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To Microsoft's credit

Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 12:26 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #266)

I was discussing a problem in Windows with someone online, and the conversation turned to the fact that the type of problem -- though not this particular manifestation -- stretched all the way back to Windows 3.0, the first usable desktop computer with multitasking.

So, for grins I looked on MS's support website for the fix. And sure enough, right there was an EXE waiting to be downloaded for Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups.

Now, I understand that this is no longer an officially supported fix. But, it's still exceedingly hip of MS to have it out there. Especially for an OS that hasn't been since 1995. Last updates were issued in 2003.

Just so the Macophiles don't feel picked, you can find Apple updates on their site going back to to Mac OS 8. Last updates were issued in 1998.

I throw that out there as a weird observation, since I think folks don't take enough time to appreciate what a good job some of these companies do.

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Tracking expiring and dropping domain names

Monday, February 15, 2010, 1:29 PM
Website Design by John (Article #265)

This is my most recent big project: DropCatchSell.com, a site for tracking expired and dropped domain names with value.

This is the culmination of much of my recent research into PR, SERP and other ranking systems. The idea is pretty straight forward if you understand the domain name acquisition process.

The big problem with what is known in domaining as "drop catching" is the majority of expiring and dropping websites aren't worth the cost of registering them. The thing is, on any given day, between 250,000 and 400,000 domain names drop. And that's only counting the major US TLDs, such as .com, .net, .org, .info, etc.

The goal with DropCatchSell is to build a website that does a respectable of filtering out the garbage domains and leaving behind those with real value. Short domains (4 letters or less), two syllable medium domains, dictionary names, ones with established traffic, etc.

It's still very, very beta. I hope to keep it free, but a big part of the beta is deciding whether free is a workable business model.

Check it out. Use the contact form to let me know what you think.

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GoDaddy finally cleans up its checkout process

Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 5:20 PM
Business by John (Article #264)

GoDaddy has finally gone and done it. At long last, they've fixed a lot of what is wrong with their checkout process.

The #1 thing I now love is there is the option to permanently point all your future registrations toward your name servers -- long overdue, and good riddance to GoDaddy's fugly parking pages.

Overall, the process is quicker, with fewer nags. The last remaining nag, to renew your upcoming domains, can be seen as a feature. It doesn't bother me enough to be a black mark.

The only downside is that some checkouts with certain coupon codes seem to prohibit using PayPal. Sucks. But, again not bad enough to be a black mark.

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Back to basics: clean up your link names

Friday, January 22, 2010, 11:44 AM
Website Design by John (Article #263)

One of the biggest things search engine providers -- and thereby search engine users (your potential visitors and customers) -- rely up is the quality of the text in your links.

While you don't want to engage in skeevy techniques that amount to Googlebombing, you do want to do your level best to write your links cleanly for the actual thing that page you're linking to is about.

The classic bad link name is "click here". While it makes a great deal of sense within a sentence, for example, saying "for more information on ridding your property of unwanted widgets, click here", it doesn't make life easy for Google, Yahoo and Bing's bots that are indexing your page.

As a content creator, it is your social responsibility to ensure that the pages those bots index have good, meaningful links on them. The entire notion of a usable semantic internet hinges on good links.

So, if the page you're linking to is about "removing unwanted widgets from your notwidget pond", that entire string of text needs to be the main text inside the A tag of your link.

It represents one of the big shifts in editorial decision making in the age of the internet. And it is shocking how much of it goes to waste. Don't let your perfectly good links go to waste in the search engine simply by poor linking. Improve your links. Thing when you're righting about what part of the sentence is the semantically linkable part. Keep that in your head at all times when you are writing for the web. Not only will you improve your own website, you'll improve the general internet.

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What the internet will look like in hell

Thursday, January 21, 2010, 10:06 AM
Website Design by John (Article #262)

Check this out: this is what the internet will look like in hell.

So many things done wrong. The Flash intro (frustrates customers who might just want the phone number). The Flash navigation (makes it hard for Google to index). The skip intro link (loses juice for the front page).

As a design it's almost bad to the point of being cute.

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Early release of expired domains is rare

Monday, January 18, 2010, 1:06 PM
Business by John (Article #261)

The last weekend I started compiling data on how expired domain names are handled. Here are the highlights:

1. While a lot of registrars do hold onto higher quality domains, the percentage of total expired domains that scored well in my analysis (respectable in-bound links, domain uses real English words, etc) that the registrars actually held onto themselves was surprisingly low.

2. More domains made it out of the auction period than I would have expected. In fact, of those expired domains with a PageRank of three and at least one inbound link from a ranked website, about two-thirds coasted through auction without a big.

3. Very, very few domains were released early. Of the approximately 2000 expired domains included in the analysis, only three were released within two days of their expiration.

Now this is all very preliminary. So, don't get married to any of this not-really information. But, I thought it was interesting and worth sharing.

[NOTE: Added on January 19.]

Having tweak my analysis tool quite a bit, I've determined that the quick drop rate is somewhere below five percent.

The one thing I have to say is that the people at various stages of handling the death of a thousand cuts that is an expiring domain are good at what they do. The whole system has that slightly too mysterious quality that any good racket requires. It's hard to determine when a name will drop. Notification of a genuine delete -- the last stage where the name becomes immediately available to be registered anywhere -- held onto until as late as possible.

Based on the domains that are thrown overboard early, the domain registrars know exactly how well any domain performs while in expired status. If a domain drops early, you should take that as evidence that it has nothing -- no link juice, zero visitors, not enough value to even waste the electricity to keep a "this domain may be for sale" pitch up and running on the URL.

What I'm very interested in now is seeing how the better domains (any domain with a PR greater than 3, a single inbound link, or any real traffic besides domainers) move through the pipeline and become honestly deleted.

At some point the damned things do have to drop into the public pool of domains. And even hunting for domains manually, I've found some winners. So, its not so much a cut-throat business as it is a slightly dreadful business amid a tsunami of data.

We'll see.

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The PageRank experiment first results

Wednesday, January 6, 2010, 11:16 AM
Website Design by John (Article #260)

The PageRank experiment I had mentioned in December has already yielded some interesting results.

Let me just say I don't understand the first result at all.

There were three sites used. The first site was a revived site that had previously been deleted. It has a few inboud links from a PR3 website. The second site is a continuously registered domain with links from many PR2 and PR3 sites. The third has a single link from a PR5 website.

Google began updating PageRanks right after the New Year. Apparently the first wave of updates pertains to new websites, because those are the ones that seem to be popping up with new PRs all over the place.

The third site, with the single inbound PR5, has a PR0. It turns out, I forgot to move this site over to a new server when I canceled the one it was on. Oops. But easy to understand.

The second site went from PR0 to PR2. Roughly what I expected. I thought it was on the border of PR2 and PR3 and it fell a bit short. Again, very understandable.

The first site is the one that perplexes me. It has several inbound links, but only from a single PR3 website. It went from no PR to PR3. The inbound link site links to five other websites. My understanding of PR indicates this should have resulted in a PR2 website. And this makes me wonder if the inbound link site has some special juice as a trusted website. Hmm.

PageRank followers believe that Google will begin updating more often in 2010. In previous years, Google updated PRs four times a year, on a very rough schedule of every three months. The current prevailing view is that Google is now updating every two months.

So, the experiment continues.

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Fixing the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX bug

Monday, January 4, 2010, 2:05 PM
Website Design by John (Article #259)

Like many folks using a standard LAMP stack system, I've gotten the joy of waking up this Monday to support calls caused by the FH_DATE_PAST_20XX bug.

FH_DATE_PAST_20XX is a bug in SpamAssassin, that scores any sent email from January 1, 2010 or later as spam (approx a 3.0 - 3.8 score, usually on a 5.0 scale to be declared spam).

Here's how you fix it (note that almost all of this requires root access).

1. Find the prefs file where the scoring is done.

On my GoDaddy virtual server, this file was /usr/share/spamassassin. The file is 50_scores.cf.

On most other systems it is going to be user_pref.cf. Or, if you're lucky, you can use the local.cf file in /etc/mail/. However, a lot of systems use different paths. Be warned.

2. Make a copy of the CF file.

I made a file named 50_scores-bak.cf.

3. Using the contents of the CF file, create a new one.

Of course, my new one was titled 50_scores.cf.

4. Do a search for 20xx and change the score.

This section will vary a lot depending on your system. On my system, it appeared as:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.075 0.084 0.054 0.088 # n=2

On some systems, it may be formatted simply as:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

As a rule of thumb, try to conform to what is going on already. If it's a more complicated series of scores, conform to that. Generally, for those using the local.cf file, "score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0" will work fine. If you have to guess, that would be the first format I'd try.

5. Restart the SpamAssassin server.

If the SpamAssassin service comes back live, you're done. This also varies greatly depending on the machine you're using.

It's also not a bad idea to restart all your other mail services. Once that's done, you should be able to send with scoring 60% of the way to spam on every send.

- - -

If there are any folks out there who need help with this, I do offer my services for profit at $40/hr. I know this can be a particularly nasty thing to fix on GoDaddy systems.

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Dear Fedex: enough notices

Thursday, December 31, 2009, 1:15 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #258)

Just a small thought: why does FedEx send a freakin email notice to registered users for every tiny outage they have? I understand the desire of any major company to project that they're on top of things. But, there is a boundary between saying, "Hey, we're here and we know when we screw up" and being overly demonstrative in that effort.

It's obnoxious, FedEx. Quit it.

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An experiment in PageRank

Tuesday, December 29, 2009, 4:25 PM
Website Design by John (Article #257)

I'm tired of the great PageRank mystery. Too much voodoo, not enough what to do.

So, I've spread out several domain name purchases with the intent of figuring out what we actually gain by certain inbound links from clearly ranked, legitimate websites.

The first sample is an expired domain, registered, with inbound links from a single legitimate PageRank 3, providing links on all pages. Based on general knowledge from the internet, I'm anticipating this will result in a PR of 2 for the revived website.

The second sample is a continuously registered domain with a previous PR of 0. It is being propped up by a ton of links from PR 2 and PR 3 websites. I also anticipate this resulting in a PR 3.

The third sample is purely propped by a single paid link from a legit PR 5 website that pushes out many links. I anticipate a PR 2 or PR 3 for this site.

I wish to keep the URLs anonymous in the hope of preventing any contamination of the experiment through further links. It's a pretty straight-forward idea: plug some stuff in and see what you get. Try to limit what you plug in so you can isolate what caused the uptick in PageRank.

I am hoping to have results around the beginning of March.

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