Monday, October 27, 2008

Alexa

Alexa has some useful information about sites. My site's ranking compared to other sites can be useful for research. Alexa for http://randomthoughts.club/

Who Is Random Thoughts?

Domain Tools has some interesting information about sites. whois randomthoughts.club I got 3,100 unique visitors to my site last month. I didn't know I got that many visitors. Is this information accurate?

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts: "what makes money so important?"

Friday, October 24, 2008

My Facebook Badge

Adam Cox's Facebook profile

Cities I've Visited

How does this function?


Wednesday, October 15, 2008

McCain or Obama?

I am voting for John McCain!

My perception on the two candidates are this:

1) Obama wants to take money from people that work hard for it and
give it to people that hardly do any work at all


2) McCain wants to reward the hard workers by letting them keep what
they earn and not take the hard workers money and give it to the
people that hardly work at all

Do you agree?

Monday, October 6, 2008

Migrating Drupal to New Server

Recently, I migrated Drupal 6.x to a new server. The front page still worked, but all the links were broken. They were all still pointing to the correct place, but for some strange reason, they were not found. The URL stayed the same. I simply updated the DNS to point to the IP address of my new server. This is a major issue. I migrated many sites to this new server and there have been several problems. On a site where I used SOAP, I had to install the SOAP module where as it was already installed on my other server. All my sites used to be on a dedicated server from http://www.joyent.com/, but now they are hosted on my Mac OS X beast. The $125 a month dedicated server did not come close in processing and disc quota to my 240 GB hard drive, core duo, G5 with version 10.5 of OS X. It was kind of a pain setting up MySQL because of all the out of date, incorrect tutorials online. The tutorial that got MySQL working, was the simple install instructions at the MySQL website.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Model for Random Thoughts Web Site

Refactor site:

-          *Make befriend functionality

-          *Fix up user profiles

-          *User’s name and link to profile should be next to each random thought

-          *Add categories

-          *Add tags

o       Use the keyword generator from webdesignerbostonma.com/

o       Make field for new posts and comments

-          *Add a “Recently Commented” and “Recently Added” link

-          *Google Analytics

-          *Allow comments on the search page for a “tag”

-          *Add a “BlogThese” to browse page, search page, shop page, learn page, ete…

-          *Make a mobile browser interface

o       Submit it places to raise page rank

o       Doubles the number of pages

o       Make sure Meta is set correctly

-          *Use Theme chooser from Binding Designs, LLC

-          *Allow users to create their own version of the MicroBlogger/social network such as Ning.

o       Fill in all the fields

-          *User Signatures

-          *Fix up shopping for keywords

-          *Words should have box show on hover with link to:

o       “people interested in …” use keyword generator with all of that users posts to make the matches

o       “random thoughts on …”

o       “shop for …”

o       “search for …”

-          *Enable links only by users linking back to the site.

o       Verify site by making call and checking for link

o       Do not allow rel=”nofollow”

o       Link to the page that links back

-          *Clean-up GUI

-          *Fix XSS scripting: http://randomthoughts.club/page.php?lim=8293 or whatever is making that mess.

-          *Make a box/border around the displayed random thought.

o       Make a message about rolling over each of the words

-          *Create networks

-          *Make a bookmark for each page that will allow the users to bookmark any page on the site…or even other sites

-          Make a blog, wiki, forum and merge them into the existing site

o       Blog – allow users to make posts

o       Forum – allow users to discuss about certain related topics

o       Wiki – discuss how to make user’s own version of the random thoughts website

o       Allow users to put ads on their version of the website

§         Allow users to put ads on their posts

-          Create an interface and outsource the implementation of the interface to offshores.

o       Safety, never send out the existing code. Just get an object with it all implemented.

-          Make global config/html/settings page for PHP

-          Get an open-source dictionary of words to search/shop/learn more about

-          Make a voting system to allow users to mark as good or bad and then view another one…continuing this process…

o       Make these searchable by good thoughts and remove the bad thoughts/spam

-          Make e-mail script to able mailings to all users

-          Make an admin interface for the users creating a website

-          Make classes or maybe at least a class…what is the point though?

-          Prevent bots from filling in fields/scanning entire site/rapidly creating posts: after 5 posts from the same IP or Session, then show a captcha. Repeat this process.

-          Allow some HTML elements: BR, A, I, B, U, IMG – use “rel=nofollow”

-          Get open-source form for filling out posts/comments with GUI

-          Make Posts/Comments editable/deletable

-          AJAX Posts/Comments

-          Fix /index.php and /gadgets/page.php to better fit user experience

-          Direct user’s towards commenting or adding a new random thought equally rather than having “Add Random Thought” form on home page

-          Filter Random Thoughts by users/anonymous/date/etc…

-          Rate this Random Thought: (*****) AJAX style!

-          Embed: embed a Youtube video, Map, other open-source content into a Random Thought. Have link to directions to get a Map, Youtube video, etc…

-          JavaScript hover box for links to random thoughts from browse page

-          Use prototype for AJAX calls. Use Scriptaculous Library to fade in Random Thoughts and fade away old ones and fade in new ones when New Thought is clicked. This could make AJAX calls to the server.

-          Add rating with AJAX libraries…use stars or images.

-          Blacklist bots.

-          Use keyword script to generate keywords mapping to a Random Thought page for AdWords.

-          Use the term MicroBlog

-          Make a “Similar/Related” link for other related entries.

o       “You may also like…”

-          Fix the overall flow/user interaction

-          Make a website builder out of it to customize the theme, title, field names, etc…

-          Make posts browsable by length of post: small(<100>100,<1000>1000 chacacters).

-          Allow users to save product searches

-          Allow users to send an item to a friend

-          Incorporate the login feature into OpenID, Facebook Connect, Yahoo!, etc…

-          Make a very detailed, concise FAQ

-          Add a more options to the post to add other things like YouTube, GoogleMaps, Images, etc…

PHP and MySQL with Apache on Mac OS X

The process of installing the *AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Mac OS X is basically like the typical install of LAMP.

First, to start the web server, go to system preferences, turn sharing on, and check the Web Server check box. This enables the /Library/WebServer directory to be open on the web. The web address will be displayed within the system preferences pane for the sharing. The /Library/WebServer/Documents folder will now host the files for your web server. An HTML file can be held here.

To add PHP, go to the http.conf file and uncomment the LoadModule directive for PHP. A default install of PHP is already installed on Mac OS X. Restart Apache and now a PHP file can be place in the /Library/WebServer/Documents folder and it will process as usual.

To add MySQL, the MySQL package for Mac OS X must be downloaded from MySQL for Mac OS X
website. It is necessary to make some configurations for your system to run MySQL. The configuration of MySQL on Mac OS X can be accomplished by following the directions on that website.