Google Reader new layout

Google Reader just got a facelift. After Gmail’s recent theme introduction this is another good news.

Full story from the horse’s mouth.

This is a great website for those who prefer to ask simple, dumb questions before searching the web. After entering a search phrase you are given a custom URL. By accessing it you’ll see a search done manually (even with the cursor) for you. Useful for handing out on chat rooms, forums etc.

The best image for this topic is:

On with the interesting aspects

You are also able to add a result by submitting the URL. If the page is already indexed by Google, it will immediately display the title and description of your URL. I experimented a little and it seems that the cache used here is different from the usual search index (some pages cannot be found by Google when searching for their exact URL, but they are already cached when adding results to SearchWiki).

Another useful feature is the ability to see what others have added on the search you have just performed.

Conclusion

They claim that your suggestions on SearchWiki will only affect your own searches. Why shouldn’t they expand this to add a certain human side of their ranking algorithm? For example having 1,000 users delete a certain result from their search means that many others might find it useless as well.

Personally, I don’t feel that they can make a difference with this. Apart from nagging everybody to keep their scripts updated with the latest versions what can they do?

After some unsuccessful searching for a website thumbnail service I found SnapCasa. The free version lets you use 100000 thumb requests per month without watermarks. If you combine this with some server side script to cache and serve the image directly from your server you have nothing to worry about. Another thing I needed was the ability to get screenshots of inner pages (other services such as Girafa’s free version only allow captures of homepages). SnapCasa has that too.

The website looks and feels pretty new and sloppy. Although some account pages have “Untitled Document” as the title and other sections lack content, it does the job.

Oh, and support is quite responsive. Didn’t take any time to receive a reply.

Here are some comparisons (only found them after setting up snapcasa):

• http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2007-08/23-free_website_thumbnail_services
• http://designerside.com/article/8-website-thumbnail-generation-services-compared

Behind the scene I made use of more OOP than my other PHP scripts. It’s really nice when everything works together and the code is not cluttered. On the other hand I miss all those little code hints displayed by Netbeans (in Java). Many times all the errors were dealt with even before compiling the project. Unfortunately Aptana lacks such features.

Just hope I validated all the data sent and don’t endup with a nice SQL injection

Old Siemens M65

After about 4 years of use it is still operational with no major problems.

good:

• it keeps track of time even with the battery removed
• somewhat rugged. Supposedly it was build for outside conditions (dust, a little rain here and there and lots of shocks)

bad:

• software errors
• shutting down inexplicably
• the response time is not so great
• hard to clean: lots of raised buttons and the metal frame which houses lots of dust

All the following scenarios will require you to edit the .htaccess file in your root directory. Htaccess is an optional configuration file used by Apache to handle all incoming requests. You will also need support for mod_rewrite.

Redirecting example.com to www.example.com

The reason for doing this is because, by default, you will have 2 distinct URLs for each page on your website. For example http://www.example.com/download/games.html and http://example.com/download/games.html are one and the same page. Unfortunately search engines assume that they are completely distinct. Some say this will trigger the so-called duplicated content filter or that pagerank may spread across too many pages.

The solution is to redirect one url to the other with the response code 301. I will just use the non-www to www redirection in this article. You need a rule that will be applyable to all the URLs on your website.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This code will find all requests that contain the host example.com and redirect them using a 301 code to www.example.com. The best part is that any string after the host is taken care of. In other words, http://example.com/page1.html will be redirected to http://www.example.com/page1.html.

Redirecting a subfolder to the subdomain

When you add a new subdomain in cPanel, a folder with the same name is created in your root directory. This is where all the files directly accessible from the subdomain are located. The downside is that you now have 2 ways of viewing the same file: http://www.example.com/subdomain/page.html and http://subdomain.example.com/page.html. This is not as crucial as the scenario previously discussed because the chances of someone linking to your “subdomain” folder are pretty slim. However, we are really into eliminating every duplicated URL out there so we will deal with this problem too :).

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdomain(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^subdomain/(.*)$ http://subdomain.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Having these lines in .htaccess will make sure that http://www.example.com/subdomain/page.html will redirect to http://subdomain.example.com/page.html. But we still have http://example.com/subdomain/page.html which is not redirected. So what now?

Combine them both!

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdomain(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^subdomain/(.*)$ http://subdomain.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

You are now fully covered!

• http://example.com redirects to http://www.example.com
• http://example.com/somepage.html redirects to http://www.example.com/somepage.html
• http://www.example.com/subdomain/ redirects to http://subdomain.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/subdomain/somepage.html redirects to http://subdomain.example.com/somepage.html
• http://example.com/subdomain/somepage.html redirects to http://www.example.com/subdomain/somepage.html which redirects to http://subdomain.example.com/somepage.html

Now comes the problem. I could not pay by credit card because they didn’t have a POS terminal! What kind of IT shop doesn’t have the means to accept card payments? It’s 2008!

Of course, their solution was simple: I was just supposed to walk to the nearest ATM and have the money withdrawn

I guessed I could live with my old mobile phone a a few more days and walked away.

URL - http://www.howtocleanstuff.net