DS32.com - Welcome

http://www.cw.com/ – Very very nice looking site, easy to use, well written… Shame it doesn’t validate!!

If you run an exchange server and have trouble keeping off blacklists, this is a great site to check out – they have news about all the popular DNSBLs and some great articles about keeping your server off of blacklists – definitely worth checking out!

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

This is a great tool that puts another light on search engine optimisation – as most people will know, Google has recently confirmed the completion of its new search index – Google Caffine, which takes the speed of a website much more seriously.  The link above will take you to a great (and free) online tool that will test the speed of your website – and the factors that effect the result – it will detail for you the size of your page, the amount of objects on the page, size of css,images,javascript etc and it also gives you advise on how to optimise your site for speed.

The great thing about this tool is that once you start reading the recommendations, you get enveloped in it – I ended up learning about, and implimenting CSS Sprites, optimising external JS files and removing space amongst other things.

Lastly, I love the websites layout, its actually a very basic design, but I think it looks great – and its one of those websites you can tell has been built on functionality, whats more, it actually validates – which isnt seen much these days!!!

This is a great bit of information I came across recently which describes the default formating of elements in HTML4 – it came in handy for me today as I had a heading set up as H3 – but I wanted to change this to a span (for SEO purposes) without loosing the current formating. With this info, all I had to do was copy the default styling to my span.class and I was done!!

Take a look:  http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/sample.html

I have spent the last hour trying to work out why out of office would not work… Then I discovered that on Exchange 2003 it is turned of at the server for external addresses by default!

To enable it, goto Exchange system manager>Global Settings> Internet Message Format>Default> Properties>Advanced And tick “allow out of office responses”. Then restart the SMTP server, and all should work!!

References: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821899

This is a video from Google IO 2010. Matt Cutts talks with Tiffany Lane, Greg Grothaus and Vanessa Fox about SEO strategies by critiquing user submitted websites concerning their SEO efforts.

If you are interested in SEO this is a must watch – there are some great tips in the video presented in a practical manner.

Click here to Watch the Video.

Six big technology companies are joining forces to fund a non-profit company to help speed development of Linux-based software…Read the full article

Looks like W3C validator is down again!! Hopefully it will be back up soon:)

Anyone else getting a google 502 server error this morning or is it just me?

I came across a problem with Outlook Express today where the client could receive email, but could not send it. After looking up the error code on Microsofts Website, I found this KB Article highlighting a known issue with MSN which prevents any other outgoing mail service from being used while MSN is connected.

However, this did not solve the problem. To further investigate, I opened a telnet session to the smtp server in question, and found that the connection could not be made (although it connected successfully from an external machine).

It turned out that port 25 (Outgoing email port) had been blocked by the ISP, and to resolve the issue I had to use an alternate smtp port ( 587). This solved the problem! I think what had happened is after the machine was infected with a virus, the ISP blocked port 25 to prevent spam email from being sent out by the virus!!

This may sound like a trick question: everyone knows what SEO stands for don’t they? Ok, Ok, it stands for Search Engine Optimisation, or search engine optimization if your American.

What I’m really pondering is the broader meaning of SEO – there are so many under-hand methods of achieving higher rankings – and there are so many more methods labeled “white-hat SEO” that are actually just as bad.

I know the basics of SEO are pretty straight forward to grasp – write good content, code it properly with appropriate heading tags etc. Add descriptive meta tags to your pages, add descriptive alt attributes to your images and use descriptive link text for internal and external links and so on. This is, however, a massively time consuming task – especially if your website has been expanding for perhaps years and this work needs to be done from the ground up.

However, any SEO company that really wants to take some money from you, will undoubtedly try and sell you a link building package – and this is where things get tricky.

Most people involved in online media will know that Google uses back-links as a dominating factor in ranking search results – which is why a lot of SEO companies are now focusing on various different link building techniques – directory submissions, three way link exchanges, paid for links and many others.

Considering that links are supposed to be a tool for providing your visitors with useful information in addition to what you have to offer on your own site, almost all of these tactics are unethical by design – how can an automated or time-constrained link building strategy be producing useful links for your visitors?

My real question is:

Are there any ethical SEO companies out there – ones that follow all the guidelines and play by the rules, or does SEO stand for ” Trying to understand Google’s system and then breaking it? “

Went to see my friends band last night – they’re called internal scars. They have a really good sound and will hopefully be a big thing!!

Just got a reply from aol postmaster and our exchange server has been removed from their blacklist.

It has taken about 3 days. But they were helpfull – I must says it’s easier than getting removed from Yahoo’s blacklist!!

Found out today that SBS 2003 does not allow another dhcp server on the same network – if it detects one running, it will terminate the local DHCP service.

Normally 1 DHCP server is enough, but sometimes its nice to have some redundancy in place.

It took me ages to find a work around for this scenario, so I thought I’d post it here:

1. Open Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Dhcpserver\Parameters

3. Create a new DWORD with the following registry value:
Value name: DisableRogueDetection
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Binary
Value data: (Hexadecimal) 1, which will be saved as 0×00000001

4. Restart the server.

I havnt tested this yet, so I dont guarantee it.

Sources:

http://www.winvistatips.com/second-dhcp-server-backup-sbs-network-t659516.html

Read my review of the recently re-designed Visitphilly.com – A great example of Design and UX (User Experience) working together.

I had a recent problem where our exchange server was blacklisted by AOL – I think this was because we didn’t have a custom Reverse DNS record setup for the mail server (IE our RDNS was bt-so-and-so.btaddressspace.com and should have been mail.ourdomain.com) – we sorted this out via our ISP – in this case it was Nildram – which is now owned by… You guessed it – TalkTalk! (Or Opal group as that is the parent company).

But that does not correct all the problems – because we had this incorrect RDNS, we had been blacklisted by AOL – I have applied to have our mail server removed – If you have the same problem, please see instructions for removal here.

When I get the problem completely resolved, I will post further details…

Unfortunately I have now decided to take Flinks.org down – the reasons are partly because I dont have time to update it, and secondly because I dont really support directories so I thought it was a bit hypocrital to be hosting a directory!