Adventures in IT

Search engines reward websites that are well linked. Search engines operate under the assumption that if many other websites link to yours then that reflects a measure of trust and value in your site content. This means that building up these links to your website is an important task for any website owner. Finding relevant sites to approach for a backlink can be a difficult prospect. Reciprocal linking Many reciprocal link exchanges end up being an exercise in spam management as completely inappropriate sites approach you for a link. Reciprocal linking is actually a risky affair. Google specifically warns against creating pages for reciprocal linking in its Webmaster guidelines. It's pretty obvious why reciprocal linking is discourage - it is an articifical distortion of a person's desire to link to your content. They're not linking to you because you have valuable content, they're linking to you in exchange for a favour. One way links Clearly one way links are mu...

I was looking around for a way to generate a word of the day on the web and didn't find anything. So I coded a quick and dirty script to do it. Just in case anybody does a Google search and manages to find my blog: here is my Word of the Day PHP script : Copy this code snippet into a wordoftheday.php file: $file = fopen("interesting_words.txt","r"); $raw_string = fread($file,filesize("interesting_words.txt")); fclose($file); $words_array = explode("|",$raw_string); echo $words_array[array_rand($words_array)]; Of course the real issue I had was finding a list of interesting words in the right format. Here is the list of interesting words that I used: Copy this into a file called interesting_words.txt : ubiquitous : being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time; omnipresent| ecdysiast : a striptease artist| eleemosynary : of, relating to, or dependent on charity| gregious : c...

Installing Ruby For Windows users the quickest way to get Ruby running on your box is to get Instant Rails which provides you with a development platform right out of the box. Mac users can use Locomotive . If you're using Linux and don't know how to manage packages then install a GUI, shave your head, and pretend you actually like Macs. Getting started If you're like me you will want to try Ruby before reading a more thourough guide or online book . Then maybe have a look at database access before spending some time reading a Ruby blog . There are a number of Ruby forum s online. Cheating at ruby This Ruby cheat sheet is a 14 page PDF that will act as a quick reference. This resource website will also allow you to quickly develop your skills.

I'm currently developing a mobile site for a client. The site is the frontend for a competition that they will be running in 2010. Part of the project specification requires the user to be able to build an image by choosing a background, foreground, and slogan. The site will then composite these images and enter the result into the competition. In addition the site will send text messages to the users cellphone informing them of their status and (if they elect to receive it) a "word of the day" This is probably the closest C# solution to what I was looking for: public Image LayerImage(Image Current, Image Layer, Int32 LayerOpacity) { Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(Current); Bitmap layer = new Bitmap(Layer); Color pixel = new Color(); for (int x = 0; x { for (int y = 0; y { pixel = layer.GetPixel(x, y); bitmap.SetPixel(x, y, Color.From...

ZABBIX (visit http://www.zabbix.com ) is an open source distributed monitoring solution for enterprise level applications. It is capable of providing detailed networking information as well as polling servers to establish their health. ZABBIX was created by Alexei Vladishev, and currently is actively developed and supported by ZABBIX SIA. It is possible to configure ZABBIX to email alerts to the administrator for just about any event. This means that even if you have several servers to watch you will be able to react quickly to any arising problem. ZABBIX code is released under the GPL2 license ( General Public License 2 ). It is free to use and requires no licensing fees. The ZABBIX company offers both free and commercial support options. My company currently has 8 production servers, three of which host mission critical applications and databases. It is possible for one of our operations staff to remotely login to each machine, check the status of the applications, do a trace on...