At around midnight last night I started the process to upgrade my Xubuntu 6.10 installation to 7.04, code named Feisty Fawn.

I sat here playing Tali, some kind of poker with dice, for an hour, then I went to bed. Browsing was kinda impossible, and the download was estimated to take about 15 hours.

Around 3 pm I checked the progress and finally, around 3:20 pm the download was completed. Then it took another 30 minutes to install the updates. At around 4 pm I could restart my machine to use Feisty Fawn.

While it looks as if nothing has changed, since i already have my computer configured the way I like it, it’s clear that things are different. In the time ahead I will explore the new features of this release and write about it. For now, I have work to do.

Since I’m downloading the upgrade to Xubuntu 7.04, my Internet connection is very slow, so I don’t feel like sitting behind my computer.

This makes room for doing some extra chores around the house, you know, those “make the husband look good” kind of activities.

My mother in law gave us some goat meat. I had never prepared goat before, so I decided to spend the afternoon trying it out.

I didn’t use too many fancy ingredients: Oyster sauce, onions, garlic, ground pepper, ketchup, ginger powder, salt, and rum. I cooked all these ingredients together, and let it cook for about an hour, to make the meat tender. 5 minutes before I turned it off, I added a little bit more rum, making the dish smell kinda like alcohol.

I thought it tasted great, so did my wife. Yet another successful cooking experiment. Next time I’m trying goat in coconut milk.

Today I saw the orange square with a white star appearing in my taskbar, the update notifier, meaning that there are software updates available for my Xubuntu installation. This time I noticed a different block telling me that a “New distribution release ’7.04′ is available” with an “Upgrade” button.

A couple of days ago the highly anticipated Ubuntu distro was released. Release 7.04, code named “Feisty Fawn” promised to have a lot of new features. One of the most promising features, especially for those who consider switching from Windows to Ubuntu, is the ability to have read/write access to NTFS file system partitions.

I wanted to let the rush pass by, which proved to be a smart decision. According to some, the Ubuntu site seemed to be experiencing a lot of downtime on the day of the release. On the day of the release of the Ubuntu distro (with the Gnome desktop) the Xubuntu version of Feisty Fawn was still in beta, according to the Xubuntu website.

Now it is available. And I’m going to upgrade to Feisty Fawn. Unfortunately my connection is rather slow, so this process might take some time. But even though it may take a day or so to upgrade, I will have to go through this, because I want to be up to date.

Besides keeping your code organized, the code also should be clean.

There are several explanations to what clean code is. To me clean code is code that is not cluttered with unnecessary tags, functions and bits of code. In modern day tableless design environment a lot of tags can be styled so other tags are not necessary.

To create a section with a bold, italic, orange title, with grayish content, aligned to center, with a line at the end of the section, you could do it like this:
<div><p><font color="#FF9900"><strong><em>This is the subtitle of this section</em></strong></font></p>
<div align="center"><font color="#666666"><p>This is the content of this section. It is aligned to the center, because I want it to look like that because I think it's beautiful.</p></font></div>
<hr />
</div>

But there’s a cleaner way to get this done:

<div class="my_section">
  <p class="my_section_title">This is the subtitle of this section</p>
  <p>This is the content of this section. It is aligned to the center, because I want it to look like that because I think it's beautiful.</p>
</div>

And then you style this section in your stylesheet:

.my_section {
  color: #666666;
  text-align: center;
  border-bottom: 1 px solid;
}

.my_section p.my_section_title {
  color: #FF9900;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: italic;
  text-align: left;
}

Isn’t that more code?
Well, you do type a little more the first time. But working this way has several benefits:

1. Your code is structural code (HTML) is separated from your styling code (CSS) which makes both clean.
2. When you have several sections, you don’t need to add the styling code to the HTML of each one of these section. Just add the class and it will adapt to the appropriate styles.
3. With 20 sections, changing the color of the head to a lighter shade of orange would simply mean changing 1 line in your CSS. In the other case you would need to change that 20 times.
4. Search engines love not to have to go through all kinds of cluttering (styling) code to find your content.

Programming
The same principles can be used in programming and scripting. Instead of repeating a certain action, you can create a function with the action to be taken, and call this function where you need these actions taken.

I made it a habit to create a file called functions.php where I store all my functions, and I include this file everywhere I need those actions defined in my functions. The same with database information, styling, constants, etc.

Conclusion
Clean code will save you and your visitors time. It’s easier to make changes when your code is clean and organized. And the less clutter a web server has to go through to be able to display the content, the faster the page will be displayed. Plus, search engines will love you more.

I got tagged by myself to write a poem for the poetry meme I started to get more traffic to A few good notes. I converted this blog to a poetry blog, giving others the opportunity to write their own poetry. So here goes:

When I get up out of bed
Where I was sleeping next to my wife
I walk straight to the other room
where I spend most of my life.

There she is, always ready for me
My computer, my second wife
The one I can’t be separated from
with gun or with knife

Call me a geek or whatever
but when I reboot her
I can feel the rush of energy
from my second wife, my computer

Yeah, smile as you want, I know you recognize yourself! But let me see what Menguzar and Infektia can come up with, ’cause I tag them.

One of Amazon’s Significant Seven for April: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

In a recent post Matt Cutts of Google writes about How to report paid links to Google. He explains that Google is needs more sites for testing, because he (and the Google team) wants to tweak the existing algorithms for finding paid links.

He makes it abundantly clear that they are not against paid links in general, but they are targeting paid links to gain a higher search engine ranking. In 2005 he suggested to use the “nofollow” attribute. As I understand it, to be safe, when placing paid links in your blog, you would need to add the nofollow tag to the link.

My problems
Nowadays smaller blogs (and sometimes even bigger blogs) have a hard time getting ahead and being noticed without using paid links (either buy or sell). I don’t know no one who would buy a link on my blog if there was a nofollow tag connected to the link. Most online businesses (which include bloggers) buy these links mainly to get noticed. And getting noticed means getting a higher ranking in the search results.

What’s the difference between a paid link without the nofollow tag and a unpaid link without the nofollow tag? Why are algorithms tweaked to look for paid links while there are a lot of other unpaid links what are flowing around? Take John Chow for instance. There are thousands of people reviewing his blog and writing about his blog and he regularly posts batches of 10 links back to those who have reviewed him. Now he asks to link to his blog with a specific set of keywords to get to the number one spot of the results of searches using that keyword. His methods are copied by a lot of others, because this is simply one of the best ways to get a higher ranking. This brings me to only one conclusion: Google seems to target their competition. The more people sell text ads, usually for a better Cost Per Click (CPC) rate, the less people will use Adwords and Adsense.

This bring me to another question: How the hell does Google know which links are paid links? Instead of displaying the paid links in some kind of “Sponsored links” section, I can just add them in my blogroll, or in another section. How will Google know that they are paid for? Does Google access my financial information? Does Google know what my credit card expenses are? Do they have ways to find out through the financial systems who paid for what? Are they being allowed to go through financial records of money handling systems on the Internet? if not, how in heaven’s name will they be able to determine what is paid for and what not?

Who (are they) will they be punishing? The seller, the buyer, or both? If I buy a link on Mitch Harper’s blog, I have no control over if he uses the nofollow tag or not. Will I be punished for that reason? He will be punished, either way: If he does, he won’t get my money for long, if he doesn’t, Google may plummet his ranking, maybe even de-index his blog, or take away his “voting authority” so no site can get ranked using the links on his site.

Is this “attack on the paid links” directed to everyone? Or are some major sites excluded? Yahoo directory for instance is a paid service: You need to pay to get your site in that directory. However, Yahoo does not use the nofollow tag in their links in the directory. Maybe it’s specified in their robots.txt file or through some other method, that those links should not be followed, but from the looks of it, I don’t think they would charge for those links only to tell search engine spiders “that the link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine”. Guess what, dir.yahoo.com has PR 8 (PR = PageRank). Yahoo.com has PR 9 (out of 10). Hell, if you search Google for some of the sites listed in the Yahoo directory, you get links to the spots where the site is mentioned.

Just for the fun of it, do a search on Google for “buy links page rank”. See those sponsored links on top and to the right? A lot of them plainly says “Advertisers: Improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Only TLA can deliver an ad that does both.” So why isn’t TLA canned? Or will they be? I don’t think so! They pay big money to Google to be displayed in the sponsored links section for these keywords. It would be hard to believe that Google would start canning sites like this, because it’s also huge income for Google. So, I’m wondering, if these sites don’t get penalized for selling ads that can help you to “improve your search engine rankings”, who will be? Matt Cutts clearly talks about it being “outside their guidelines to get PageRank via buying links”. And he is now asking for links to sites that sell text ads, for the development of new techniques.

My thoughts
To me Google has been a “hero” for a long time. 2 guys, taking over the search engine market, making the world a better place with their great search engine, selling part of the company for big bucks, being part of the first groups to use Ajax on a large scale, providing the best online mail service with the best spam filter I’ve seen so far, expanding by creating some online office suite, creating a lot of useful services for the Internet community. But actions like this scare me. Is Google turning into Microsoft? Are they slowly trying to monopolize the market? Are they looking for ways to get rid of the competition?

This whole hype is about links that would give you a higher rating on THEIR system. Everyone wants to have a high PR. Google give PR to “trustworthy” sites. A site is trustworthy when a lot of sites “vote” for that site by linking to it. The more links, the more Google likes you, the higher your PR. Isn’t it obvious that more people would want links to their site? Yes, and Google agrees, but in order for you to get those links you need to get traffic to your site, so some of that traffic can vouch for you. This can take a long time. Some have spent years trying to do it “the Google way”, without any luck. One of the offered ways to get more traffic to your site is the use of Adwords. You pay Google to place a link to your site on other sites, so you can get more traffic to your site, hoping that some of that traffic will link to your site, so your PR can rise. In return Google gives you the opportunity to make some (more like a little) money by sharing the revenues of such an ad with the person on whose site the link was clicked.

In my opinion Google is creating these problem for itself. If you display search results depending on page rank, people will do as much as possible to get a higher PR, so their results can appear on top. This includes paying others to link to their site. Instead of trying to fight paid links for ranking purposes, why not just rank pages according to content and other relevant issues? Why not work on making the algorithms better so “link love” will have lesser influence on the ranking of a site?

Conclusion
People will continue to try to find ways to get their product listed on top. This is a never ending fight. Too bad the little guys, who try to make some money with their site, will be the ones to feel the outcome of the fights against the abuse.

I for one see the “nofollow” tag as a sign of distrust. I can use this tag for links to bad examples. When I am approached for links to a site, I only add that link if I trust that site, whether the link is paid for or not. I don’t accept paid links to sites I don’t trust/like. So none of my paid links will have the “nofollow” attribute.

Book
One book I’ll definitely be adding to my wish list is Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings

Suck it
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Note: For this article you need to have shell access or a way to unzip files in your hosting account.

FTP is one of the fastest file transfer protocols. This protocol is used for the transfer of files from one computer to another, using the Internet. FTP is usually used to transfer web documents and images for websites to the server where the website is hosted (read more about getting your website online).

When transferring your website to your server, it might take a while to upload, depending on the connection to the Internet you’re on. All files are transferred separately. Every time the transfer starts, a STOR command is sent to the server. This command initiates the transfer. The server responds with an acceptance or denial message. If accepted, the file is transferred. The server then sends a message back to the FTP-client to notify that the file is successfully transferred. If permissions need to be changed for the file, this will also be done in this process.

It’s also possible that the transfer does not reach full speed, because, before it can reach it’s maximum, the transfer of that single file is done.

WordPress for instance has about 900 files. Think of what happens when this process needs to be repeated 900 times. There is time lost with the sending and receiving of server messages. For those on high speed connections this is not so much a problem, but those of us with connection speeds of 256K/128K down and 128K/64K up, every minute you can save is appreciated. The time it takes for a request to reach the server is about a quarter of a second on my 128K/64K download/upload connection. Each uploaded file sends and receives half a second worth of messages. That means that a transfer 900 files uses about 450 seconds for messages. 7 and a half minutes are added to the time needed to upload files.

Can it go faster?
One way to speed this process up a little is by zipping (compressing) all the separate small files into one big file, transfering it to your server and unzipping (decompressing) it on the server. This way messages are sent and received only once. Besides, the transfer can easily reach it’s maximum speed. Once the file is transferred, you need access to the server to decompress it.

For this process to work you need a way to decompress the uploaded file. One way this can be done is using the right commands in the shell (what is known as Command Prompt in Windows). Most hosting providers don’t allow shell access by default, but some of them can grant you shell access if you ask for it. In those cases they will probably ask you to fax or mail them a copy of your drivers license or some other form of identification. If you do get shell access, it’s as simple as unzipping the files in the right location. I will soon write an article about the zipping your web files on your local machine and unzipping them on your server.

cPanel, a control panel for hosting accounts, also has the feature of extracting (unzipping) files on the server. I know of cPanel, because that’s what I use. If your hosting company uses a different control panel, you may need to check for instructions on how to extract compressed files. You may need to ask your hosting provider if that feature is available.

Conclusion
If you have shell access to your hosting space, if you’re hosting control panel supports extraction of compressed files or if there’s another way to extract compressed files on your server, zipping your files into one big file, uploading the file and extracting the files from the compressed file may be a faster alternative to uploading small files one by one. This is especially true when you have a lot of small files.

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I have finally reached the desired circumstances to really start monetizing my blog. The number of readers has grown to my set limit, I have enough quality content and I have more time to spend on my blog.

At the moment I have 3 options available for advertising: Text Links, Image ads in the sidebar and 1 image ad on the top of the page.

Text Links
In the sidebar I will have a section for 10 text link ads. These text links will go for $10 per month.

Image ads, sidebar
In the sidebar I reserved a section for static (non-animated) image ads of 175×100 pixels. These image ads will go for $50 per month. This ad section is place in the top of the side bar, so visitors will see those ads right away when the page loads.

Image ad, content top
On top of every page there is a section reserved for one (1) 500×100 pixels static (non-animated) image ad. This ad will cost $150 per month.

Notes
These prices are promotional, they are valid until May 31, 2007. All the ads will be displayed on the same spot on every page in this blog. In the future I will be adding more advertising opportunities.

Interested?
If you are interested in advertising on my blog, please contact me. By doing that you get some exposure for your site, while helping me to finance the work I’m putting into this blog.

This information is also available on my Advertise page.

After writing the Payal vs Moneybookers article, I actively started letting people know that Moneybookers is the payment system I’m using.

I was excited to see my first ever online payment come in. An Internet friend of mine paid via Moneybookers for the domain names he registered.

Now, let’s hope more people start using Moneybookers, since Paypal is not available for a lot of countries around the globe.

Sparked by Mitch Harper’s guest post on John Chow’s blog I started doing some research on the matter of the oh so widely discussed “code of conduct” which Tim O’Reilly would have set.

Misinformation
The title of this guest post is “Will You Adhere to the New Blogging Code of Conduct?” The following statement is the one that caught my attention:

Tim O’Reilly (cited as the founder of the Internet) has put together a blogger’s code of conduct. It includes 9 modules and can be seen here:

The post goes on to mention the nine “modules Tim would have put together”.

After researching the matter a little (I just spent half an hour checking some links out, and reading around) it became clear to me that Tim never set any “modules” of a code.

The Blogging Wikia has started working together on the development of a code of conduct, following Tim’s advice. They split the code up in modules and advise bloggers to choose which ones of those modules apply to their blog and use it in the blog.

So what’s up with all this?
Not so long ago Kathy Sierra was harassed. This harassment took large proportion, even death treads were sent. There was some name calling, she accused some people of being part of the whole mess, others for allowing the mess, so actually also being part of it. It went so far that she canceled a speech at some conference, in fear for her life.

In light of these developments Tim suggested that some code of conduct was construed. In his Call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct he proposed some ideas, which were put on the table in a discussion at on of his conferences. “These thoughts are just a work in progress, and hopefully a spur for further discussion”, Tim writes.

About a week later he supplies a Draft Blogger’s Code of Conduct. This would be used to get the development of the BCC rolling.

Tim explains
In an interview with Wired Tim explains that this proposed code of conduct is not a set of rules.

I’ve come to think the call for a code of conduct was a bit misguided. A lot of sites have their own terms of service that are a lot like what I proposed for the code of conduct. And I was just saying, let’s get the best of the breed, let’s figure it out, so somebody who wants to have one of these doesn’t have to think it all up for themselves.

This is not something like an MPAA rating system. It is just to find a way to change the way comments are moderated. He mentions Slashdot, where comments can be voted up and down (same as with Digg).

Most blogging platforms don’t have that kind of control. I want to get an attempt together to get some good moderation plugins on all the major blogging platforms, so people have other options than simply deleting.

Tim explains how this who “code of conducts” discussion got started

The whole (code of conduct) was a reaction to Chris Locke’s original statement, you know, “I didn’t say that so I have no responsibility.” And I’m going, “Wait a minute, yeah, you do. You’re the manager of a site that was getting progressively nastier, and you let it happen.” It really started with a reaction to this idea that a site owner can and should disclaim comments on their blog.

(Bold type added by me)

Conclusion
There are several things clear in this post:

• The code of conducts is just supposed to be a set of guidelines that people can use on their site.
• This BCC should be the base for some good moderation structures for the major blogging platforms.
• This code of conduct is not a set of rules people will try to force you to live by in the blogosphere
• When you write in your blog (or anywhere else), make sure you present the right facts. Even if you thing you have your facts straight, make sure to research the topic enough to be able to present info.
• When writing, make sure you write in a way that people would not thing that you read something somewhere, and hurried to write something about it (even if you did)

Update
Tim has summarized the lessons learned so far:

• The poor choice of the “badges” I proposed, together with a reiteration of why I thought badges might be useful.
• The need for a more modular code of conduct, a set of axioms rather than a single monolithic “code of conduct” or “terms of service.”
• A suggestion of some moderation mechanisms that might be more effective than a code of conduct.
• A discussion of constructive anonymity vs. “drive-by anonymity”.
• An acknowledgement that a “code of conduct” should be reviewed by lawyers lest bloggers incur additional liability for commenters.
• Why I think civility matters, despite all the nay-sayers.

O’Reilly Media Present: Web 2.0 Report

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