One of the primary goals of every webmaster is to rank well in major search engines for specific keywords in order to get as much organic search traffic as possible. But, how do you keep track of search positions? Doing it manually would take a lot of your valuable time, specially if you’re tracking multiple sites. The guys at Link Assistant have produced a great free tool, Rank Tracker that performs this job for you.

Rank Tracker can track multiple sites and you can track as many keywords per site as you want. Stats are collected from any of the selected 3 main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) plus from Overture. Rank Tracker keeps track of previous results and shows the rank diff for each keyword. Here is an example for one of my sites:

Quite nice, I can see straight away which keywords have progressed, which have dropped, but I can also find out if any of the keywords I’ve been working on have made it into the first 100 entries. When you click on a specific rank, you can see it’s position through time, such as on the following diagram:

Rank Tracker supports Google and Yahoo APIs, but you can use the ordinary (non-API) access as well, although you must take care not to perform too many requests in that case so you don’t get banned by the search engine.

Overall, this is a very clean, easy to use and extremelly useful application. If you’re a webmaster, go and get it now.

Tags: Ranking, Search Engine Ranking, Google, Yahoo

During the last year my support forum saw a huge increase in registrations and posts made by spammers. A few common prevention techniques I applied did not work and I was forced to close the forum for new registrations for a while, until I had time to find better methods of dealing with spam. Fortunately, this turned out to be a fairly easy task, thanks to the excellent phpBB Antispam HOWTO page which lists the drawbacks of some existing techniques and recommends a few mods, developed by the site owner himself.

Textual Confirmation: The core of the solution is that a user/bot performing the registration is required to answer a simple question. In case of a real person, the answer will be provided, but every bot will stumble and fall. This really worked.

The site also suggest the Links Rejector mod, which allows phpBB to reject posts that contain links and are made by guest users. So, after a long period of accepting posts by registered users only, today I turned this protection off and my forum now accepts posts by guests again. As long as they don’t post links, of course. It’s nice to be free again.

I must add that each time a spam registration or a guest post is rejected, these tools send a notification to the forum administrator and to the community spam database. It’s not clear who uses that data and for what (the mods above certainly don’t care about them, it’s not a learning system), but hey, they helped me, so if this helps build a “community database” that’s fine with me.

Tags: phpBB, Spam, phpBB Spam, Forum Spam

Borland Turbo C/C++ and Turbo Pascal ruled the MS-DOS programming world during the 80s and early 90s. These were the compilers/IDEs that made it a joy to develop software and they occupy a special place in the hearts of many “older” programmers. It was therefore with great joy that I read about the Turbo series comeback Borland announced a couple of days ago.

The Turbo series will contain Delphi, C++, Delphi .NET and C# packages. If you’re using only one of these, you can use the Explorer version which is free. There is however a serious limitation, “Extensible and customizable IDE for hundreds of available pre-built IDE 3rd party plug-ins and components” is not available in the Explorer edition. This makes this free edition practically unusable for any serious development. And this is where Borland is making the same mistake as they did several times before. Expensive tools will never attract large amounts of followers, specially in today’s world of powerful opensource tools. I don’t see how Borland didn’t learn from the JBuilder vs Eclipse fiasco.

I myself will probably continue using the (once) Free Delphi 6 Personal Edition which is a nicely stripped down version that fulfil all my Delphi programming needs and I’ll continue to eagerly wait for the day when I’ll be able to port my apps to Lazarus.

Tags: Delphi, Turbo Delphi, Turbo Pascal, Borland, Lazarus, Turbo C++, Turbo C#

We all have different computer usage patterns and therefore different backup demands. This post will explain the backup plan I have in place, I’m sure there’ll be people out there who will find this useful, and I’d appreciate any feedback that could improve the process.

A little bit of background. I am a heavy computer user, using at least two computers every day, often more. As a hobby I develop software and create and manage websites. My projects change on a daily basis (I actually do work on them!) and so does my personal documentation, such as finances, passwords, reference and todo notes, etc. Since I need access to these at all times, a USB drive is a crucial part of my setup and is where my working copies are located. My websites must be backed up on a nightly basis. This includes the static content, databases and Subversion repositories. I make enough photos to have to back them up once a week from my camera (not cutting edge backup, but good enough for me) and any new music should be backed up once a month, since I’d like a copy of it to survive all future disasters. All my email is stored on an IMAP server (Fastmail.FM), which is backed up locally with IMAPSize.

This is the diagram of my backup plan (click to enlarge):

The main idea with creating a backup plan is understanding how often the data changes and what data is “priceless”, meaning that once lost, the data would be extremely hard or impossible to regenerate. For me, my software, my websites, my personal documents, my email and my photos are the priceless electronic stuff. This data changes on a daily basis and for it I maintain both an automatic daily online backup and several copies of monthly offline snapshots.

Offline backups are performed on a monthly basis and include both a snapshot of my crucial data as well as less important data (can be found online) such as software, publicly available docs, etc.

These are the tools and services I use:

- SyncBackSE with powerful filtering options is used for moving everything to a centralized backup area on my main PC. I do this since my projects require some cleaning from unnecessary files (svn folders, build files, etc) before being backed up. This saves space and therefore backup times.

- Mozy is an excellent online backup service which I’ve been using for the past few months. The Mozy agent is transparent and does it’s job very well. Mozy provides a free account with a generous 2GB, but also provides paid accounts in case you need more space.

- Fastmail.FM is my email service provider. With a 2GB IMAP store my live email system is also my main email backup area (I’ve been with Fastmail for almost 5 years and they have earned my trust). However, I do backup up my email locally with a scheduled automatic backup every week with IMAPSize and monthly to a DVD. Fastmail also provides me with 1GB of flexible file storage which I use in case I need to share files online.

- For backing up my websites I use the widely available scripts for automatic backups. Even though I’m extremely satisfied with my main host A Small Orange and I do trust their backup strategy, I feel much better knowing that I have my own backups in case something goes terribly wrong. I keep two copies of my live websites at every time. One is the latest nightly backup and the other is the weekly backup, which is a Sunday’s copy of the daily backup. Due to space limitations I can’t afford to have more than two full backups, so this is a compromise I made. Ideally, at least a week of daily backups should be kept in case the latest backup is messed up for some reason.

In summary, all my important data is backed up automatically on a daily basis. An exception are photos and the address book in my phone, since these currently require my manual intervention. Once a month I perform the big offline backup to DVDs.

Tags: Backup, Online Backup, Mozy, SyncBack, IMAPSize, Fastmail, Email Backup

This turned out to be a temporary glitch with GMail, but still an interesting one. I accidentally noticed it since all my email from my GMail account is routed to a “google@” address on a domain I use exclusively for email. For a few hours today, all emails sent from my GMail account to a “google” account on any of my domains were being bounced back. For example, sending an email to google@broobles.com bounced back with the following message:


----
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data
----


Sending an email to google1@broobles.com a few seconds later worked just fine. I was able to repeat this several times during the past few hours, however the issue now seems to be resolved. Obviously, I couldn’t perform too many tests, but I did try a few involving “google” and “gmail” and the only one that consistently failed was google@broobles.com.

I wonder what type of DNS server is used internally by GMail and why it had problems extracting a domain from an email address addressed to a “google” account on a valid domain.

Tags: GMail, Google, DNS, MX

Following up on my previous post about finding interesting expired domains, I’ve been looking at Domain Research Tool (DRT) for some time now and decided to give it a go and buy it. It is a pricey tool, but offers powerful features and there is a real potential for a quick return of investment. So, what does it do?

It is designed for bulk scanning of huge lists of domains and applying all sorts of useful checks on all domains. For example, you can import the list of all domains that have been dropped today (or even a full zone file!) and check their Google PR, number of backlinks, Alexa traffic, Overture rankings, etc. You can filter the domain list by keywords, domain length, hyphen existence, existence of numbers, etc, but oddly enough you can’t filter a list after a scan without clearing the list. There are several such examples of poor usability throughout the application, which show that it hasn’t yet matured fully.

DRT performs the scans through proxies which means that your IP doesn’t get banned for performing a huge amount of searches. It also supports a “Turbo mode”, which is basically a cache of domain related data resulting in queries made by other DRT users. This cache is stored on the product’s server. The idea is great, but I’m yet to see this turbo in action - running full scans is quite slow and I don’t believe none of the DRT users has never run the same scans as I do.

Apart from searching for domains, DRT can be used for managing your personal domain portfolio and keeping domain watch lists. The weird thing is that these lists are not persisted across sessions, as if I have dozens of domain portfolios or watch lists and need to have them organized in files!?

All in all, the tool is expensive but powerful and useful and can pay itself back relatively quickly. The good thing about it being expensive is that not many people will have it, which puts you ahead of the game. The downside are some usability issues, I hope the author will work on resolving these and making it a joy to use.

Tags: Expired Domains, Domain Tool

Every day thousands of domains expire and are available for anyone to register them. A good portion of these domains were once in use, which means that they have links pointing at them, they might have a Google Pagerank assigned and some might even be included in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory. Buying a domain with a previous history means that you might get some traffic to your new domain from the first day, without any marketing effort.

Many domainers buy dropped domains to park them and collect revenue from any visitors they may get. There are expensive tools out there which allow you to find expiring domains with potentially good traffic and such domains are usually bought through one of the drop catchers (SnapNames, Pool.com, etc). If the domain is good and several people have reserved the name there’s an auction involved. As you can see, buying excellent domains requires time and dedication.

However, even with the best dropped domains being cought by professional domain catchers, there’s a lot of domains which remain deleted and are available for buying. So, how do you find these without paying for an expensive tool? Have a look at Free Daily Deleted and Expiring Domains List. The list is organized by days, and you can list domains for each day based on your favourite search criteria, just click on the Google PR, Alexa or another link for today or another day of interest and watch the list of domains appear in front of you. Note that the best domains will already have been re-registered by domain catchers (do a Whois to find out), but there’s always quite a few of them still available. Note that the process is slow, but it’s good enough for the price (free).

Few things to note:

If you are planning on developing a domain (builiding a website for it) be aware that the Google PR might be lost during the next PR update, so IMO it’s better to look for domains with an existing Alexa rating (which indicates existing traffic) and those which are listed in the two major directories.

You have to be careful and know what you want to do with these domains since you shouldn’t expect much revenue from just parking them. More about this in another post. Until then, happy domain hunting

Tags: Domains, Dropped Domains, Expired Domains, Domain Catcher

After two years of hosting with Doorhost.net I was forced to change hosts since the company was sold and the new owners (IHSystem.com) ruined the service overnight by providing no support and leaving the servers to run mostly on their own with harsh consequences. There were several cases of servers being down for a few hours a day.

So, I spent some time searching around. I was mainly interested in a reliable host with a good reputation, knowledgeable support, a user forum, ssh access, possibility for multiple add-on domains, with around 500MB of space and 30GB bandwidth. Python 2.4 (as opposed to the usual 2.2), Ruby on Rails and Subversion would be a big bonus.

After quite a bit of searching on FindMyHosting.com and reading the WebHostingTalk forum, I narrowed the list down to the following hosts:

• Dotable.Com
• A Small Orange
• Hostgator
• Site5

These are all very fine, highly respectable hosts, although Site5 seems to be having some hickups lately. Hostgator is the most recommended one around but it doesn’t offer ssh which is a must for me so my choice dropped down to ASO (A Small Orange) and Dotable.Com. I wrote to both of them with questions about the service, and both replied with detailed and fast replies. I chose ASO because they are more developer oriented and offer Subversion and Ruby on Rails. They are also a bit cheaper, but this is due to the reseller nature of all Dotable accounts, which I do not require at this point in time. However, Dotable remains a service to consider in the future. They left a very positive impression.

A few days ago I started migrating all my major sites to ASO and it’s been an easy transition and a very smooth ride since. The speed is great (isn’t it?) and I have my peace of mind back. I will report back in a few months with longer term impressions.

Tags: Hosting, ASO, A Small Orange, Hostgator, Dotable.Com, Site5

There are many junk websites being offered for sale nowadays. It is therefore important to have a tool which would be able to give you a very quick overview of a site, something like it’s age, alexa ranking, number of backlinks and it’s homepage pagerank. iWebTool has exactly that, they call it “All-in-one Lookup”. In just a couple of seconds it list this information, which allows you to decide if you want to investigate the site further or not. It’s a time saver.

Tip: To make things even faster, you can lookup any site by going to http://www.iwebtool.com/domain.tld directly. If you’re using Opera or Firefox, you can create a customized search and make this lookup process even faster (so, you just type something like “iwt domain.tld”).

Just a quick note for those among you who enjoy wine, I’ve started a wine diary a couple of weeks ago. It’s a mix of wine tasting notes and wine software and web sites. I like it

Also started a small experiment, called “A Wine Blog“, it will be interesting to see how it develops.

Tags: Wine Blog, Wine Diary, Wine Websites, Wine Sites