Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/referer-zeitgeist/
So, take a look at backlinks. It is kind of a mess, culled from my web server’s Apache log, but gratifying to browse. Apparently, I am the top hit on Google for such things as:
I owe such “fame,” I think, in large part, to WordPress’ clever habit of putting title keywords in to the URLs of my posts. Google seems to lend a bit more credibility to URLs that match keywords as opposed to goofy URLs. “What’s in a name? Would a Rose, by any other name …”
Anyway, another thing you’ll see in there is some spam referers that companies will wrap in to HTTP requests with the expressed intent of appearing on a public “backlinks” page to boost their own Google ranking!
I have been thinking to hack up a little log-file parser that pulls the referers out, and checks on them to make sure they actually link to the pages they say, and if the referer is a search engine, to check the results on that search engine and report the ranking. It is nice to:
- Know what keywords are bringing you traffic.
- Filter out the referer spammers.
And, thinking 1.1, it would be neat to track this data by week, or month, and see gaining keyword hits, and declining keyword hits. A personal site “zeitgeist” if you will.
Has anyone ideas on implementation, or if it has already been implemented, or other features that would be nice, or how best to arrange the results? Drop me a line or comment here. Thanks!
-danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howto-gmirror-system/
A new feature of FreeBSD 5.3 is the ability to set up a software mirror of your system disk. This allows you to boot off either of a pair of hard disks, which will then function as a RAID1, which will ensure system uptime in the face of a single disk failure. (more…)
41 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/05/freebsd-howto-ndisulate-windows-drivers/
This is the second time I am going to use NDIS to allow FreeBSD to load the Windows drivers for a Dell laptop to access the built-in wireless. As this is my second time, it is good to make my own crib sheet of what I have to do, so I can do it even quicker next time, and because you, the reader, might find yourself here thanks to Google.
In both cases that I have done this I have been starting with FreeBSD 5.3. According to this crib sheet, you need to be fairly current with 5.x to do this. That crib sheet is also my main source of reference.
If you have already done this to your system and find yourself having to re-do NDIS after an upgrade, you may find my “rendis” script handy.
If you have already done this to your system, and are tracking -STABLE I have read that you no longer have to follow these steps, but merely run:
ndisgen (more…)
36 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/30/google-groups-gripes/
I don’t like the new Google Groups. There’s a smaller reason and then there is a bigger reason.
The smaller reason is that the “old” Google Groups has worked well for several years. The new Google Groups, it is a wee bit harder to navigate, but even more than that, it is frequently broken. See http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=gmirror — as of this writing, 9/10 of the hits from this search yield a message that says:
Topic not found.
We’re sorry, but we were unable to find the topic you were looking for.
Perhaps the URL you clicked on is out of date or broken?
Yes, perhaps google Groups is broken. I e-mailed them about it yesterday.
But this points to the bigger reason, which is that I use Google because it is the best search engine, hands-down, and it is the best search engine, because they focus, not on the “interactive portal” thing, like Yahoo!, but on search. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/two-wordpress-plugins/
I was stumbling around the Internet this evening, and stumbled upon two neat plugins:
- Related Entries Plugin
- Does some magic to link to “related posts,” as you can see below. So far, it seems mostly to amount to navigational funness.
- Spam Stopgap Extreme
- A quick little hack that involves MD5 hashing, and JavaScript. Will purportedly kill off all spambots. We shall see, but unlike a lot of the anti-spam solutions, this thing wsa a trivial install.
UPDATE: March 8, 2010. These days I use Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WordPress’ built-in Akismet Anti-Apam system.
-d
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/howto-mpg123-random-mp3s/
Assuming your mp3 collection is in $HOME/mp3s:
find $HOME/mp3s -name '*.mp3' | mpg123 -Z -@ -
The find command generates a list of .mp3 files in your $HOME/mp3s, and that mpg123 command says play songs randomly (-Z) from the list (-@) that I am feeding you via stdin. (-@ -)
To skip a song you are not enjoying, press control-C.
-d
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/07/frebsd-laptops-windows-backups/
My fancy new Dell laptop and FreeBSD are a bit of an odd couple. I haven’t tried yet, but apparently I could get the trackpad, nub and mouse keys working through something called “Project Evil” that supports Windows drivers under FreeBSD. Entering suspend mode causes the computer to reboot, this in part because apparently Dell has messed up their implementation of standards-compliant power management, but whatever. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/22/howto-map-an-ip-to-an-asn/
whois -h whois.cymru.com <IP Address>
Thanks due to a colleague at CacheNetworks.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/20/field-report/
Walnut Creek 20/Nov/04 — Highs and lows in the rugged terrian around Mount Diablo. I took a new job in San Ramon, which is known for being a nice, quietly dead town. Fifteen miles up the road is Walnut Creek, where Yayoi and I have selected an apartment very close to the BART.
When Yayoi came out, everything was beautiful. I rented a car from Thrifty but they cajoled me in to spending a little extra for a convertible. Normally, I might frown at the excess, but what better way to welcome my new bride to California? She has school and can not join me out here ’til December, but she was able to spend a few days out here. The first two days I had to work, and she trudged around Walnut Creek in the rain evaluating housing options. On the weekend it cleared up and we decided on a two bedroom place with a pool and a hot-tub for the modest rent of $1200.
Then, as the sun was shining on the newly verdant hills, and the leaves were turning colors, we hopped in the convertible and drove to the top of Mount Diablo. We surveyed the land as man has surveyed this territory for hundreds of years, if not more, from the tallest peak in the land. It was quite the honeymoon, for it is about a week after we were married that I had landed this job in California. (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/01/freebsd-user-timezone/
I just stumbled on this. My e-mail server is in California, but I am in Chicago. However, I launched my current screen before we ran tzsetup on the server, so my IRC window and mutt were displaying times in GMT.
Now the server is displaying times in Pacific time. Yet for my login shells it is displaying in Central time. How? (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/28/postgresql-database-restored-from-filesystem/
lnk.to is back online. I was even able to restore the database. I was skeptical, at first, because I could not understand quite how the Postgres database was laid out, filesystem-wise. And the install provided was different in layout than the install that had preceded it. How much fighting with Postgres would be required? (more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/27/unix-viz-good/
Unix people tend to be comfortable in their non-visual command-line world. But sometimes a picture says an awful lot:
Read that as “around 11:40, someone sent a mass e-mail through the server. It took twenty minutes to process, peaking at 916 deliveries per minute.”
What’s more, the vast majority of the deliveries were successful, and some failed. That looks like a legitimate bulk mailing to a fairly well-maintained list, and not some random virus or brute-force spam attempt. Server resources are not being wasted on nonsense.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/19/dovecot-sounds-good/
I’ve done UW-IMAP, Cyrus imap and Courier. Dovecot sounds like it took the best of all three:
(Thanks, Photo Matt)
- Support mbox (like UW) and Maildir (like Courier)
- Maintains a meta-data cache (like Cyrus)
- Sounds like configuration may not be too insane (like UW, Cyrus, and Courier ;)
(more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/16/mplayer-keyboard-shortcuts/
Yesterday we were abuzz on IRC because Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire, and castigated them for doing a disservice to the people. Pretty funny to watch — if you watched it. Which I had not. And not even my TiVo could offer any help, because unlike Comedy Central, CNN doesn’t rebroadcast each show they do fifteen times a day.
Necessity being the mother of invention, I was shown the ways of BitTorrent, which distributes piping hot digital warez of all flavors through distributed bandwidth, and when Microsoft Media Player proved useless in the presence of a DiVX CODEC, I found that there was a Windows port of MPlayer, invented for Linux weenies who for a long time had limited video capabilities. Forced to fend for themselves, MPlayer now surpusses what ships with your Windows OS. So much for the value added retail price of $500 or whatever Windows costs these days. (more…)
5 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/14/firefox-1-port-freebsd/
From the bleeding edge — get it working thusly:
portupgrade- Backup your
bookmarks.html
- Remove your
.mozilla directory
sudo firefox to set things upchown -R `whoami` .mozilla- Put your
bookmarks.html back
- Run firefox under your own UID. :)
- And reinstall your preferred theme and all your favorite extensions.
At least it works well under Windows.
1 Comment
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