exec: The valuable friend to shared hosting

All the bloggers start out small. You won’t start blogging by paying over $20 for hosting per month. So, you go for cheap shared hosting. That is a very nice solution but it has a small problem. You don’t get to have a console access to the machine that your blog is hosted (except for BlueHost and a few others). Although in most cases you won’t care about it, there are a few times where such an access is more than valuable and time saving.

The most common problem with a blog powered by WordPress, is not being able to use the automatic update. When trying to access it, it asks for a username and password of the FTP/SFTP to use in order to update. That of course ruins the simplicity of the automatic update. This problem is caused by the file permissions on the server. When you open an FTP connection to your site, with a major FTP client, you must see a column there with the file permissions. Those must be set, so as to give the web server the permission to write on your files. That is done by adding “write” permission to the group. When you don’t have ssh access to your Linux powered server, that can be troublesome. Using the FTP client will take too long, so you end up updating by hand. Here comes the powerful “exec” command.

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Mailbox full of spam? Your fault!

This must sound aggressive but it’s 100% true. We all complain nowadays about the amount of spam landing on our inbox. My mailserver’s traffic is more like 80% spam to 20% legit emails. This is a huge problem for any mail provider and, in the end, the end user. So, i decided to make a small experiment. I wrote a small Perl crawler (i might discuss this on a later post) and put it out to collect e-mails. This was a quest to find out how easily can a spammer collect addresses to send their stupid spam to. I decided to make it ridiculously easy. I wouldn’t look for emails “disguised” in one way or another. I would be looking for plain ones. For instance, i wouldn’t be looking for “foo [at] bar.com”, which is a common disguise nowadays, but for “foo@bar.com”.

So, i started coding. About half an hour later i had the little bugger ready. About thirty lines of code. That easy. Now, all i needed, was a place to start searching from. The way it would operate was like a spider. Starting from one site, it would search for emails and then find references to other pages/sites and then visit those doing the same. I decided to go with the most “promising” category, the bloggers, such as me and you people. So, the starting page was a blogging submission catalog. From there the little spider would find it’s way to thousands of blogs.

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TweepMe: Good or bad?

The microblogging platform called Twitter, started a wild climb on the social media ladder the past year. Since the release of their API many services have jumped out on the internet world and have helped or swamped tweeple. Just recently this new service called TweepMe opened the gates. What they do is pretty simple to grasp. If you sign up they automatically add you as a follower to all other TweepMe users and you are automatically added to be followed by each of them back. Now, this has it’s good side but i think it’s a pitfall.

On the good ones. First of all, you have guaranteed followers. Even if you just signed up there is nothing to it. You follow and get followed by thousands of people. Secondly, because of the vastness of the users it will give you the opportunity to find some more interesting people you might have not found out about without. But think about it a little bit more…

A spammer that wants to promote their stupid product, all they have to do is sign up. No need for consent or anything. A few seconds later he can reach your timeline, no sweat. Moreover, besides those, what is the quality of your followers? Are they posting something that interests you? Imagine having 10000 followers at once and more than 60-70% being something you don’t care about. The impact? Try loading your twitter stream and having as much fun as you are having now…

A final thought that comes to my mind is the most essential one. Twitter has given all the users the opportunity to build their own world. They include anyone they feel is worth being there and exclude anyone they don’t care. So, their tweet stream is filled with interesting stuff that their friends come up with. Links, funny stuff, facts, quotes etc they are all there and most of the time it interests you. By joining that service wouldn’t that be harmed? And think about it the other way. If twitter was meant to be used that way wouldn’t it be designed that way from the beginning?

If, after all this negative energy, you are still interested in joining then hurry up and visit their site. The first 5000 users will get free lifetime membership. My guess from this, they will be charging monthly for this….????

PS: After posting i found this excellent article on the subject…

BloggerBuddy Hacks: Change the look and feel

With this post i am starting a small series of posts about customizing and maintaining BloggerBuddy. As you know BloggerBuddy is built upon the Adobe framework, AIR. This actually allows a programmer to use web development techniques and languages (HTML, Javascript) on a desktop application. What makes it unique is that it flawlessly integrates on online services.

So, essentially, BloggerBuddy is a web service, a “web site” if i may use the term. I’ve been asked before how you can change the width of the separator between the subscribed blogs and the feeds. It would be good if i added some sort of options page/window but, well i haven’t. So, a quick and dirty way to do it is simply to edit the css file responsible for the layout. Yes! There is a CSS file that controls the layout like every web page! The file resides on the folder you chose to install BloggerBuddy and it is called style.css. In there locate:

As you can see it’s a typical css block. This particular segment is responsible for the layout of the feeds list. What you need to change is the property “width” to something bigger or smaller according to your preferences. You can fiddle further with the file but i would suggest keeping a backup of the original one in case something gets extremely wrong. After you are done save the file and restart BloggerBuddy. Your changes will be reflected!

Feed problems when editing .htaccess on WordPress

Coding BloggerBuddy a couple of months back let me find out about some stuff that are common as a practice but i had no idea of. One example is the complete redirect of a blog’s feed to FeedBurner. According to some marketing and SEO masters out there one shouldn’t provide multiple ways to subscribe to one’s blog as this somehow is not good for business. I am not sure why, except for the fact that through FeedBurher you can track many stats about your readers. This being said i have seen this around the blogosphere, many blogs completely redirect their “/feed” that WordPress provides to FeedBurner using the .htaccess file. If that is not done the proper way it may damage your feed syndication.

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