HOEI

It appears that the new Alexa ranking system has benefited a couple of sites that I manage.  The ranking for HOEI was in the 500K range and GrowingKids was in the 600K range with both climbing before the change.  GrowingKids was launched in July of 2007 and has finally pasted HOEI in Alexa rankings with a new ranking of 344,414.  Traffic on GrowingKids.org has doubled since the beginning of the year and the RSS subscribers have nearly tripled so the Alexa ranking is not at all a surprise.  There have been criticisms of Alexa about the rankings favoring sites with technical content.  It seems that the new ranking system is proving to change that technical bias at least from my perspective.

Mrs. Ozz is a genius! Tonight she asked me, “what happened to Lowcountry Christian Community School web site?” As you can see from that link, there is little to see on their web site right now, well at least until I complete the instructions I am about to share with you. I told Mrs. Ozz that the LCCS administrators had let their domain registration and hosting service expire. This resulted in the hosting service deleting all of the HTLM files for that domain to free up space for the next paying customer. I told my wife that the school administrators had asked me to help build a replacement site which I had promised to do when I got some free time.

The next thing out of my wife’s mouth made me feel REALLY stupid. She asked, “can’t you just get a copy of the site from one of those online services that saves everything automatically?” My response was, “You are a GENIUS! I have not even considered that.” She turned a couple of shades of red as I proceeded to follow her advice.

What she is talking about is something like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine. As a result of her suggestion, I have been able to recover about 90% of the content from the original LCCS web site as it was last displayed in August 2007.

To recover the site I did the following:

1. Searched archive.org for the LCCS site
2. Clicked on the most recent copy of the site (Aug 2007)
3. Using Firefox - selected File - Save Page As (making sure to choose type “web page complete”)
4. Navigated to each subpage and repeated step 3 for each
5. Edit the content and FTP it into the new site location (In Progress)

That’s it. Now I have a pretty solid copy of the content from the school’s site prior to their domain and hosting service expiring. I can use these HTML pages to create the same look, feel, and content that they had prior to the expiration.

By the way, you have not heard the last of Mrs. Ozz. She has got the itch to do a little blogging. She will be joining me on The Land of Ozz(s) and she may actually jump into the mix over at GrowingKids.org as well.

I have stepped out on a limb and upgraded one of my production blogs (Riley’s Page) to WordPress 2.5 RC1.  Well, it is sort of production in that it is still live.  I plan to shutdown Riley’s Page at some point and consolidate all of my family blogging into my personal blog.  Here a couple of additional notes about this upgrade so far:

• Riley’s Page was running on its own MYSQL database instance
• It was a direct upgrade from WP 2.1 to 2.5
• The blog uses the default WordPress theme (the theme folder was not upgraded at all)

Others are blogging about this today and recommending a little more cautious approach than what I am taking.

Daily Blog Tips

WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing 

Invitation: I am inviting all of my blogging buddies to take a look under the hood of WordPress 2.5.  If you know me well enough to have my personal email, then drop me a note and I will hook you up with an admin account on the back end of Riley’s Page.

Click for a full-screen view

This is a capture of my current iGoogle Page. We talked about iGoogle a little last year when the new name surfaced. Today I want to share with you how iGoogle and some cool add-ons like Google Reader can be used to make you more productive. The following list helps you understand a few things I am doing with my iGoogle page.

A - I track the weather in the two cities I spend most of my time: Goose Creek, SC and Washington, DC

B - I track the feed of a group blog that I manage (GrowingKids.org)

C - I track current events

D - I track the feed of Simply Recipes my 2nd favorite food blog

E - Google Reader copy #1 tracks Information Security related feeds that have been placed in my Security folder.

F - Google Reader copy #2 tracks blogs that I placed in my General folder.

You will also note that I use multiple tabs. The BLOG Watch tab is a post for another day. There I track blogs using custom feeds created mainly from Google Blog Searches.

I want to offer a few more comments on the multiple copies of Google Reader found on my iGoogle page. You can add multiple copies or you can switch between folders using the pull-down on one of the readers. Using Google Reader in this way allows for a quick view of a hot subject (folder). For instance, I subscribe to several dozen blogs in my general folder. It is pretty easy for a high priority topic related network security to get lost in the midst of dozens of other posts in a general category. The security folder for me allows for a focus on blogs and new sites that provide RSS feeds related to information security. These RSS feeds are related to announcements on the release of patches from vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Oracle to address security vulnerabilities.

The following video was recorded from a Windows XP laptop. This short lesson demonstrates how to connect to a FTP server using Windows Explorer and transfer a file from your PC to a FTP server.

I found this bizarre behavior in the title bar of my “My Yahoo!” page.  It seems to only happen in Firefox and I can not recreate at will.  It has happened several times in recent weeks, but I have not been able to find any information on why this mysterious counter appears. The counter will continue incrementing for hours if you do not close the browser.  Any help identifying the cause of this behavior would be greatly appreciated.

The move from the Treo 650 to Treo 700p has been fairly painless but has not come without problems. Here’s a list of the top three:

1. Calendar sync errors.
2. No Freedom Keyboard support for the 700p.
3. Bible Reader crash.

It was calendar synchronization errors that were the most prominent, but were the easiest to correct. The problem looks something like this:

“The application cannot be launched because it is missing localization information.”

I did a quick Google on some key words from this error message and found out that I only needed to do the following:

1. Perform a reset of the Treo 700p by pressing the power button while using the stylus to push the reset button found under the battery cover.
   
2. Delete or move C:\Program Files\palmone\Username\backup\calendar*.*
   NOTE: That means you would delete all the files beginning with word calendar from the backup files related to your user profile.
3. Synchronize the Treo 700p with my Palm Desktop.

The Freedom Keyboard issues were a surprise, but I am not really that heart broken. I would really like to try a different keyboard with my Treo anyway. I do love being able to blog with my Treo, but I found myself using the built in QWERTY keyboard just as much as the Freedom Keyboard. I found that my Freedom Keyboard normally stayed tucked away in my laptop bag. When remote web access was needed, I would more often use the Treo as a modem for my laptop as opposed to using the Treo with a wireless keyboard.
The Bible Reader problem still has me stumped, but it is not a show stopper for me. Admittedly, I have not spent much time on this problem. The folks over at Olive Tree software offer a Desktop Assistant program for the Bible Reader. I had problems with the Treo 650 when trying to get my custom DailyBible.pdb file to work. I have been writing a custom Daily reading Schedule based on the reading plan posted on my personal blog. I hoped that maybe my problems were related to the Treo 650. I hoped that the Treo 700p would be the answers to my custom reading schedule efforts. I was wrong. The Treo 700p actually crashed when trying to access the Daily Reading Schedule when the Extended memory was not configured. I don’t use the Bible Reader’s built in Daily Reading Schedule. I plan to email Olive Tree to see I am missing something with my test reading schedule.