I've been using my .htaccess file to deny access to certain IP addresses and address ranges. Yesterday while adding a couple of entries, I mistakenly left a line consisting of only “Deny From”. I didn't catch it at the time but noticed later in the day that the entire www.cantoni.org domain was not responding. I assumed it was a problem at the hosting company (Pair Networks), so I contacted them later in the evening. Their technician responded quickly, pointing out the error in my .htaccess file and fixing it himself! Another gold star for Pair Networks whose support is excellent.…
From Scribbling.net comes a useful article called Help the Googlebot understand your web site which lists about a dozen tips for structuring your site for the best experience with the Google indexing software (Googlebot). Cantoni.org already handles most of these suggestions except for the additiona meta robots tag which should cause it to not index my main page which is frequently changing. When I recently changed from daily to individual archiving with MovableType, I saw a big improvement in search results through Google. With each post having its own title, the results were much better. (As opposed to searching for…
I just added an Atom 0.3 feed to this site (in addition to the RSS 2.0 feed which I'll keep as well). Following the example template from Mark Pilgrim, it was quite simple. The template uses a couple of MovableType plugins (UTCDate and MTEntryModified, both from Staggernation.com). For now, I didn't take the additional step of serving the file up as MIME type “application/atom+xml”, instead just sticking with xml type until aggregators better support the subscription model. My current news reader of choice (Bloglines) now reads Atom 0.3 feeds without a problem. So does the latest Feed Validator. It will…
As an experiment, I signed up for Google Adsense. The most popular section of my website is my list of PDA friendly web site, so I thought I'd see what kind of ads Google would want to display. So far, everything is related to Palm PDAs, especially “shopping” links. There isn't too much traffic on this site, but it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
Tonight I finally upgraded from MovableType 2.51 to 2.64. Of the new features in 2.6, I’m not taking advantage of any immediately, but I did want to take advantage of the bug fixes (esp. for XML-RPC), so I took the plunge and upgraded.