01 Apr 2005
Just to continue the SEO train of thought, it seems I should have checked the name “DashLite” before launching a product with that name — someone else has already taken DashLite.com, for a company which sells torches under the brand (a registered trademark, no less!) of “DASHLITE”.
A few days back, my original DashLite post was ranked first for that term… fortunately, it looks as though Google have either noticed, or Dashlite complained (but haven’t said anything to me… If anyone from Dashlite is reading this, please feel free to get in touch) and the index was resolved. Go figure!
Apologies to Conwave, Inc. for the error — to everyone else (and perhaps including them), here’s a demonstration of what accessible, semantic, keyword-driven design and content can do for you!
01 Apr 2005
Just thought I’d brag for a moment about how, with only one incoming link in the entire world, and no visible text on the webpage, a site achieved the number 1 Google match globally in under 24 hours after adding the first link.
Make that two links. The point stands, there’s not even any visible text on that page, and, had it been created with Fireworks or Photoshop or something that autosplices and makes a table, search engines still wouldn’t know about it.
Full disclosure: www.simonbreakspear.com.au is a website developed by base10solutions, for whom I work. The holder page located there at present should only persist a while longer, until the full website launches.
29 Mar 2005
We got motorised roller shutters installed today from… some company that does that thing. Basically our back area is a greenhouse (effectively), and gets stupidly hot… and we’re not quite in winter yet, but predictions run that it’ll also get stupidly cold at night with heat escaping through the glass.
So… it was an excuse for some pictures.
It also has a fun switch to play with…
28 Mar 2005
Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed until just yesterday when I was testing out a contact form for a website under development that my PHP mail() wasn’t working properly. I really should have — WordPress sends out moderation emails for comments, and the absence of those in testing should have made me think twice, but it didn’t.
So, PHP and Sendmail weren’t playing nice. The default command is sendmail -t -i, if you don’t manually set sendmail_path in your php.ini configuration, but this wasn’t working.
Unfortunately, due to some degree of stupidity in the way things are run, you need to use an absolute path for PHP to find where it is (even if just the command “sendmail” works fine from a terminal… like I said, stupid), so if you want mail, you have to play by its rules. For no apparent reason.
This is all with stock Ubuntu versions of Apache2 and PHP, by the way — the stupidity may go away if you do-it-yourself, but I’m kind of doubting it.
Anyway, assuming you’ve got sendmail (or an MTA which provides sendmail hooks — I’m actually using postfix here) installed, you can simply set this in your php.ini, restart Apache (using apache2ctl restart from a root account), and all should be working:
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t
Bingo!