Is HostGator Any Good?

December 27th, 2011

For years I rented a dedicated server until I revised what it was costing me versus what advantages it brought me. It was not that expensive, under a hundred dollars a month, but it was hard to justify spending over 1100 USD a year when I could actually spend less than 16 percent of that for shared hosting and lose very little in terms of flexibility.

I considered three of the biggest discount hosting services: GoDaddy, 1and1, and Hostgator. I ignored Yahoo hosting because what they offer is great for Joe Schmoe, but just  not what a serious programmer needs. I chose HostGator because it was the only one that accepted PayPal as payment. I elected to go with their business hosting package, which allows me to host an unlimited number of sites and Mysql databases for about fifteen dollars a month. The web-based control panel has pretty much everything you need, including an easy way to add new domains and email addresses. I also have Linux shell access via ssh/sftp, which they grant you if you ask for it, and although I cannot do anything that requires root access, I have my familiar command line interface whenever I need it!

It has been almost a year and there have not been any outages. Their customer service was fairly quick to respond via email, but not always with the right answers, although eventually I hit someone who was knowledgeable. I signed-up for their affiliate program, but so far it has not yielded a single cent in commissions. Generally, it is better to join affiliate programs where you get paid per click rather than per sale, but they do not offer that option. Another criticism I might make is that they use a third party service for domain purchases instead of their own as GoDaddy and 1and1 do. 1and1 wins on that count, with discounted first year charges and low annual fees after that. Note that you can still use that part of their service even if you are hosted at the competition.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with HostGator and not planning to move anytime soon! Click here to visit their website.

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Fake Money Poker: Not Poker

November 28th, 2011

Okay, this one has little to do with programming per se…

Like many of my fellow programmers, I love playing poker, but I advise anybody who is serious about the game, or wanting to learn, against playing the free online play money poker. Not only are the stakes fictitious but the game you’ll be playing has nothing to do with real poker.

It’s not that the free online games are badly engineered — nothing could be further from the truth — it’s just that the majority of people who will play against you will do so in a most unrealistic manner. Because it’s not real money, they will play the worst hands, regardless of odds and their position versus the dealer button. They will usually  call all your raises and there’s no shortage of kamikaze all-in idiots who will just get an auto chip refill when they lose it all so strategy pretty much goes down the drain along with the aforementioned realism. It gets too stupid after just a few hands. If this is where you learn to play poker, you will have a very distorted idea of the game!

The only realistic poker involves real money, because of human nature (you think twice before throwing it all away). Thus if you are going to play the game, play the real money version online (unless you live in the USA, where it is quasi against the law), go down to the casino, or invite some friends over for a traditional poker night!

 

 

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Are Paid Links and Paid Posts Evil?

September 4th, 2011

If you manage your own blog or small web site, you know that growing your viewership is painstaking and results are likely to be minimal for all the effort. You’ve probably heard the  adage that if you produce interesting content, others will find you and will organically link to your site from theirs and eventually your its popularity shoots up. Maybe that was enough 10 years ago, but not now, unless a major web site touts yours. There’s about 44 billion web pages in Google’s index alone, so getting found is no small feat, never mind what bs seo “experts” claim. So how can your labor of love make any money?

It’s not evil to want to make a bit of money, even if it only covers the hosting costs. There’s referral programs you can join, but if they only pay for conversions, where your referral actually buys something, your chances are nearly nil. There’s some programs that pay you a few pennies per unique click, but again, if you don’t have the traffic, it will take some time before you get something out of it (most set a minimum accumulated commission before they pay out). Referral programs are better than nothing, so by all means use those that are most likely to yield results.

Selling banner ad space is virtually impossible unless your monthly visits are in the tens of thousands. What is left is actually the kind of stuff that makes Google cringe: paid text links and paid posts.Whether you join some kind of program or someone comes to you (it happened to me repeatedly), you’ll stand the chance to collect a small fee for minimum effort. The problem is that these advertisers, although offering something that’s relevant to your web site’s topic, aren’t looking for return traffic but rather contextual back links, their goal being to improve their position in major search engine results.

In the case of a paid post, they’ll either ask you to place their own article with a contextual link embedded, or let you write your own with the aforementioned link in it. Using theirs is a sure fire way to get flack because it’ll obviously be somebody else’s writing, while writing your own, if the topic is germane to your web site, is not that dark a proposition, though what you write might be slanted in favor of the advertiser rather than an objective critique — they usually reserve the right to request changes. They’ll probably offer a one time fee, which, if you think about it, is a rip-off considering it constitutes a permanent advertisement. Simple paid contextual links, typically earn you a monthly fee, and you can remove the link if you or the advertiser cancel the arrangement.

Google, the God whose decisions can make or break web sites, frowns upon both paid links and paid posts. They hate paid posts with a passion, but as sophisticated as their detection methods may be, I don’t think they’re penalizing web sites who have them because of the difficulty in determining if the link is organic or not. As for paid links, which tend to be found in blog rolls, they’re easier to identify, and in this case I have an inkling that they do beget a Pagerank penalty.

Truthfully, a paid post is a bit more insiduous because you’re writing a biased article, but in the case of a paid link, why is that any worse than a paid banner if what is being offered is related to the web site it’s on and isn’t a scam? If they want to penalize the advertisers who engage in anything that tries to influence their positioning in search results, fine, but is it fair to also discredit small web sites who only have this as a source of income? Sorry, I can’t see this as worse than some major web sites, such as weather.com, that are chock full of spammy banner ads!

 

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CakePHP Printable Cookbook Page Generator

August 17th, 2011

CakePhp is one of the most popular php-based web application frameworks, but it’s not without its frustrations. I’m not speaking of its steep learning curve, but its misnamed cookbook, which is really its manual.   Try as you may, you won’t get their cookbook to print properly, and there’s no version in book form that you can buy. Did they make it this way intentionally?

If you’re a little bit patient, I have a free solution for you, that will save you a bundle on ink cartridges. It’s a little script which you can use that will churn out printable versions of the cookbook pages you need, minus the stuff that causes the problems and the header and sidebar. I can’t host the script on my site since it might get me the wrath of the CakePhp people, and I can’t offer you a ready made printable manual for the same reason. Thus, the fair thing to do is to give you the code below and you use it on your own web site on a non-public page for your own use.

Usage: Just enter the full cookbook URLs into the form and it will fetch them, parse them, and then combine them into one html doc, which you can then save or print directly from your browser. It’s probably not a good idea to try to paste hundreds of URLs at a time. What I did was go section by section. Here’s the code…


<?php
/**
* By Tom Germain, cgiware.com
* Free for personal use only.
* CakePHP cookbook printable page generator
* Just install this on your web site and use it!
**/
if(isset($_REQUEST['url'])&&!empty($_REQUEST['url'])){
$URLS=explode("\n",$_REQUEST['url']);
if(count($URLS)==1) $URLS=explode("\r",$_REQUEST['url']);

$DOC="";
foreach($URLS as $url){
$url=trim($url);
if(!$url) continue;

$HTML=file_get_contents($url);

if(!$HTML){
echo "Could not fetch url: $url";
exit;
}

$x=explode('<div class="node-nav">',$HTML);
$HTML=array_shift($x);
$x=explode('<div id="content">',$HTML);
$HTML=array_pop($x);

$HTML=preg_replace('/<a href="http\:\/\/cakefest\.org".+?<\/a>\n/','',$HTML);

$x=explode('<ol class="code">',$HTML);
$HTML=array_shift($x);
foreach($x as $xx){
$y=explode("</ol>",$xx);
$HTML.=array_pop($y);
}

$HTML=preg_replace('/<div class="options">(.|\n)+?<\/div>/m','',$HTML);
$HTML=preg_replace('/<div class="comments".+?<\/div>/','',$HTML);

$HTML=str_replace('class="code"','style="color: blue; font-style:italic;"',$HTML);
if($DOC) $DOC.="<p><hr><p>";
$DOC.=$HTML;
sleep(1);
}

 

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
print $DOC;
exit;
}
?>
<form method="POST">
Enter URLs and hit button: <p><textarea cols=80 rows=40 name="url"></textarea>
<p>
<input type=submit>
</form>

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Yahoo Domains, Thanks for Screwing Me!

August 7th, 2011

It was three days ago that I bought the domain facebooknut.com through Yahoo Domains. I received a confirmation email saying the registration was completed and I could begin using it, and the transaction appeared in my PayPal account. Flash forward to today, August 6,  and I can’t find facebooknut.com in my Yahoo Small Business domain manager. Not only that, but a whois on the domain showed me that someone in Mumbai, India, has just registered it.

What the heck has happened? Has someone hacked my account? Is the domain transfer not locked by default? I submit a call back request and seconds later I’m talking to a Yahoo customer support rep (who’s clearly not at a call center in India, I might add!). Turns out that Yahoo has a back end program which watches for certain keywords in domains that you register, including “facebook”. It canceled my registration silently.

At no time did I receive any notice that this had happened. The proper way of handling this would have been to warn me right at the time I submitted the domain. This would have afforded me the opportunity to use another registrar that has no such restrictions. Instead, it was swiped by some opportunist in India that has some means of watching lists of newly registered domains, likely checking against whois to see if any fell through.

I needed this domain for a Facebook api faq site, not some phishing scam. Moral of the story: be weary of registering any domain with Yahoo (and possibly others) that contains the name of a top website, product, or company, and  not because you could get sued. Ask what their policy is.

Thanks Yahoo! You’re lucky I don’t sue you!

 

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