Gabriel Harper's Blog

Once in a while you might run into a suspicious IP address accessing your website and now your anxiety makes you unable to play your dancing drums game. Maybe it’s doing something funny like probing for vulnerabilities, or just spamming the heck out of your server. Being a responsible webmaster, you decide to ban the IP address from your server completely – but how? Using Apache Web server it’s easy to ban a single IP address, ban multiple IP addresses or ban an entire IP range using the .htaccess file.

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Social networking in business can be both highly rewarding and extremely distracting. Leveraging the strengths of social networking in your organization requires a strategic plan, education on social networking for key employees, and understanding it’s role in your business model.

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I just read about the horrible earthquake that tore up Haiti yesterday. Reading the initial reports was bad enough, but stumbling across some more graphic photos of wounded, lying in the streets with crushed limbs, just made my stomach turn. Not in disgust but despair. It’s times like this I feel so helpless to do anything, sitting here thousands of miles away, and far from rich.

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Here’s a simple trick you can use to test DNS changes on a Windows PC. You can fake or override DNS lookups by manually entering an IP address for any domain name you want. Use it to see if yoursite.com looks OK on the new server or IP address before DNS makes it around to you.

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A degree of scepticism is in public response to the trademark infringement lawsuit filed against Microsoft by a small St. Louis design company for using the Bing name on their heavily publicized new search engine. Is this just a rally for publicity on behalf of the plaintiff? The case appears questionable, but there may be grounds for infringement nonetheless.

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When is it okay to use a trademark on your website? Is your logo or product too much like the competitor’s? When do you risk being shut down and possibly taken to court, even being sued for extensive damages? Combined with some common sense and these 8 tests for trademark infringement, you can arm yourself against most of the common mistakes in infringement law.

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Here’s a comprehensive, recently updated list of good Webmaster forums to check out. Currently 46 active Webmaster related forums for discussing Web design, coding, online business, development, online marketing, and other stuff that Webmasters like to discuss.

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Improving your CTR is one of the best things you can do with your ads. You can earn more money for the same amount of traffic, and it’s totally free to improve your CTR with some basic techniques. If you’re getting paid for sending clicks with PPC ads like AdSense – every click really counts. Imagine how many visitors came to your website today who would have clicked an ad and who would have earned you cash… but didn’t. Find out how you can stop missing these opportunities, maximize your ad profits, and do it in a way that doesn’t drive away visitors.

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Speaking of Flippa, something is going on. Release? Not sure, but Sitepoint Marketplace is down for an upgrade at the same time as Flippa.com. According to SP it’ll last about three hours, which in terms of a top 1,000 site is quite a while.

If you use the Sitepoint Marketplace to buy and sell online, prepare for a big change. Sitepoint is flipping things upside-down soon, and moving the marketplace to Flippa.com. Many people are saying WTF to Flippa, and with good reasons. Is this too much at once?

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This huge list of 76 script directories took several hours to compile, but it’s a goldmine for anyone selling online software. This is one mega list of script directories that let you submit your PHP scripts, turnkey scripts, and other website scripts. Most are free, some are paid or offer paid options. Some of these script sites get tons of traffic. Getting your products listed on the right script directories pays off.

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The nofollow tag (as it’s commonly referred to), is an HTML attribute proposed by Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen of Blogger.com in 2005. It is a recommendation on behalf of search engines to add a special identifier to links that shouldn’t be counted towards search results. For instance, unmoderated blog comments might be a candidate for nofollow attribute.

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Linux sometimes dumps a huge file when a script crashes. These core files can build up and eat away valuable disk space. Some other methods of deleting core files will damage your server. Here are a few simple commands I use to find and delete these core dump files safely.

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I use a lot of different software in my job, but there are five software tools in particular that I can do nearly all of my Web development with. The best part is they are allcompletely free applications. You can download and install everything you need to be up and coding in under 30 minutes.

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TinyMCE is a free WYSIWYG editor with two visual components – themes and skins. TinyMCE themes are very complex to customize but you can make your own TinyMCE theme. If you just want to customize the look & feel a little bit, you’re better off creating a TinyMCE skin.

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Creating great products is easy if you identify a problem. Like many others I’m willing to pay for a good solution if the need is great enough. Identifying the deepest problem for your customers and developing a great solution is the recipe for a successful product.

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I’ll admit this is one project I wasn’t even aware of. The Wordpress blog just mentioned the sister project BuddyPress, which takes the WP architecture to a new level with a complete social networking platform.

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Google has a history of commemorating holidays and historic events by showing a different logo for the day, and this is the best yet! Today is Samuel Morse’s birthday (you know, Morse code?), and they spelled out Google in the famous dash-dot character encoding.

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There are thousands of free scripts to speed up development. Established PHP frameworks and JavaScript libraries abound. It’s expensive to reinvent the wheel, and pointless besides. But when is it legal to use free code in your commercial apps, and how will it affect your project?

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The Apache Web server supports URL rewriting with the mod_rewrite engine. Placing custom rules in an .htaccess file lets you do all sorts of useful things to keep your URLs tidy. One really handy thing you can do for search engines and visitors is redirecting traffic from www to non-www version of your domain (and vice versa).

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