Internet Marketing Venturer

Couple of days ago, I’ve finished building a new website of mine for Design to XHTML service. One of the things needed for a such a project is having the page(s) passed W3C Strict Validation.
Everything was cool except for the phantom hidden input field that was holding PHPSESSID value. The problematic input field was positioned right after the <form> tag, and you can’t have that if you want to pass W3C strict. You have to enclose that field with a <p> or a <div>.
I’ve installed a JQuery SWFUpload for easy & user friendly upload experience, so I thought that script might be the one causing trouble. I’ve spent an hour running through lines and lines of code and couldn’t find nothing relating to my problem.
Since that was the only exotic part of code I was inserting, I turned over to session_start() as my primary suspect. I’ve stripped everything from the page, left only the form and the session_start() function call. Uploaded, W3C verified and that was it! For some reason session_start() invoked another hidden field in my form that didn’t render in my Firefox or Safari, but only in W3C. Knowing that, the only solution was simple:

if(!strstr(”$HTTP_USER_AGENT”, “Validator”)) {
session_start();
}

All I can say is I hope this saves somebody an hour of his life.

Technorati Tags: w3c, strict, validation, session_start, input, hidden, not passing

One piece of software I’m really missing after crossing over to Mac from a PC is Tortoise SVN. It is seamlessly integrated into shell, and is easy to use. I use SVN only to update my local working copy and commit changes to SVN server. I don’t need no fancy options, just that… and the ability to syn/commit only selected folder or file.

The first option that came to use is Eclipse. It did have a SVN extension which worked pretty well for the basic tasks I needed, but it felt like using a jumbo jet to fetch a pack of chewing gums! And one day - it stopped working. Some kind of Java error, and since I was unhappy with Eclipse from the very beginning, I started searching for the alternative.

Man, I didn’t realize what a trouble that will be! It seems that every Mac person handles SVN from the Terminal. I just couldn’t find plain and simple SVN client with graphical front end, that doesn’t need SSH tunneling or wormholes/rocket sience of any kind. Just when I was preparing to give up, Syncro SVN client showed up in some 15th Google search query. That’s it! Yeah, that’s it!

Plain and simple, Syncro SVN client handles things just as good as Tortoise SVN. It has SVN+SSH support that I needed, and I am a happier coder now, thank you SyncRO soft!

Technorati Tags: tortoise, svn, client, mac, os x, leopard, syncro

Here’s an old thought for you, just as a reminder: When building backlinks, consider the sites that share a common theme with yours first. If you can’t find enough websites to link back, you can ask the webmaster of a site that’s not themed similar to yours to write an article that’s theme related to your website. Better yet - write it yourself and send it to him.
Now I don’t know what could I possibly say about Christina Aguilera perfume. I’m neither the fan of Christina Aguilera, nor am a fan of her perfume! But every little keyword helps. If I mention the words like perfumes, fragrance, cologne or eau de toilette in my article, it stands a better chance to transfer some quality themed page rank to my friend’s website. So maybe you’ll even click on a link and learn something about Christina Aguilera perfume. Hey, you may even buy one! You never know!

Technorati Tags: google, themeing, perfumes, christina aguilera perfume

Last September I’ve conducted a ‘Does Google indexes content of div tags hidden by display:none ?‘ experiment which resolved to ‘Google indexes content of div tags hidden by display:none‘.

This time the experiment will test the speed of indexing as the rumors are it’s compromised. Apparently as of beginning of April, a new Google algorithm update is in place. Amongst other things it is speculated that the page indexing speed will be significantly reduced.

The experiment will also measure if the rankings will drop for any reason during a certain period of time.

This test will include a nonsense keyword nargosylian, and a broader existing keyphrase for which I should get a ranking for in first hundred results: “extra experiment“.

This blog post will be submitted to a couple of major Social Bookmarking websites as it is usually done when you want your pages to rank quickly.

The results will be posted as soon as the Google Alerts hit my mailbox. Follow up on rankings will be posted periodically as well.

UPDATE: The phrase nargosylian appeared some 15 minutes after writing this post as well as “extra experiment” phrase. So much for that! We’ll see if it holds during the next month or so.

UPDATE 04/13/08: Both phrases nargosylian and “extra experiment” are no longer in Google SERPs, and it seems that I’ve hit the sandbox for these terms. Will update shortly upon getting back to SERPs.

UPDATE 04/16/08: Both phrases are back in SERPs. “extra experiment” is back at #1 for exact phrase, but it used to be #1 for broad phrase search, too. Now it doesn’t show up in first 100 results, only the newly indexed page of an old blog post pinged by this one appears at #27.

UPDATE 04/22/08: “extra experiment” phrase is back at #1 for broad search. Maybe due to repeating it here more than I normally would, but I think that what we’re seeing here is a normal Google results ranking cycle. My conclusion is that the Google indexing speed is fast as it was, although there might be some other indexing/ranking algorithms or filters in motion when a more competitive search terms are involved. Those are however hard to test.

Technorati Tags: google, extra, experiment, nargosylian, april, update

Couple of days ago I’ve came to a conclusion that I definitely need some sort of intranet, a way to track all of my projects and share project specs with my future employees.

One way to do it was to set up a protected wiki.

The other way is so much better: Google sites.

Not only that you can write pages in an easy way as you would in wiki pages, but you can easily integrate all google documents that you use: spreadsheets, presentations, graphs and so on. There are ready made templates that are basically good to show you all the various possibilities, but the best thing is easy sharing of documents, and document access, as well as read/write setting for each individual user.

I was able to create project specs pages and progress statistics for one of my bigger project just in this afternoon, in a couple of hours. The interface ‘feels like home’, and there’s nothing to stop you in using Google Sites right away. So I warmly recommend it!

Technorati Tags: google sites, intranet, sharing

I own a Macbook Pro, and unlike it’s pre-descendants it has some wake from sleep issues described and resolved here (thank you Windley for a fix!). The thing is, if you happen to be in a situation where you need to force your Mac to shutdown, like I had to because of the wake from sleep problem, there is another problem waiting for you after reboot.

I use MAMP for my websites development locally. When I forced my Mac to a shutdown, both Apache and MYSQL servers were started. When I rebooted and turned on my MAMP interface it appeared that they were started as indicated by a green light, but in fact they weren’t. I tried to stop MAMP with Stop Servers button, but nothing happened. I tried to kill the apache server from the Terminal with:
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/apachectl stop
but ‘httpd (pid 55500?) not running’ returned, meaning that in fact Apache was not running. OK, so I thought I’ll start it with:
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/apachectl start
and I’ve gotten an error again:

Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

Wow, that sucks! I really hate when my system messes up in the middle of my work day, and just when I thought I will spend an hour or so messing with this problem, the simple solution appeared:

All I needed to do is to click on a ‘Preferences’ button in the MAMP interface, and then click OK. The servers rebooted and started normally.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, mamp, apache, mysql, servers, shutdown

Good old Ed Dale is back with thirtydaychallenge.tv.
URL redirects you to http://www.justin.tv/eddale where you can see past live shows footage, and watch new live as it happens. Ed found yet another way of reaching the masses in a such a cool way. The great thing is that anybody can do it with a single computer and a webcam.

The only thing you need to figure out is what to say to your viewers, and Ed is doing a great job in sharing valuable info on Internet Marketing. He spoke about upcoming Thirty Day Challenge 2008, cool software tools for video broadcast such as CamTwist for Mac. A few shameless promotions of his and his buddy’s IM programs didn’t hurt, the rest is just a pure 100% Internet Marketer inspiration.

Live shows are on each week, and if you want to be informed when is the next one, you can sign up to thirtydaychallenge.com newsletter.

I warmly recommend it!

Technorati Tags: thirty day challenge, tv, ed dale, video broadcast

As you already know, Apple has released Iphone SDK earlier this month. It is available for free download at http://adcdownload.apple.com/iphone/iphone_sdk/iphone_sdk.dmg but it seems that many users are having trouble mounting the dmg disk image after download. It just says ‘failed to mount’. After redownloading the same error persists. Apparently there is a cached version of the 2.1GB file that is corrupted, and if you’re outside the US, it’s most likely that you will be affected by this error. The temp solution is to download the same file from torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4066811/iPhone_SDK

EDIT: Apparently, the new revised SDK is now available for download from Apple, so hopefully the case is closed.

Ladies and Gentleman, Girls and Boys, I have finally and officially moved to my new Macbook Pro. I have had it since January, and moved from my PC almost 2 months later. I couldn’t get a hold of Mac OSX fr quite a while, and now I think I’m beginning to like it.

I, as a programmer, couldn’t afford to transfer to MAC immediately and waste time learning OSX as I go, so it took me a while to explore and understand the OSX.
Once I was used to not having both my backspace and delete key, and not being able to move around the text using my usual Win keyboard shortcuts - learned the OSX way, I begun to feel like being at home. You don’t get all the tools right from the box, and after learning from other users’ experience, I’ve installed Quicksilver, Witch, Little Snitch, muCommander and some other apps that made my work flow uninterrupted.
So far it’s cool. The only thing that bugs me is windows clutter, and I’m trying to find my style of work using the Expose and Spaces. Oh, I must mention the Parallels app! It’s just too cool. It allowed me to install WinXP for IE 6 &amp;amp;amp;amp; 7 debugging. The only thing I miss is the ability to install 64 bit Vista, but managed to do so using the bot camp.
Now I have all the things that I need. We’ll see in a while will the Mac earn the right to have it’s nice apple sticker supplied with Macbook Pro on the back window of my car!

Technorati Tags: macbook pro, osx, winxp, vista, transfer

• still awaiting The Secret delivery #

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