What do you do when you have multiple blogs under one Google Blogger Account?

Changing The Names Of Replies And Posts

By Strictly-Software

If you are a blogger user and you have multiple blogs each with different names then you might run into the problem that when you post, or reply to a message using your Google account it will put your main Blogger account name in as the author, or comment author.

Now the way I have got round this is to use JavaScript in the footer of the blog. Add a JavaScript / HTML gadget to the footer of your blog and then you can fix this issue.

I will show you two ways you can fix this using old JavaScript and newer JavaScript .

To fix the name of post authors you can use this code. Say your blogger author name is Dave Williams but you are using pseudo names for your blog, say "Strictly-Software" for example then you don't want Dave Williams posted at the end of each post, you want Strictly-Software to appear.

Wrap these in SCRIPT blocks, whether a short <script>....</script> block or a full old style <script type="text/javascript"><!-- ..... //--></script> tags. Up to you.

This looks for all the spans with a class of "fn" which appears under the post where it says "Posted by ..... at 9:58pm" etc. So we loop through all the fn classes and change the innerHTML to the value we want.

 
(function(){
var x = document.getElementsByClassName("fn");
var i;
for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {
    x[i].innerHTML = "Strictly-Software";
}
})()

Now what about comments? 

If you are replying to someone and you don't want to use the Name/URL option to put your blogs name in, then you can use the Google option so it knows you own the comment, but then you can use some code to identify the links which contain the Google Authors name and if found update them to the name you want.

Same as before with the SCRIPT tags, although I put both together one after the other in one script block at the bottom of my layout.

Now, this code uses a more modern document.querySelectorAll method to find all elements that match the selector we pass in which will be an anchor tag. This is because all comments have the name of the person commenting wrapped in a comment tag IF you use a Google Account to post it. 

Obviously, Anonymous and Name/URL comments can't as there is nowhere to link to.

(function(){
	var x = document.querySelectorAll("a");
	var i;
	for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {		
		if(x[i].innerHTML=="Dave Williams"){
			x[i].innerHTML="Strictly-Software"
		}		
	}
})();

As you can see I am looping through all the elements that the querySelectorAll("a"); returns. 

If we had used just querySelector it would have only found the first A tag on the page and we need to find and replace all comments on the page which have Dave Williams as the current contents and if found, we replace it with Strictly-Software by using the innerHTML of the element.

I just thought I would post this as I had to do this tonight on one of my other blogs as I noticed the comment author was wrong. You could use the 2nd method for getting the author name as well if you wanted but I thought I would show you two ways of doing this.

Hope this helps if you have the same issue.

By Strictly-Software

Blogger EU Cookie Message Missing Problem & Solution

My EU Cookie Message Disappeared From My Site - How To Get It Back

By Strictly-Software

I had a bit of a weird experience recently, I found out, only from Google informing me, that for some reason one of my Blogger sites was not showing the EU Cookie Notice that should appear on all Blogger sites if in a European country where "Consent to use Cookies", is required by all website users.

It used to show, and my other blogger sites were still working and in fact, on my own PC, it was still showing the correct message e.g:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse."

However, when I viewed the site Google had told me about on another PC this was not appearing for some reason. 

I cleared all the cookies, path, domain, and session using the Web Extension called "Web Developer Toolbar", such as this Chrome version. After installing it, a grey cog appears in your toolbar if you fix it to. 

It is really helpful for turning password fields into text, if you want to see what you are typing, or need to see a Browser stored password in the field, or as needed in this instance, for deleting all kinds of Cookies. So after deleting all the Cookies, I refreshed the page and but the EU Cookie Message still didn't show.

Fixing Blogger Cookie Notice Not Showing

If you view the source of a blogger site that is showing the EU Cookie message, then you should find the following code in your source, not generated source, but the standard "View Source" options when you right-click on the page and view the context menu.

The following code should be just above the footer where all your widget scripts are loaded. Notice that I put some HTML comments above my version of the code so I could easily identify it from Bloggers version in the DOM when viewing the source. Why do this if Bloggers code is not in the source anyway? Wait and see.

<!-- this is my code as bloggers only appear in the source sometimes -->
<script defer='' src='/js/cookienotice.js'></script>
<script>
 document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(event) {
      window.cookieChoices && cookieChoices.showCookieConsentBar && cookieChoices.showCookieConsentBar(
          (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.msg) || 'This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse.',
          (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.close) || 'Ok',
          (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.learn) || 'Learn more',
          (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.link) || 'https://www.blogger.com/go/blogspot-cookies');
});
</script> 

So to fix the issue, copy the code out of the page and then go to your layout tool in Blogger. Add a widget at the bottom if no JavaScript/Text widget already exists and copy the code into it.

Now the odd thing is that as soon as I saved the widget and then my blogger site. I went to the website having issues and viewed the source code. When I did I saw that not only was my version of the code was in the HTML, but somehow this had put Bloggers own version back into the HTML as well!

Why this would do that I have no idea. However, it meant that I now had two lots of the same script being loaded and 2 lots of the EU Cookie code that shows the DIV and the options for wording appearing in my HTML.

The good thing though, is that this did not cause a problem for my site. I found by adding that code into a widget at the bottom of my page above Bloggers magically re-appearing code, that it did NOT cause the message to appear twice, but also that when I removed my own version of the code, the Blogger version remained.

Also even though I have put in a version of the Blogger code that uses English sentences into the HTML when I use a Proxy or VPN to visit a European country such as Germany, the wording appears in German.

I suspect that my code runs first as it's first in the DOM, then the Google code runs, overwriting my DIV with their DIV and of course the correct wording for the country we are in.

So as I thought everything was working, I removed my own code and saved the site. I then went to it, deleted path, domain, and session cookies, and then refreshed the page again and saw the blogger cookie code running okay. When viewing the source I could see that my code had gone but the blogger code was now still in the HTML, whereas it wasn't before.

However......

After a few hours when I came back to the computer which had not been showing the message and I re-checked by clearing all cookies (path, domain and session), and saw that Bloggers code had disappeared again, and the message was now not showing again!

Why this has happened I do not know as I had not re-saved the Blogger site in question during the time away so I have no idea what caused the Blogger EU Code to disappear again. 

There really should be an option in settings to force the Cookie compliance code to be inserted but as there isn't the answer seems to be to just leave your version of the cookie code in the HTML source in a widget at the bottom of the layout.

Why this works without causing issues I have no idea and it sounds like a bodge which it is, but as I cannot find any real answers to this problem online, or in Googles KB, I had to come up with a solution that worked to comply with Google's request and this seems to do it.

So the fact that when you have two lots of the same code in your HTML does NOT cause the message to appear twice is a good thing. This means that even if the original code re-appears then you are okay, and if it doesn't then your own code, which is a direct copy of the blogger code, runs instead. 

Also as your code runs first, if it is causing Bloggers code to also re-appear in the HTML then that will run afterwards ensuring the correct European language is shown in the message.

You can view the JavaScript which is loaded in by Blogger by just appending /js/cookienotice.js to any blogger site e.g this one, http://blog.strictly-software.com/js/cookienotice.js. You can then see the functions and HTML they use to show the DIV. You can also see at the top the ID's and Classes they put on the Cookie Message DIV.

So if you want to check which version of the EU Cookie code is running when both sets of JavaScript exist, you could add a bit of code underneath that checks for the Cookie DIV on display, and add some CSS to target cookieChoicesInfo, which is the ID of the DIV that is shown and you could change the background colour of the DIV to see if it is your DIV or Bloggers DIV that appears.

For example, you could put this under your JavaScript code to change the background colour of the DIV with the following code.

<style>
#cookieChoiceInfo{
	background-color: green !important;
}
</style>

Obviously green is a horrible colour for a background, but it easily stands out. When I did this I saw a Green DIV appear with the message in the correct language displayed, despite my EU options having English as the language for all the wording. 

This is because our code to load the script, and the cookie options into the page runs first, before any Blogger code that appears lower down in the HTML / DOM. When that Blogger code does run, it overwrites the DIV and the wording in the correct European language.

If you right-click on the DIV and choose "inspect" then the Developer Console will appear and you will be able to see that your style to change the background colour is being used on the Cookie message DIV. 

As it's a CSS style block with !important after the style, when the Blogger code overwrites the DIV and wording, the style for the background colour of the DIV is still being determined by our CSS Style block.

So the answer if your EU Cookie Compliance Message disappears is to add your own copy of their code into the site through a widget. 

This shouldn't cause any problems due to any duplicate DIV overwriting your DIV and if it disappears again then at least your version remains.

I just don't understand two things.

1. Why did the Cookie code disappear in the first place?

2. Why did the Blogger code re-appear when I added my own version of Bloggers own EU Cookie message code into the HTML and then why did it dissapear again a couple of hours? 

If anyone can answer these questions then please let me know. A search inside Googles Adsense site does not reveal any useful answers at all.

People just suggest adding query strings to your URL to force it to appear which is no good if your site is linked to from various Search Engines and other sites. Or to just delete all the cookies and refresh the page. 

These are two useless suggestions, and the only thing that seems to work for me is the solution I came up with above. So if you have the same problem try this solution.

By Strictly-Software

Removing Chrome Has Sped Up My PC

How Removing Google Products Can Speed Up Your Laptop

By Strictly-Software

If you read my other recent pieces on speeding up my PC you might be interested in the fact that the other day I removed Google Chrome and now my PC is fast as road runner.

If you ever look at the task manager when you have 5+ tabs open in Chrome then you will see 5+ Google Chrome processes running. Their idea was that each tab of Google Chrome would run in it's own process so as not to interfere with the running of other tabs that maybe open.

Not only does that not seem to be the case in my situation, a slow tab will cause high memory, high CPU and DISK usage which then effects the other tabs, therefore I removed Google Chrome altogether and now just use Firefox, Opera and TOR Browser.

Just look at my task manager processes now that I have removed Chrome. Whilst I was suffering 100% DISK Usage, and high CPU and memory I am now showing only low numbers.

Currently as I write this article with 7 tabs open in Firefox including Facebook a heavy hitting site due to all the Ajax it uses and Betfair which updates constantly I am still only using 4% CPU, 54% Memory, 9% Disk Usage.

Not only has removing Google Chrome from my laptop has sped it up but if anyone has been paying attention, Google is an evil company (they had to remove that it didn't do evil from their motto), that is hooked into nearly every smart phone measuring when you sleep, walk, drive, the current temperature as well as listening to everything you say just in case it wants to be helpful.

I cannot count the number of times that I have been watching a football match streamed from my phone to my TV and then Google pops up to ask "What would you like to know about Liverpool" or some other nonsensical question I didn't want it to help me with in the first place.

This obviously means it is listening to you ALL THE TIME, otherwise it would not know when to offer help.

If you read the Terms and Conditions on your smart phone then you will see under privacy, a mile down the long winded notes, a section about how they are allowed to listen to you and send off to "unspecified 3rd parties" content that "may" help improve their service.

These unspecified parties maybe Google AdSense to show more relevant adverts by listening to the surrounding sound around the phone and then translating that to adverts you will see online. Or it maybe listening for more illicit speech that it can send local police enforcement or even the numerous 3 letter agencies in the UK and USA.

Will Binney from the NSA who was arrested for going public about the Prism program he had written and Edward Snowden had stolen to expose, told us about how he had designed it for spying on the Soviets in communist USSR. However once the cold war was over they flipped the script and used it to spy on US citizens illegally instead. 

If you read up on the web tech companies that were first involved in the unknowing spying on users, then they were Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube, and Skype.

The UK was used as a test bed due to our lack of a real bill of rights or constitution and therefore we here in UK are rats roaming a maze designed by the NSA all so they can catch the right words and tell the correct authorities if need be.

The main problem is that you cannot remove Google products from Android phones and trying to do so will probably break your phone. Google is ingrained into most smart phones and almost impossible to remove totally. If you want an app you go to Google Play Store and trying to remove that from your phone would be a huge hassle.

Therefore I have done the logical thing due to the slowness of my PC and removed Google Chrome from it. Not only has it sped up my laptop but it means Google searches are no longer logged and kept for years as I now use DuckDuckGo or TOR Browser to surf the net. 

Even the browser Opera has a mini "VPN" built into it which goes through a proxy computer before the site you wanted to visit, hiding your real IP address, and making you look like you are in Germany or Bulgaria. 

Just try Opera and then go to this site https://manytools.org/http-html-text/http-request-headers/ and see what headers and IP address you are showing to websites and servers.

In another tab either type in the search box "Where am I now geo-IP" or just go to this link and you will see information like the results below when I just tested it with a new instance of Opera. My real IP is 86.164.1.XXX by the way.

However viewing my IP address on Opera with that search term or a header search reveals my location to be elsewhere from South East England. In fact they show me to be in the Scandinavian region of Europe with an IP address of 77.111.247.188.

Their Geo-IP location data is complied from 3 sources, IP2Location, ipinfo.io and www.db-ip.com they all use my Opera proxy IP of 77.111.247.188, and put my location in either Norway or Sweden, in either Oslo or Östergötland.

If you want more details on why Google is evil and Youtube is broken then read and watch the video on this blog. 

However if you don't care about Google working with the NSA and GCHQ and listening to you all the time through your phone and just want a faster PC, try removing Google Chrome from your machine and using another browser instead.

Remember to keep your task manager open to see if the DISK, CPU and Memory levels drop after a restart and a clearing of your registry and unused objects with CCleaner.

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

Browsers New Automatic Settings Slowing Site Loads Down

Blocking All Social Media Cookies and Trackers Seems To Be Slowing Down Chrome and FireFox

By Strictly-Software

I have had recent automatic updates for Firefox and Chrome to versions

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

and 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

How these two have got to versions nearing 80 so quickly is funny, when IE just rolls out a new version of it's browser every year or so not every time I try and open Firefox from my taskbar.

However these updates seem to contain some important settings, some may have been around for a while which I just haven't noticed. However it is the slowness of these browsers compared to Opera, that uses a proxy server in it's pretend VPN, so you are actually going through 2 servers to your site compared to the other browsers, that is doing my head in.

I liked Firefox, and Chrome when it first came out for their speed, and add-ons. However either my laptop is either deciding to slow down these 2 browsers for some reason and let Opera hop before loading a faster page or something else is going on.

My version of Opera with this "VPN" is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36 OPR/65.0.3467.62

When I open it, it is faster than both Chrome and FireFox despite their VPN which when I check with a geo location website shows I have these details instead of my real ones:

• Your Public IPv6 is: 2001:67c:2660:425:7::dfa
• Your IPv4 is: 77.111.247.105
• Location: Amsterdam, NH NL 
• ISP: Hern Labs AB

I notice they have removed the word Opera and replaced it with OPR now, also nearing it's 70th edition. So not only does it protect my privacy a bit it is faster than Chrome and FireFox at the moment for me.

So today after upgrades to both Chrome (manual due to it's insane slowness) and an automatic update for FireFox that took almost 20 minutes, I noticed major slowdowns.

Chrome seems to always be showing a "resolving host" message in the status bar and loading in remote scripts from the big 3 spyware social networks, Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Of course site builders have put these outbound scripts into their code as they want people to Like, Follow and Tweet whatever crap they are selling and you may like seeing a Twitter scroller on the blog you are following and the ability to share the page to Facebook.

However I watched a video on www.darkpolitricks.com the other night about how many #alttnews sites are moving their videos from YouTube to BitShute. YouTube is broken and Google is an evil company. And it seems they are indeed.

It is all about how these niche news outlets had created YouTube making it the biggest video sharing site online, and although the company claims they are only 1% of all videos watched they still feel the need to de-rank these alternative views and put "authoritative sources" above your searches in their algorithm tweaks. These tweaks were all admitted by a Google employee who described getting those Up Ticks and Likes as a "drug" that ensures people continue with their outpourings of every thing they do in life on Social Media.

Yes we do want to see where Jane is having lunch, who with, where the cafe is located and then everything else she does that day as we follow her goings about on Facebook and Instagram.Well you may want to but I don't. However to do so you need to load in Facebook scripts from their servers.

However it seems if you delve into the privacy and security settings for Firefox you get to see that their default setting is to stop tracking cookies from cross site and social media trackers which obviously means if you are loading a 3rd party script from another location you could see as I did today on one site the "trying to connect to t.co" message appear dozens of times as the page tried to load. All the while the page was hung and unusable.

You can go into the FireFox settings and change your settings under Privacy and Security. The heading is...

Browser Privacy

Enhanced Tracking Protection

Trackers follow you around online to collect information about your browsing habits and interests. Firefox blocks many of these trackers and other malicious scripts.

The default setting will block Social media trackers, Cross-site tracking cookies, Tracking content in Private Windows and Cryptominers.

Obviously the latter few are definitely required but let me know if you have noticed a slow down with the standard setting that supposedly is "Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally.", as they may load normally but they seem very slow to load, and off server scripts like Twitter and Facebook are attempted multiple times before a page is usable.

What happened to just loading the core code first to let the page be usable and load any off server scripts by Ajax in the background. It seems too many sites now use pure JavaScript and Ajax to load the content, probably to prevent content scraper BOTS however it does mean a lot of code has to run and be loaded before the page is usable. Have you had a look at the source HTML of www.google.com lately?

Apart from some META tags after the HTML tag the whole source is JavaScript and probably Ajax to load in the content for what is really nothing more than a white page with a different image every now and then above a text input box for searching.

The links to your Google account and Gmail in the top right corner are just that links. We could shorten the load time and the code to a few lines of HTML in reality. I really think Google have gone overboard with their API Jizz all across their systems as their need to stop scrapers has just caused slow loading pages it seems.

Would you like all 3rd party scripts and cookies blocked, or would you like the site to work and load quickly? It seems a dilemma these browsers are making over complicated especially for non techies who wouldn't know half the words in Firefox's Privacy and Security settings.

The difference between Standard which says "Balanced for protection and security. Pages will load normally" and Strict which says "Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or content to break" seems to only be the addition of:

• Tracking content in all windows - rather than standard mode which only blocks "Tracking content in Private Windows" and
• Fingerprinters (blocking Browser finger printing, logging your add-ons, window size and other ways to identify you from just your browser)

They don't actually explain what a fingerprinter is, and to the average user they would be scratching their head thinking about their latest Samsung phone and the ability to login using your fingerprint. However these two extra blocks seem to be deadly for a working website as they state underneath :

Heads up! Blocking trackers could impact the functionality of some sites. Reload a page with trackers to load all content.

So god knows how someone is supposed to manage the 3rd option which is a custom way of blocking things you don't understand or know why they would break a site.

Of course they have a number of complicated Knowledge Base articles  for you to read and get your head round to try and understand whether they need to use Private Windows for browsing all the time, and why the prevention of loading certain features is going to stop your site loading.

Of course Firefox has a "simple way" to help you understand what is going on by just clicking on the shield in the address bar you can change the mode of protection on or off. 

You can view this site with "Enhanced Tracking Protection is OFF for this site" or ON and if you don't know what the difference is they have helpful little graphs that tell you about their Enhanced Tracking Protection, how many trackers they have blocked over the week and ways to look for data breaches. All very interesting but not very helpful information.

They helpfully clarify the situation by saying "Social networks place trackers on other websites to follow what you do, see, and watch online. This allows social media companies to learn more about you beyond what you share on your social media profiles."

Of course you could just disable 3rd party cookies and JavaScript by default with a web developer toolbar and see if the page loads or not. If it doesn't work turn on JavaScript and try again before white listing the site so it can use JavaScript again.

It seems that as Windows in numptifying the front end of their latest operating systems and making it harder for developers to dig in and get into the back end like Windows 8.1r which I still have - now without Skype support - the browsers are offering their users far too many options they probably don't understand or need to know about.

What I want from a browser is for websites to load quickly, any 3rd party hosted widgets like Facebook or Twitter widgets to load in asynchronously and not prevent the working of the site. I want the browser to do the dirty stuff behind the scenes and I don't want 100's of options to play about with. They should block dangerous content, warn users about dangerous sites and stop anything that may have a dangerous effect on my browsing or privacy.

Yes - Ask me if I want to load this soon to be outdated flash movie or allow notifications but don't give me too much to tweak about with.

The speed of loading a site is the most important factor for most users and also affects the sites SEO. If they want to give us an option for being as private as possible or allowing tracking cookies then just have a single option "Privacy HIGH or OFF" option, and then use their own browsing logic to work out if a page won't load instead of offering the user a whole list of options to try out if a page doesn't load.

What is wrong with just keeping incognito windows that are private as possible, don't allow trackers or fingerprinting and the logging of pages visited with a clear out of cookies automatically when I leave?

It just seems that as Chrome enters the laptop world with it's Chromebooks, that as Operating Systems continually ask for your admin password in Windows 10+ when opening an application. Hiding all the nitty gritty that really slows your PC down behind automated "maintenance jobs". That browsers are trying to become their own little PC within a PC.

Just give me fast loading pages and if I want to hide what I am doing from sites and other users of my laptop then make the incognito windows as private as possible. Stop trackers, fingerprinting, 3rd party cookies, and anything else you are now making a "choice" for the user under the settings.

It is bad enough that as everyone moves to HTTPS we see the TLS handshake message in the taskbar constantly which is obviously slowing down the loading of pages and their content, especially if it's mixed.

Just give me a fast browser. I thought using FireFox today would speed things up as Chrome is just getting unusable and as everyone realises they are actually evil, I don't want to help Google pass on my data from their browser or search engines and analytics trackers to advertisers and god knows who else.

From now on Opera with its extra server hop is going to be my standard browser. The "VPN" offers enough privacy and whilst some pages won't remember certain settings due to my location changing the browser is fast.

Anyone find their settings too complicated nowadays and the speed an issue?

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

 

Quickly Grab Generated Source Code With One Click

Quickly Grab Generated Source Code With One Click

By Strictly-Software

Now that my broken arm is getting better I will be doing more code. It still hurts like mad though, the arm bone didn't even look like it belonged anywhere near the shoulder where it was dislocated.

If you want WordPress plugins then go and check out the main site which I need to do some work on. I am also thinking of building an alternative search engine to get round Google's/CIA/NSA's de-ranking and demonetisation.

I used to have a Super Search Engine years ago, that took the top 10 items from Google, BING and Yahoo, however they kept changing the source code until it all became AJAX loaded in on the fly and too hard to scrape.

I think with the push or deletion of alternative news down the rankings, and pro-establishment news gaining viewers they would never had got a year ago due to Facebook's subservience to the USA and Israeli governments. More and more people will move to new decentralised social media platforms and once that happens Facebook and Google, who are already losing out to duckduckgo.com  due to privacy concerns will lose money in their share price as well as many members.                                 

The problem is money of course and too few people click on adverts or donate out the kindness of their heart.

I think, like search.darkpolitriks.com, that has a starting page of core main #altnews websites and podcasts, I could write my own one and charge £10 for a relevant #altnews blog or channel to be added to the SERP, just so that small alternative sites have the same chance of being found in results and sites like CNN and the BBC are weeded out.

Easiest way of creating a SERP. Just ensure the site is relevant and not mainstream.

Anyway I was fixing a bug today when I realised that it was a bookmark with an http source on an https site that prevented the lock from showing.

Sometimes I don't think people realise how dangerous loading third party scripts can be.

Just loading in a CSS stylesheet could cause nightmares.

For example say your site loaded in a stylesheet from www.SomeSiteIDontControl1.com which loads in a background PNG image which in turn loads in another remote 3rd party stylesheet from www.SomeSiteIDontControl2.com.

Then one day the person in control of that site changes that 2nd image to a dangerous .js file or .exe that loads in an XSS attack.

You are so far removed from the actual cause of the problem that with minification and compression you might have no hope in finding the dangerous file.

So one day the 2nd CSS file that you are loading looks something like this:

background:url(http://www.somesiteIdontcontrol2.com/images/background.png) no-repeat 16px 0;

Then one day this site owner changes his background image to be an .js file e.g

background:url(http://www.somesiteIdontcontrol2.com/images/dodgyscript.js) no-repeat 16px 0;

And when the page loads, and after your onDOMLoad event loads in these scripts it hits your user with the JavaScript sites code.

A recursive script might be handy to run every day to check diagnostics by referencing every URL it finds in any style-sheet or JavaScript on your site.

Follow it backwards and check every other URL it finds.

Another way, if you are perfectly happy with your code is to create local versions of the files and images and keep it all on a server you control so no-one could malform the objects being loaded.

This is a bookmarklet script I wrote years ago that shows me the DOM loaded afterwards and not before.

I wanted to see what scripts and files had been added since I pressed the View Source button that shows the HTML and JS/CSS before any code is run on the page.

I use it all the time. I created a bookmarklet and added it to my bookmark bar so it's within easy reach with a URL to www.google.com and save it.

I then edit it and change the location of the JavaScript I want from www.google.com to the code so that it runs. This might not be necessary anymore but I had add a real URL in the old days.

This code basically takes a snapshot of the DOM once all 3rd party objects have modified the code, loaded videos, changed images and anything else sites like to do when onDOMLoad (not onWindowLoad, which only fires once every image and external object has been loaded.

As you are loading the code with a press of a button there is plenty of time for the onDOM onWindow and onFrame load events to fire, plus many others.

javascript:(function()%7b function htmlEscape(s)%7bs=s.replace(/&/g,'&amp;');s=s.replace(/>/g,'&gt;');s=s.replace(/</g,'&lt;');return s;%7d x=window.open(); x.document.write('<pre>' + htmlEscape('<html>\n' + document.documentElement.innerHTML + '\n</html>')); x.document.close(); %7d)();

As the HTML 5 spec still allows for href="javascript: ..... " then a link or button can run JavaScript when it really should be running external document.addEventListener events to each object needing code to fire when hit.

The code just creates a URL encoded function called htmlEscape which replaces brackets and ampersands and opens a new window writing this new code out into the document.documentElement.innerHTML.

Not hard to do but very useful.


By Strictly-Software

© 2018 Strictly-Software

Twitter Rush caused by Tweet BOTs visiting your site

Twitter Traffic can cause a major hit on your server

If you are using Twitter to post tweets to whenever you blog or post an article you should know that a large number of BOTS will immediately hit your site as soon as they see the link.

This is what I call a Twitter Rush as you are causing a rush of traffic from posting a link on Twitter.

I did a test some months back and I like to regularly test how many hits I get whenever I post a link so that I can weed out the chaff from the wheat and set up rules to ban any BOTS I think are just wasting me money.

Most of these BOTS are also stupid.

If you post the same link to multiple Twitter accounts e.g by using my Wordpress plugin - Strictly Tweetbot then the same BOT will come to the same page multiple times.

Why? Who wrote such crap code and why don't they check before hitting a site that they haven't just crawled that link. I cannot believe the developers at Yahoo cannot write a BOT that works out they have just crawled a page before doing it two more times.

Some BOTS are obviously needed such as the major SERP search engines e.g Google or Bing but many are start up "social media" search engines and other such content scrapers, spammers. hackbots and bandwidth wasters.

Because of this I now 403 a lot of these BOTS or even send them back to the IP address they came from with an ISAPI rewrite rule as they don't provide me with any benefit and just steal bandwidth and cost me money.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (?:Spider|MJ12bot|seomax|atomic|collect|e?mail|magnet|reaper|tools\.ua\.random|siphon|sweeper|harvest|(?:microsoft\surl\scontrol)|wolf) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR} [L,R=301]

However if you are using my Strictly Tweet BOT plugin which can post multiple tweets to the same or multiple accounts then the new version allows you to pre-post a page which hopefully gets cached by the caching plugin you should be using (WP SUPER CACHE or W3 TOTAL CACHE etc) before the article is made public and the BOT looking at Twitter for URL's to scrape can get to it.

The aim is to get the page cached BEFORE multiple occurrences of BOTS hit the page. If the page is already cached then the load on your server should be a lot less than if every BOT's loading of the page was trying to cache the page at the same time (due to the quickness of their visit). 

However if you are auto blogging and using my TweetBOT you might be interested in Strictly TweetBOT PRO as it had extra features for people who are tweeting to multiple accounts or multiple tweet in different formats to the same account. These new features are all designed to reduce the hit from a Twitter Rush.

The paid for version allows you to do the following:

• Make an HTTP request to the new post before Tweeting anything. If you have a caching plugin on your site then this should put the new post into the cache so that when the Twitter Rush comes they all hit a cached page and not a dynamically created one.
• Add a query-string to the URL of the new post when making an HTTP request to aid caching. Some plugins like WP Super Cache allow you to force an uncached page to be loaded with a querystring. So this will enable the new page to be loaded and re-cached.
• Delay tweeting for N seconds after making the HTTP request to cache your post. This will help you ensure that the post is in the cache before the Twitter Rush.
• Add a delay between each Tweet that is sent out. If you are tweeting to multiple accounts you will cause multiple Twitter Rushes. Therefore staggering the hits aids performance.

I did a test this morning to see how much traffic was generated by a test post. I got almost 50 responses within 2 seconds!

50.18.132.28 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:41 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "bitlybot"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
184.72.47.46 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
204.236.150.14 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:44 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:47 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:48 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
173.192.79.101 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "-"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
66.228.54.132 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 106183 "-" "InAGist URL Resolver (http://inagist.com)"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
110.169.128.180 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "http://twitter.com/" "User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:15 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.127 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:18 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.54.253 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:19 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:28 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.62.87 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:30 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28860 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:59 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:46 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:01 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:07 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
50.16.51.20 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:21 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Summify (Summify/1.0.1; +http://summify.com)"
74.97.60.113 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:07:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28889 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"

Beware of the REL NOFOLLOW Scam

Beware of the REL NOFOLLOW Scam

By Strictly-Software

For those of you who sell articles or blogs to people you should be aware of a scam I have been caught in twice now.

I call it the rel nofollow scam as it basically means people get link juice from your site without paying for it.

The scam goes like this.

1. Someone offers to pay you £$ for an article to appear on your site. Usually with good PR. 
2. They send the article which has links to their own site in it one or more times. There is NO rel="nofollow" on these links. 
3. They say it will take 3 days to pay you so you put the article up. 
4. 7 days later you are chasing them for the money as it hasn't been sent to you. 
5. They then make some sort of excuse why they cannot pay you and say "take the article down". Which of course you do. 
6. However unbeknown to you they have already obtained what they wanted, which was BOTS like GoogleBOT, BING and so on, to crawl the article and then follow the link to their site passing on the link juice from your site. 
7. Believe it or not the benefits of this link juice being passed stays around long after the article exists. 
8. So you have basically been ripped off as they have got their PR and link juice and you haven't received a nickel.

Don't Believe Me?

At my company that makes Job Boards we used to do tests to prove to our boss we could get to number 1 on Google for a one page Job Board for long tail terms like "latest jobs in CSS" or "latest London jobs in SQL".

We did this by turning on a switch that at night made sure every major SERP BOT (GoogleBOT, BING) saw different banner links, alt and title values than normal.

Because we had hundreds of Job Boards it looked as if they were all pointing up at our magnificent Job Board.

This was in the days where the number of backlinks was king and SEO companies selling links from directories was the main thing SEO companies did.

So we were testing features for "boosting" a sites Page Rank through linkage systems.

This wasn't the "illegal" GoogleBOT masking method of showing different content to humans and then to robots.

The reason is that banners rotate anyway and the href, alt and title values will change naturally anyway.

If you refreshed most sites with banners they will rotate and show different images than the page load before.

If all these sites were all breaking the GoogleBOT masking rule no site would be able to rotate banners.

So to a SERP BOT it looked like our one site Job Board was sitting at the top of a pyramid with 200+ high PR Job Boards all passing link juice our way. Basically saying although we have good PR, this site is better than us (in basic terms).

Also a mate who had an online T-Shirt company that was ranking nowhere on Google turned this "feature" on for a weekend, changing the TITLE and ALT attribute values to all have multiple long tail keywords within them.

Here is an example of a multiple long tail stuffed attribute:

"Buy the best XX T-Shirts from XX company, the best looking XX T-Shirts by company XX. Buy XX T-Shirts now for rock bottom prices! Sale now on at XX Company" 

Within a week he was on the top of the first page of Google! 

Also even though the "tweak" was turned off after a few days the benefit he got from all these sites linking to him over just a couple of days lasted for ages.

He was still on the top page of Google many months later!

Even after we turned this Job Board feature off the one page jobboard stayed at the top of Google for months later for our desired keywords.

The algorithms may have changed by now for BOTS but the idea of passing juice along to sites with higher "domain authority" than you still exists.

The ideal SEO situation for a site linking to you is this.

A site with a homepage where there is only one link on it which points at your site.

This is basically telling the SERPS that your site is "better" than them e.g it has more site/domain authority than them.

Plus as their homepage only has a single link on it (the most important page on a site) and this link goes to YOUR SITE then they are telling the SERP BOTS that crawl it that this other site MUST be very important.

The original PR algorithm is below. It is probably much more complex now and SERPs use responsive site designs, social media and load speed a lot more in weighting the "worth" of a site when ranking it.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) where:

PR(A) is the PageRank of page A,

PR(Ti) is the PageRank of pages Ti which link to page A,

C(Ti) is the number of outbound links on page Ti and

d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.

The original PR algorithm.

This scam has actually happened to me twice now so I am putting an end to people stealing link juice that can stay around for ages anymore by insisting that rel="nofollow" is put on all links UNTIL I get paid.

Once I get paid I remove the rel="nofollow" attribute and they get the benefits of the link juice they are paying for.

I usually change the posted date of the article as well so it looks like a new post to ensure BOTS will crawl and see the new links.

So beware.

This REL NOFOLLOW scam is real and I have fallen for it.


© 2014 Strictly-Software

Why I hate the new Google+ API

I absolutely hate the new Google+ API

Yes Google+ have had a revamp and if you are not on it then you won't know what the old version was like if you now join.

To me it's as if someone has read too many books on the jQuery effects library and basically orgasmed code across the API.

If you go to type a new status message into a box the whole page shifts round so that your box moves to the centre of the screen and the rest of the messages and segments of the page do a little jig around it so that you are supposed to go "wow".

Not me. Too much API Jizz is something I hate. 

Not only does it repeatedly turn my PC into a helicopter as the CPU rises and falls like a coke head on the lash but it just is too much for my ageing eyes.

It really seems to me as if someone is showing off by writing their "funky" API code. Hey boss look what I can do with a shit load of JavaScript that takes ages for all the page segments to load but makes non techies go "oooh" as they see it in action.

Whilst an API should be friendly and easy to use there is nothing "useful" about the whole screen moving around just so your current type box is in the middle of the screen.

Why not just put the "new message" box in the middle to start with?

Not only that but the amount of times I go to reply to a conversation down the right hand side and someone I have never seen before pops up in a box on top of the place I am trying to write is beyond annoying.

It means not only can I hit the send button but sometimes if I can find a way to get rid of the annoying box (and that's not 100% of the time) the message I was writing disappears!

I know writing the whole page in JavaScript stops (or limits script kiddy's) from scraping easily but there really is a limit. Personally I just think Google+ have crossed it and that there was nothing too wrong with their old API.

What do you think?

Accessing your computers external IP address from your computer without using a browser

Access your computers external IP address from your desktop without using a browser

Following on from yesterdays blog post about what can happen if you get given a new IP address and don't realise it, you might want a quick way to check your external IP address from your computer without having to open an Internet browser.

There are many "What is my IP address" sites about that show you your IP address plus other request headers such as the user-agent but you might want a quick way of seeing your external IP without having to open a browser first.

If you are using a LINUX computer it's pretty easy to use CURL or WGET to write a small script to scrape an IP checker page and return the HTML contents.

For instance in a command prompt this will return you the IP address using CURL by scraping the contents of icanhazip.com.

This site is good because it outputs the computers IP address that's accessing the URL in plain text so it means you don't have to do any reformatting at all.

curl icanhazip.com

However if you are on a Windows computer there is no simple way of getting your external IP address (the IP address your computer is seen on the outside world) without either installing Windows versions of CURL or WGET first or writing a script to do it for you using Microsoft objects.

Of course it would be nice if you could just use ipconfig from the command prompt to show your external address as well as your internal network details but unfortunately you can't do that.

As you're connected to the Internet through your router your PC isn't directly connected to the Internet.

Therefore there is no easy way you can get the IP address your ISP has assigned to your computer without seeing it from another computer on the Internet.

Therefore you can either use one of the many IP checker tools like whatismyip.com or icanhazip.com to get the details. Or you can even just click this link to search for "what is my IP address" and get Google to show you your IP address above the results.

However if you do want to do it without a browser you can write a simple VBS script to do it for you and then you can access your external IP from your desktop with a simple double click of the mouse.

How to make a VBS Script to get your computers external IP address.

1. Open notepad.
2. Copy and paste the following VBS code into a new notepad window. 
3. Save the file as "whatismyip.vbs" on to your desktop.
4. To view your IP address just double click the file icon and a Windows message box will open and show you the IP address.

The script is very simple and all it does is scrape the plain text contents of the webpage at icanhazip.com and output it in a pop-up - simples!

Option Explicit
Dim objHTTP : Set objHTTP = WScript.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXmlHttp")
objHTTP.Open "GET", "http://icanhazip.com", False
objHTTP.Send
Wscript.Echo objHTTP.ResponseText
Set objHTTP  = Nothing

If you really want to use this from the command line you can do it by following these steps.

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Type "cscript " leaving a space afterwards (and without the quotes!).
3. Drag the whatismyip.vbs file to the command prompt so that you have a space between cscript and the path of the file e.g C:\Documents and Settings\myname>cscript "C:\Documents and Settings\myname\Desktop\whatismyip.vbs"
4. Hit Enter.
5. The IP address will appear after some guff about the Windows Script Host Version.

The output should look something like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\
myname >cscript "C:\Documents and Settings\myname\Desktop\whatismyip.vbs"
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
89.42.212.239

So there you go, a LINUX and WINDOWS way of accessing your external IP address from your desktop without having to open Chrome or FireFox.

Turn one Google Mail account into many

Multiplying your GMail Account to create multiple email addresses

I just come across a wonderful tip that allowed me to bypass the rule on Twitter that prevents you from using an email address for more than one account. You may have tried this yourself and found that if you try to create a new Twitter account with an email address assigned to another Twitter account you won't be able to.

Obviously there are good reasons for this e.g to prevent spam bots and auto sign up tools etc etc. However if you don't have multiple email accounts at the ready and don't fancy setting up a new one just to get round this problem then the answer lies in GMail.

Apparently its possible to add dots to your GMail address to make a unique email address in the eyes of Twitter or anyone else who sees the address. However GMail will treat it as one account no matter how many variations you use.

For example using an address like strictlysoftware@gmail.com

I could create the following aliases that would all be forwarding addresses for my underlying account:

strictly.software@gmail.com

strictly.soft.ware@gmail.com

s.trictly.softwa.re@gmail.com

So in the eyes of Twitter or any other website that requires an email address when signing up they are all unique addresses. However any email sent to these addresses would all appear in strictlysoftware@gmail.com.

This is a neat trick that helped me get round Twitters sign up form and I will sure be using it in future.

For more details read the following links:

thesocialmediaguide.com.au

bullishchina.com

Setting up a new site for SEO

Creating a new system for Search Engine Optimisation

When you are creating a new website the amount of time from conception to roll out can be anything up to a few months. I am talking here about custom built systems not Wordpress or blogger type sites that can be knocked up instantly.

You have the design work to be done, the back end to be developed, debugging and testing and any number of changes to accommodate for. This is usually an iterative process and once its complete and the site is live the owner will then concentrate on SEO by looking into viable search terms to target and trying to get back-links to the system as well as creating an online presence for the site.

The problem with this approach is that the SEO marketing is left until last and as we know with the major search engines they can be quite slow to react to changes within a site and Google will only update the Page Ranking for your site every few months. Therefore a good idea would be to move the SEO right to the front of your process so that you gain the benefits that time brings an online presence before the actual roll out of your site.

How would you go about this? How can you build up an online presence when there is nothing to present to the online world? Well here are some ideas that you can take onboard.

1. Get your domain purchased and ready as soon as possible.

2. Don't worry about features and functionality at this point as you will be doing this over the next few months as you site is being created. However once you have access to your webserver and your domain is ready put up a holding page.

This should be a pure HTML page that loads fast and contains lots of text describing your site and what features its going to be providing. Make sure the content explains that this system is coming soon and not ready yet. The content should not be a list of spammy keywords but it should contain various configurations of the search terms you want to target.

3. Make sure your holding page is laid out correctly with H1, H2 tags, paragraphs containing your targeted keywords wrapped in strong or em tags and links to other static pages. Do not use too much highlighted text but concentrate it on your key search terms.

4. If possible create static versions of the main pages that you are expecting to use on your finished system and link to them from your home page. For example if you are a catalogue site put up a static results page with a number of product items on it. Target your main sales items, the ones that you are hoping to sell the most of once the main site is ready. If you are going to gain SEO points for site age then you want those points to be related to items that will benefit you in future.

5. Make sure its clear that your site isn't ready yet and if possible have an email link or form where potential customers can put their names down on a mailing list to be informed when the site goes live. Or if you are a shop and have the ability to take orders offline ask them to contact you by email or phone if they see something they like. This way you can drum up interest before your site is ready.

6. Once you have a temporary website up you can concentrate on getting your real system ready without losing out on all the benefits of SEO that just having a site online gain. For example search engines such as Google will not even consider putting brand new sites at the top of rankings for certain search terms until a set period of time has passed. Known as a Sandbox this is to prevent spam sites from being created with huge numbers of backlinks taking all the top spots.

You may still be able to find your site in the index by searching for your domain or company name but other search terms which you are trying to target may not give you the desired result. Therefore having a temporary site up and running until your main site is ready is one way to get over this time delay as you really don't want your new site to suffer the sandbox on release date.

7. Search engines also see the length of time a site has been around as an important factor in calculating a sites authority. Remember site authority is important as when you get backlinks from sites with a higher authority than yours it helps boost your sites authority and also increases your Page Rank therefore you should aim to get backlinks in from sites with high authority but not link back as this may cancel out the benefit.

8. Remember Page Rank (PR) only gives an indication of the number of sites that link to yours. It doesn't say anything about the quality of your site in terms of content or the quality of the links that are pointing to you.

In the old days Page Rank was important as it was used as a way of allowing Internet users to rank the sites on the web as they would only be linking to good sites or so the idea went. However as with most ideas it was soon worked out that link farms and link exchanges could boost a sites PR which is why so many people still think that getting thousands of inbound links from anywhere is still a good thing.

I have no idea whether Google still considers PR on itself a useful tool but I have heard from many people that they don't. Because any site could get thousands of inbound links into them from link exchanges I am pretty certain that Google do not consider it that important in ranking otherwise all the top spots for most search terms would be taken up by spammy sites that offer nothing but ebooks or get rich schemes or other MLM BS.

9. Back links are important as Google still looks for sites that have good site authority that link to your site. If you are a new site selling custom widgets then you should aim to get backlinks from other widget selling sites or sites that relate to widgets in some way.

Having lots of backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with widgets won't help. Your PR may go up to a certain level but it doesn't tell Google that you are considered a relevant site in your field. Your site authority will go up when you have lots of sites in the same field as yours linking to you.

10. Backlinks are also important as they help get your pages indexed quickly by search engines. If you create a new page but have no inbound links to it then it may not get indexed even if the page is linked to internally or listed in your sitemap. I have found the quickest way to get a page indexed is by having some good quality backlinks to it from external sites.

11. If you are going to pay for advertising on other sites then you need to decide what you hope to get out of the advert as most advertising system that run over multiple sites use JavaScript iframes to load the advert content. Therefore if you are hoping to get backlinks to your site you are going to be disappointed unless the adverts are loaded server side so that search engine spiders can crawl them. If you are just trying to get brand awareness or drive traffic through clicks then Javascript loaded adverts are fine.

12. When you do use images wrapped in anchor tags on your site or adverts on other sites that take this format you should make use of all the available attributes. With an image wrapped in an anchor you have 3 possible areas to add search engine friendly content. These are the title attribute on the anchor tag and the title and ALT attributes on the image tag. Make sure you put good search terms in all 3 places and try to vary the terms so that you are making the most of these opportunities. Do not just put the name of your site in the attributes e.g

title = "Strictly Software"

but add search terms e.g

title = "Technical advice and free scripts from Strictly Software"

and then alternate it on the other two

title = "Strictly Software technical blog and downloads for developers"

ALT = "Technical development from Strictly Software, free downloads and great code"

13. The ALT tag is used for when the image cannot be loaded such as text browsers. However because text browsers or image free browsers are very rare you can probably add more text than the recommended short description of the image that an ALT tag is for.

14. Use commas in your search terms and try to get multiple sentence variations out of one piece of text without resorting to a list of keywords. Search bots are quite clever and can spot spam a mile away nowadays so you should make your search terms readable but also combine 2 or more search terms. For example.

title = "free online tools from Strictly Software the best technical blog for downloads and technical advice for free"

Now as a human reading this you might think its a bit unreadable as its quite long however for bots who crawl your site they will see this and not be able to tell that its slightly wordy only that it's not a list of spam keywords. However once your page has been indexed you now can search on the following variations to find the page.

Free online tools

Free online tools from Strictly Software

tools from Strictly Software

Strictly Software the best technical blog

Strictly Software the best technical blog for downloads

technical blog

technical blog for downloads

downloads and technical advice

downloads and technical advice for free

technical advice for free

Obviously this is just a quick example but you see what I mean. Make the most of your title and ALT attributes.

15. Good content is the most important thing on a site. If you are writing a blog then short one paragraph articles are no good as:

1. They don't look like authoritative examples of the topic you are writing about
2. They don't offer you the option to highlight the various search terms and combinations that you are targeting without it looking like spam.
3. They don't offer the reader much and therefore you are less likely to get natural inbound links.

16. META tags are not as important as SEO applications downloaded from the web would like you to think. Most search engines ignore the keywords META tag nowadays and the description tag is hardly used anymore on search engine results pages unless no other search term specific content can be found in the article. Page titles are useful for usability and offer another area to enter search terms specific to the page but none of these are as important as good quality content.

17. Make sure your page content is split out appropriately with H1 tags to denote the topic and then H2 tags for sub headers and so on. Search engines see content within headers, anchor text and strong and em tags as more important than the other content as you have specially marked it out for the users attention therefore the search engine will also pay more attention to it. Do not wrap all your content in headers or strong tags as this will be seen as spam so keep it to under 10% of the overall content.

18. Put all your important links towards the top of the page and try to keep the number of links on a page to under a 100. I have seen pages that contain 250+ links and the most important links e.g to the site index were at the bottom in the footer and did not get indexed.

19. If you have lots of CSS or SCRIPT content try to put these in external files and reference them as far down the page as is possible so that your main content is the first thing a spider comes across. Try to put all your CSS references above any SCRIPT references as the browser will stop rendering the page to load in external script which may cause a nasty effect. This is one thing I hate about Googles AdSense adverts as you have to insert the SCRIPT at the place in the HTML where you want the advert to display and depending on how slow Google is to load the content it can cause a horrible delay. I have tried myself hacking about with this but as of yet don't have a way round it so if anyone does please let me know!

20. Make sure all images have width and height attributes on them. This is so that the browser does not have to wait for the image to load so it can look up the actual size of the image before being able to display it. With a specified height and width it can render the whole page and put aside the correct space for the image before it has loaded. As page load speed is one of the things that Google is now concentrating on when determining ranking then it makes sense to make your pages load as fast as possible.

So there are some tips to utilize on your temporary site as well as the completed site. If you can make the most of the time that it takes to get your site finished by having a search engine optimised temporary site up and running and gaining SEO points just by being accessible then you won't have to try so hard once your real site is ready.

There are lots more things you can try and you should download the various versions of all the Search Engine Optimiser tools that are available on the web. Most of these tools do basic content analysis by determining how much of the content is specific to various search terms as well as looking for missing or non specific META and other tags. However good SEO is something that is learnt over time and once you know the key aspects to look for its just a case of trial and error. Check out your competitor sites and see how they have optimised their pages, who is linking to them and what search terms they rank high on then try to target variations of terms that users search on but are not already saturated by existing sites. As with most things in life its mostly trial and error.

Google Chrome Unresponsive

Googles Chrome Browser Raising Page Unresponsive Errors

Today I have just come across an intermittent problem with the latest version of Google Chrome 3.0.195.27 which has meant that the browser opens correctly but then freezes when trying to load any page including the homepage.

I first had this problem this morning and thought it was down to a slow connection but all my other browsers worked fine. After a while of spinning around Chrome pops up a little pop up box saying that a page (unnamed) has become unresponsive and you can either close it or wait. Choosing either option does nothing at all.

I have scanned my system with multiple virus checkers and all seems fine.

I have also re-installed Chrome three times now. The first time I re-installed the program run okay up until I rebooted later on then the same problem came back. Now I am just getting the unresponsive messages on starting up the browser.

I don't know what the problem is and I also haven't got a solution yet so if anyone has similar issues please let me know. I can still access the web with FireFox, IE, Opera and Safari but I tend to use Chrome for all my pure web surfing so I would really like this browser back working well as I have really got to love using it over the last year.

Implementing SEO Strategy too late in the day

Think about Search Engine Optimisation early in the day

In my 10+ years of web development I have noticed many mistakes that customers make in terms of creating an application that meets their requirements as well as being cost effective and delivered on time. Most of the mistakes and problems can be traced back one way or another to not having a detailed specification document that is not only just signed off by both parties but also kept to 100% with any deviation treated as new work to be costed and developed.

Loose specs lead to misunderstanding's from both parties where the customer expects one thing and the developer is building another. Even with a signed off stringently kept spec there is also the problem of customers not understanding the technical limitations or boundaries of the system they are buying into. An example I want to give is in relation to SEO which is usually treated as an after thought by the customer rather than as a key component during the specification stage. I work for a recruitment software development company and have built a system that is now running 200+ jobboards. I have noticed that what usually happens is that the customer is under some illusion that the 7 or 10k they have spent on a site has bought them a custom built system that is flexible enough to allow any future development requirement that they may wish to have down the line. Now this maybe the fault of the sales person promising the earth for peanuts or it may not but in reality they have bought an off the shelf generic product that can be delivered quickly and comparatively cheaply exactly because it hasn't been custom built for their requirements.

One of the ways this problem manifests itself is in Search Engine Optimisation as the customer will usually wait a couple of months after the site going live before realising that they are not top of Google for the word jobs and ask why. They then discover numerous SEO specialists that offer to get them to the top of Google for certain terms and invest lots of money in audits and optimisation reports only to find out that we cannot implement everything they want because they are using a system with a shared codebase. Yes our system has numerous inbuilt features for SEO that can be turned on and off but asking for and expecting specific development that has been recommended by a 3rd party after development has completed can cause unneeded stress and tension especially when the customer is told no due to system limitations.

What the customer should do is think about and investigate the possibilities of SEO before the specification document has been signed off rather than months after the site has gone live. This way any limitations of the system can be discussed so the customer is made aware that spending money with a 3rd party who is also unaware of system limitations is probably a waste of £££. Also any good ideas they may have regarding SEO requirements can be planned out and possibly developed during the main development phase rather than thrown in later as an after thought. Even if its a generic system good ideas are good ideas and a benefit for one customer will be a benefit to others as the development house can make money by reselling the feature as an add-on to existing customers.

I am not saying 3rd party SEO consultants don't do a good job but potential customers of sites need to be aware of what they are buying and what is and not possible before they spend money with any 3rd party. There can be nothing worse than spending money with a consultant only to find out that their recommendations cannot be implemented or if they are implemented it will cost even more money for the extra development. So take my advice and think about SEO before not after development as not only will it save time and money but having good SEO from the off will mean your site gains better positioning in the search engines quicker rather than later.

Further Reading:

Please read this article of mine about techniques for good and bad search engine optimisation.