Ebusiness4all Blog
Discussions on the evolving online world
September 18th, 2008

Meta tags keywords and descriptions

There is always a debate on whether these are worth investing in or not.  Whatever the side of the argument you are on it is worth having the ability to create and display these tags well.

Wordpress is a wonderful tool but has some out of the box deficiencies.  The creation of meta tags is one but this can be addressed by adding plugins which extend the functionality of the core package.

One plugin I have adopted is the excellent Headspace2 which is modular and gives you the ability to control many aspects of your code as seen by the search engine spiders.

Have just fitted it and am test piloting the plugin for a while … I will report back in a week or so on progress.

September 5th, 2008

Save time with automation

I am always looking for ways of reducing the time it takes to do tasks, particularly repetitive tasks.

Yesterday I came across this post on the Halotis blog which advised on how you could use the imacros add in for your browser to automate a lot of those boring tasks.  The post even goes on to advise how you should consider extending the basic automation to include the scheduler so that you never forget to run those automation tasks.

Looks good - I’m going to try it and will update you on progress later.

August 27th, 2008

Determine your page keywords in php

Often it is valuable to summarise the content of a web page or article and outline the most common keywords.  This can be useful in categorising articles but it would require the author to indicate which keywords are appropriate.

This could be a poor strategy as some authors will not want to take the time to do this and others could use false keywords as a form of spam not related to the article content.

Fortunately there is a PHP class that will allow a site owner to create automatic tag clouds or article summaries for their site. Use of software will save time and improve accuracy.

This PHP class, written by Ver Pangonilo from the Philippines analyzes the article text and determines keywords based on the frequency of one or multiple words. You can influence the outcome by providing the parameters you want to filter by:

  • minimum word length
  • minimum times the word appears
  • minimum length and occurances of words for 2, and 3 word phrases
  • minimum length and occurances of 2 and 3 word phrases
August 15th, 2006

Linux live cd a more simple approach

I am never surprised when brilliant, technical people make IT solutions complex.  In the years I spent running a business the main challenge was to translate the IT peoples clever initiatives into practical business solutions.

The area I am thinking of now relates to linux live cds.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 15th, 2006

Wusb11v4 Linksys wireless networking on Slax Linux

I have seen many posts on the Internet asking whether the Linksys usb wusb11v4 can be used in Slax Linux to provide wireless network access.  The Linksys wusb11v4 is a low cost wireless usb device.

The answer is yes, as that is what I am using to post this article.  How to do it ….  read on below.

Read the rest of this entry »

March 24th, 2006

Wordpress upgrade, check your htaccess file

Upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 brings many advantages but the installation may create some page not found, 404, errors for you.

If you see these when you have previously established a permalink structure, and you are certain that the pages exist, then you should check your htaccess file.

By default Wordpress tries to write to this file to enable the rewrites that will conform to the permalink structure you have defined.

On some hosting accounts Wordpress may not have the right permissions to edit the file and the rewrite functionality will fail. The rules will relate to Wordpress 1.5 whereas you will be running Wordpress 2.0.

In these situations you should edit the htaccess file manually, if you are confident of doing this and not shutting down your blog - take a backup.

Wordpress 1.5 seemed to produce a very large set of rewrite rules whereas Wordpress 2.0 handles rewrites differently and the rules are fewer. So do not worry if the replacement code is much shorter than the original code.

Good luck and I hope that this helps.