Mark Sanborn . net

Wordpress by default is very un-search engine friendly. There are many places where content is the same yet the URL is different. Google recognizes this as duplicate content.

Modern search engines like Google penalize for duplicate content. They do this because they want to give credit to the original author and keep spammers or copiers from getting page rank. They also do this to separate actual content and navigation/sidebar/ and other text that is not ranked as higher value. This all helps Google provide better search results. Read more »

After listening to an episode of the Security Now Podcast I was fascinated by the idea of multi-factor authentication. In the perfect paper password episode they discussed using one time passwords that were written on a credit card sized piece of paper. Each time you log in you would have to supply both your password and a pseudo-random one time use password that is on your credit sized perfect paper password card. The next time you logged in you would have to supply the next one time password from the card. When all the passwords are used up you would print another card and start the process over. Read more »

Server Environment Discovery Tool - This is an sweet time saver for knowing what services a server offers.

Feds: We will search through your laptop files at the border - Well this seems crazy to me. If you are traveling abroad you may be subject to search and seizure of your laptop/cellphone data. I’ll quote good ol’ Ben Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I recommend using a program like truecrypt for whole drive encryption. I think it would also be fun to write over the “blank spots” of your hard drive with Rick Astley videos. Read more »

If you remember back to the post I wrote, Using PHP to Determine Which Adsense Ad Works Best, we explored ways to split test the performance of Adsense with the help of PHP. I had also promised to share the results of my testing for the month of April. Below are my results. Read more »

Bash can be configured to recognize any word you want and link it to a command. This is called an alias. This is can be used for many reasons. For instance, you could assign a short word like dvdbackupnow to execute a very long command that you don’t want to memorize each time you want to back up a DVD. We will explore a few useful aliases and how to add them to bash. Read more »

If you ever wanted to quickly encrypt a file in Linux or FreeBSD without complicated keyrings and key files this is the post for you. In this guide we will use gnupg to quickly encrypt any file in Linux or FreeBSD. We will keep it simple and easy and leave out public/private key ring authentication and stick with simple password phrase encryption. Unlike password protection in zip files and other weak security implementation, PGP or GnuPG is a very secure way of encrypting files. It is pretty easy to set up so lets get going. Read more »

Sometimes we are given an error message that references a line number in a text file. We can number each line so we can find the error message right a way. In fact, we can print out the exact line that contains the error. This is often useful for finding errors in PHP. If there is an error in the syntax of PHP it will give you the line number it is on. Often times I don’t work in an environment that shows line numbers and I am not about to count each line by hand. Read more »

BSDTalk - A cool podcast that discusses FreeBSD. They interview many FreeBSD developers and have some interesting discussion.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users - An interesting article with 7 great tips for beginners learning Linux. Although the advice the author gives is very basic and common knowledge, he explains his advice very well. I think Linux beginners would get a lot of value out of reading this. Read more »