Jul 28th, 2007 by Michael
In this first installment of the WenderHost Screencast, I’m going to show you the proper way to cut and paste a Microsoft Word document into a WordPress post.
View Screencast Episode 1: WordPress and MS Word »Jun 25th, 2007 by Michael
Today I needed to grab a Flash file from one of my client’s websites. However, I did not have FTP access to the site, so I created an online form that lets me download Flash files quickly and easily.
For anyone else who needs such a tool, feel free to use my online SWF Downloader.
Jun 15th, 2007 by Michael
HTML Meta Tags have been around since the early days of the World Wide Web with search engines formerly relying heavily on them for the proper listing and classification of web pages. However, as search engines have become more sophisticated and the tags themselves have become subject to abuse, their importance has wained. So, Do Meta Tags Still Matter? More specifically, does my use of meta tags affect how my web page will be listed on a search engine?
My quick answer to that question is, yes, at least as far as Google search results are concerned, your description meta tag does appear to influence the content displayed with your search results listing. To demonstrate this, I’m going to give you a couple of examples from this blog based on search terms people are using on Google to find this site:
Search for “google apps cpanel“:
Search for “widget subpages“:
Search for “mirror cpanel server“:
You will notice that the description under the link for each of these search results is “Unique insights on PHP, WordPress. and Open Source”. This description corresponds to the description meta tag on each of these pages. Unfortunately, this description is ambiguous with regards to the specific content on each page.
What appears to have happened is Google has indexed these pages because they provide relevant content for the given search terms, and while indexing these pages, Google has included the description meta in the result. I am pointing this out because the key to each of these pages being listed is an accurate page title and relevant content. So, the description tag doesn’t appear to have as much influence on how these pages are getting listed; however, having a better description would make these listings more useful.
To change this behavior and add more meaningful data to my search results, after publishing this post, I am going to install the Add Meta Tags WordPress Plugin by G-Loaded. This plugin will give me more control over my meta description tag. Once Google re-indexes these pages, their search listings should start displaying the new descriptions thereby giving more meaningful search results.
Update (June 20, 2007)
It is now five days since I updated the description meta tag on my blog posts, and as I suspected that description data is now showing beneath the Google search results for each of the search terms I mention above.
Jun 11th, 2007 by Michael
Recently, one of my clients asked me to mirror his web server. The only problem with this request was that I host his web site on my WHM reseller account, and his budget would only cover another shared hosting package. Mirroring one shared hosting server via another shared hosting server seemed possible; however, I knew that the budget constraints meant I would be piecing together my own solution…
Now a couple of months after his request, I am happy to report that I have successfully setup a mirror of my client’s CPanel/WHM server. My technique combines the right combination of service providers, public key ssh authentication, rsync, mysqldump, and DNS Failover switching.
Jun 8th, 2007 by Michael
This video comes from this year’s TED Talks. It features Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Photosynth, a new photographic technology that may revolutionize how we interact with photographic data. You will definitely want to watch from 2:47 on as Blaise interacts with a multidimensional representation of Notre Dame made from thousands of Flickr images.
Jun 8th, 2007 by Michael
The following video provided by PopularMechanics.com shows an excellent demonstration of Microsoft’s surface computing technology:
Please note: Should you ever use one of these interfaces, I would recommend washing your hands before and after you use it. Unless, of course, Microsoft has built virus protection into the interface. 
