your reputation.

But if someone clicks the up or down arrow to vote, and ALSO fills out the comment form and submits a comment, it's no longer anonymous, and then that affects your reputation. Your rep gets affected based on the rep of the person who did the voting/commenting.

No, it's our fault. You shed light that the system wasn't ideally designed, because you're not the first person who made that mistake.