Purplenova Web Hosting on your PC

Purplenova’s slogan claimed to have ‘redefined web hosting’, this is true to a very small extent in that Purplenova enables you to turn an ordinary desktop PC, or any computer with a broadband connection to the Internet, into a web server that can share applications, host websites, share documents, photos and just about anything that reside on the computer that you may want to share with the world or selected users.

The aforementioned services Purplenova helps you share or make available on the world wide web is not quite new, if you have the know how, you can easily do this yourself with built-in web serving capability that comes with the standard PC running any of the major desktop operating system including Linux and Mac.

What Purplenova does differently from yet to be released Windows Home Server or Windows Personal Web Server which comes bundled with Microsoft Windows computers is that a PC that is Web enabled with Purplenova is able to work as a fully functional Web Hosting server, able to perform complex DNS services needed to host
top level domain name or a sub domain name in the form of say temi.co.uk, whereas Windows Home Server can only host a sub domain of homeserver.com for example a site you host using Windows Home Server will have url that goes something like this: temi.homeserver.com .

Other features of Purplenova that makes it more advanced that Windows Home Serve includes the much more advanced way Purplenova interacts with services such as proxy servers, firewalls, IIS, Apache and other web
applications.
Purplenova is far easier to install than Microsoft Home Server, according to Infinishare Technologies, owners of Purplenov, “it takes only three minutes to install Purplenova and there is not need to reboot your computer”

[Read more]

Google Yahoo Proxy Exploit – Protect your site agaist it

Defence against the dark arts sound like something from Harry Potter but webmasters need to defend their website against some black hat search engine techniques.

One technique, which could be a black hat attack to get a site into trouble with leading search engine, is the proxy exploit.  Proxy servers used correctly can help some Internet users access sites they want to access legitimately, but for whatever reason they need to go through a proxy server.

The downside of proxy server is that they tend to cache the site they are used to access, the cached copy of the site creates a duplicate copy of the original site, which is then seem by search engines as duplicate contents, thereby penalising the original site for duplicate contents.  This can be devastating for a website, especially when the website owner is unaware that a copy of his site exists on another location on the Internet.

One of the senior members of UK Webmaster Forums Bagi, has brought together a hack that help you protect your website against this proxy duplicate contents exploit.

A snippet of the code can be found below, you can find the complete full code here.

 <?php
// Get the user agent.
$ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
// Check the user agent to see if it’s identifying itself as a search engine bot.
if(stristr($ua, ‘msnbot’) || stristr($ua, ‘googlebot’) || stristr($ua, ‘yahoo slurp’)){
// The user agent is purporting to be MSN’s  bot or Google’s bot or Yahoo! Slurp.
// If the user agent string is spoofed, we won’t find googlebot.com in the host name.
// Get the IP address requesting the page.
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
// Reverse DNS lookup the IP address to get a hostname.
$hostname = gethostbyaddr($ip);
// Check for ’.googlebot.com’ and ’/search.live.com’ in hostname.
if(!preg_match(“/\.googlebot\.com$/”, $hostname) &&!preg_match(“/search\.live\.com$/”, $hostname) &&!preg_match(“/crawl\.yahoo\.net$/”, $hostname)) {
// The host name does not belong to either live.com or googlebot.com.
// Remember the UA already said it is either MSNBot or Googlebot.
$block = TRUE;
header(“HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden”);
exit;
} else {
// Now we have a hit that half-passes the check. One last go:
// Forward DNS lookup the hostname to get an IP address.
$real_ip = gethostbyname($hostname);
if($ip!= $real_ip){
$block = TRUE;
header(“HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden”);
exit;
} else {
// Real bot.
$block = FALSE;
}
}
}
?>

You can find this code in Hungaria at Bagi’s blogs

Allskytv SEO Friendly Directory

————-Guest Blogger Jamie; AllskyTV Directory owner——————

Finding a good web directory these days can be quite an arduous task. Many directories offer the same things or start out well but quickly fade away. So how is this directory different? Allskytv SEO friendly directory has been designed specifically with you in mind. Each and every submitter would like to give their site the maximum possible exposure and that is exactly what you will get. On the submission page you will have the option to have deep links or not, the decision is yours. This is where Allskytv Directory is different. While there are many directories out there that offer deep links they are buried within the details page which can be as many as 4 clicks away from the homepage, this means that search engines are a lot less likely to find your links and pass the value onto you. On Allskytv Directory Links to the details page of the last 5 submissions are displayed sitewide. This means once your link is approved Google and other leading search engines will be guaranteed to find your dedicated details page along with the deep links you submitted. Featured links get the greatest benefit with 3 random links to details page shown on the homepage at all times. Don’t worry it doesn’t end there. All links are eligible for site of the day, this is where a site will be featured on the homepage for an entire day. As with other links it will point to the details page, which gives a detailed description of your site along with your deep links and advanced seo stats.

At Allskytv Directory there has been a great emphasis on search engine friendliness. All major categories have been optimised and have there very own title and metatags. This is a factor often missing from many other directories. It helps search engines to recognise the correct niche of your site and can furthermore help to boost your sites search engine rankings. Another aspect that enhances your search engine exposure is the search engine friendly url’s. You will notice that the url’s to details pages reflect that of the title of your site Example.

Thanks to the time and thought that has been put into Allskytv Directory you will get a nice amount of traffic, at the time of writing with an alexa ranking of close to 100,000 and many thousands of back links this is testament to the hard work and time that has been put into this directory.

While much of the efforts has gone into the seo of the directory you can see the site has a completely unique design. Made for easy user navigation and pleasant appearance, large thumbnails are in use, so your site will be shown the way you would like it. While you are visiting Allskytv Directory don’t forget to check out the sponsors and partner links. If you are seeking more places to submit your link you there is also a great list of Directories. Submit your link to Allskytv SEO Friendly Directory today.

You can discuss this post at Webmaster Forum

Web Development – HeyDJ.COM

First off, I’d wanted to run my own record store since I was at school, I did actually run a high street store at the age of 19 with a mate called Greg who was 17 I think?
We made a great success of it in a short space of time but the lease of the building came up for renewal and the prospect of taking out a new lease with minimum 6 month contract was a little scary, large amounts of cash up front, higher rates, new premises to establish and fit out… we decided it was a step too far for us so the dream was once again put on a back burner.

I then found myself in a position where I could start thinking about an store again, but this time it would be online or virtual. This way costs such as high rent, rates and decor could be cut out of the equation.

The name www.heydj.com was conceived, ideal for a compact house, funk and disco record store for DJs. A kind of micro record shop easily reachable from anywhere in the world by the click of a button. Not stocking everything around but just what we felt would be quality for DJs who don’t have time to trawl through every release online.
I checked for the domain name and it was taken, I contacted the owner who wasn’t doing anything with it and we agreed on a price which seemed reasonable.

Next up was a rough master plan on paper and then gradually a designed static site on photo shop, through this process I had to think in advance how the site would navigate, this was extremely difficult but was aided by a technical brief which I wrote so that the web programmer would know in detail how I wanted features to work.

I submitted my plan to the programmer who started to build the site, a rough mock up was made first which had to be tweaked and then the main site began to take shape.
Because of some of the advanced features the site had to be database driven which means it’s not a straight forward website and you have to have someone who really knows what they are doing, my programmer is extremely competent.

The website went through several design changes but the overall concept remained the same.
As the site neared completion I started thinking about Search Engine Optimisation, this is crucial as it is the equivalent to passing trade on a high street. My friend Temi suggested carrying this out as soon as possible and in truth I probably left it a little late so for any one in the same position, think about SEO as soon as you can, it’s an ongoing process but essential if you want to succeed.

My final process to set up the working record store was to sign up for a payment gateway and in my case it was with HSBC. I set a launch date and then paid up front for the payment gateway script, I then discovered that HSBC didn’t support PHP, this was a massive blow as I had already paid them up front which was non refundable and it was way too late in the game to change to world pay or alike, I had to pay the extra cost to get the programmer to rewrite the gateway script into PHP which luckily enough he knew how to execute.

HSBC were helpful as much as they could be but in all honesty their incompetence cost me time and money and in retrospect I’d have gone for word pay to begin with and see how that fared. It does have the advantage that whatever transactions go through appear the next day in my account but it’s a high price to pay.

The website is now up and running and I am pleased with it’s progress, it is an ongoing game though and no website is ever “finished” IMO so I decided to sign up for web maintenance from Velnet which for £22.50 per month enables simple tweaks and changes to the site as and when the need arises – and it does

Post by Nick Byng, Webmaster Online Dance Music Store – HeyDJ 

Google webmaster tools starts to think international

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language – but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets. [Read more]

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