Diary of a Techie

Im transferring to Prepys.com

2006-01-11T16:27:00.001+08:00

Blogspot.com has allowed me to learn the ropes in blogging. And for that, I'm truly grateful. However, the past few days has seen quite a number of downtimes and im getting worried.

Please visit the new site of diaryofatechie!

Im transferring to Prepys.com

2006-01-11T16:27:00.000+08:00

Have MS Word will Blog

2006-01-11T14:49:00.000+08:00

I just read about this cool add-in from blogspot—Blogger for Word. Once you download and install it, you get to have 3 extra buttons on your menu.It allows anyone capable of writing documents in Microsoft Word 2000 and above to upload and publish to a blog! Cool! This entire post was done in Microsoft Word XP and then 'published' to my blog from within word.This text should be in Red. (But its not….so its not 100% wysiwig)

This text should be bullet point 1
This text should be bullet point 2
This text should be bullet point 3

The first letter should be 72 font size. (But its not…again, not 100% wysiwig)

Broadvoice Problem Solved

2006-01-11T11:40:00.000+08:00

I have finally found out why i kept on getting the "All circuits are busy now". I had to go to the Asterix Logs and dig out why i was getting the busy signal. I found these entries:

Jan 10 22:01:47 DEBUG[2553] chan_sip.c: Stopping retransmission on '3XXXX382XXXXXb8c04bbf74XXXXX08d@sip.broadvoice.com' of Request 102: Match Found Jan 10 22:01:47 WARNING[2553] chan_sip.c: Forbidden - wrong password on authentication for INVITE to '"631614XXXX" ;tag=aXXXXX'

Jan 10 22:01:47 VERBOSE[10993] logger.c: -- SIP/BroadVoice-cb88 is circuit-busy

Aha! Wrong password on authentication. This means that my username or password was wrong. And so this led me to check my sip trunk settings, and this is where i found out that the problem was a mistyped username........

The thing is, i had sent the same 2 entries over to broadvoice support for about a week now, and none of their 'support' engineers figured out the problem......

P.R.A.S.E.

2006-01-09T20:16:00.000+08:00

Mark Martirez over at box.ph clued me in on this beta tool. (Ive always wondered how he gets these ahead of me). Apparently, if you want to gain top rank in a search term, the first thing to do is to see who ranks the highest. And http://www.prase.us/ is the site to do this.

Once you know the top ranked websites for your search term, you could do the following:

1. Examine how the top websites did their site. (layout, content, headers, meta tags)
2. Write to them and possibly offer something of value to them in exchange for linking to your site.

You could gain invaluable insight into what each of the top ranked sites value most...possible new doors will open up to you.

Gmail as a Forensic Tool

2006-01-09T09:08:00.000+08:00

In my previous post on Gmail, i mentioned using it as a forensic tool. You may be forgiven if you think that there is absolutely nothing about Gmail that can be used as a forensic tool.

But if you are like us, where we need to sift through a lot of log files daily.....(almost .5 million incidents in a single day), you will by now have noticed that gmail has 2 things going for it:

1. Large storage capacity
2. Fast index and retrieval

So what we did here is to send all the log reports (routers syslog, Windows event logs, firewall logs etc) via email to our gmail account. These reports are stored there. Now, I dont have to worry about a hacker being able to 'own' my system, and deleting all the log files....because the logs are already sent to my gmail account.

I also dont have to worry about backing and archiving the damn thing! I have yet to see data being lost in the gmail system.

Finally, lets say that our system detects unusual activity in a particular IP (say xxx.yyy.zzz.www). We simply log into our gmail system, and 'search' for all instances where the log report contained xxx.yyy.zzz.www

This is even easier to use than Microsoft's logparser! (sql like reporting tool that works with either event log files, system file etc....

Im interested in what you think about this novel way of using gmail. Leave me some comments okay?

Search Engine Optimization Tips

2006-01-09T09:07:00.000+08:00

The following is from an email sent to me by John Bertrand. He is a professional search engine optimizer with office in the Philippines, The Netherlands and the US. He is the proprietor of JNB WEB PROMOTION http://www.jnbwebpromotion.com/ and provides search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking, hosting, software programming and article marketing services.

Misconceptions about Search Engine Optimization

By: John Bertrand

Picture this scene, an adolescent boy walks into a barber shop and says to the barber, “Don’t touch me, I’m only here because my mom forced me.” Search engine optimizers are sometimes put into the position of the barber. They are knowledgeable and willing to work on their client’s site, but the client doesn’t want any modifications done to the text that is visible on her web pages. This kind of dilemma occurs due to general misconceptions about search engine optimization. Let’s look at these misconceptions.

1. SEO only involves writing meta tags and working on “invisible” code

Many people want to get a high ranking for various keywords or keyword phrases, but if you look at the text on their web pages you can hardly find these vital words. They come to a search engine optimizer and think that he or she will sprinkle these words into the meta tags and it will work like magic. This is a major misunderstanding.

It is true that your main keywords and key phrases should be in your title tag and your description meta tag, and even in the keywords meta tag, but they must also appear on the page itself and they must appear in some strategic places on that page. Some clients say, “But I like the way it looks now.” You may like the way it looks, but the search engines will not recognize that your page is truly about Electronic Widgets unless these words appear in headlines on the page, in the opening paragraph, in the file or domain name in link text and in the body text of your page.

So, by all means if you already have copy that works, that can convert visitors into buyers or otherwise accomplish the purposes of your site, keep it. But you should also be ready to listen to what the optimizer has to say about modifications that will enable search engines to select your site when a potential buyer makes a query for your key words or phrases.

2. Search Engine Optimization is Tricking the Search Engines

Some clients say, “Don’t touch the visible copy but put in the modifications invisibly.” Using invisible text is something that can get you banned from a search engine. The main purpose of search engine optimization is to give your website the best possible chance to come up in good positions when someone makes a query for your keywords or key phrases. The key to doing this is to design web pages and write copy that is intelligible to search engines, without sacrificing the experience and understanding of your end-users, the people who visit your site.
So, don’t ask your SEO professional to try to trick the search engines, but work with him or her to present your website in the best possible way.

3. Search Engine Optimization deals mainly with onsite modifications

Even if your website is well designed, has proper meta tags and has keyword-rich text, this alone does not guarantee that your site will rank high in competitive queries. All of these factors, design, meta tags, and copy, are on-site factors.
Search engines certainly take them into consideration, but they also value off-site factors such as how many high quality or authoritative websites link to you. This means that hand-in-hand with your on-site optimization you and your promotion team will have to embark on a campaign to get links to your websites coming from websites that are already highly regarded by the search engines and by the public in general.

4. Search Engine Optimization works instantly

Don’t expect to get a flood of traffic right after your site has been optimized. Some search engines work in a fairly rapid manner, but the main search engine at the present moment, Google, is believed to have deliberately put an aging delay into its algorithm. This means that it may take several months before your site makes it into the top results for your particular category, especially if it is a newly created site.
During this initial period you will also have to consider using other promotional methods such as pay per click advertising, article marketing, joint ventures, paid advertising in ezines and offline advertising.

So, the next time you work with a search engine optimizer, let him or her go about the task of making your website both user friendly and search engine friendly.

No Response yet from Broadvoice

2006-01-09T09:05:00.000+08:00

Is anyone out there also using broadvoice AND pointing their ASTERIX platform to use proxy.lax.broadvoice.com? I am still getting the "All circuits are busy now errors".

I have not yet heard a word from support@broadvoice.com.....Maybe the user community is a better source of support than broadvoice. wah!!!!

Curious Blogspot Error

2006-01-08T20:48:00.000+08:00

Just a few minutes back (Jan 8, 2006, 8:35pm GMT+8), i could not view this blog. I kept on getting the error message: " You are not authorized to view this page " error.

It's either a temporary problem, or blogspot support is very fast. I was able to browse the site again. This was a few minutes after i sent a help request to blogspot.

Anyone else experience this problem?

Broadvoice Support

2006-01-06T19:53:00.000+08:00

Being a techie its unavoidable that I also dabble a little bit into VOIP. We set up an Asterix based IP PBX in our lab and hooked it up to use Broadvoice as a gateway. Initially the service was okay. The voice quality was acceptable. Lingo and Vonage are better, but hey, they both dont offer unlimited International calling.

Since i have relations in Hongkong, China and Singapore, i decided to stick it out with Broadvoice.

Then over the new year, the problems started to appear. The voice quality progressively became noisy to a point where the other party on the line would just hang up on me.

Granted VOIP call quality may be caused by a lot of factors OUTSIDE the control of Broadvoice, so i emailed their support@broadvoice.com. I quickly got a response. I was to ping the following proxies to find out the nearest one and switch my Asterisk platform to using it.

So i did. I found out that we were using the NYC site, whereas the LAX site was nearer. I then asked for help on how to point the Asterisk to use LAX as the SIP trunk. The support@broadvoice immediately sent me the info.

I quickly entered the code and the system now connects to LAX.

A new problem now becomes apparent. Each call i make will result in the voice prompt "All circuits are busy now, please try your call later".. A look at the Asterisk logs shows that the "Service is unavailable"...

This is the point where the customer support at broadvoice starts to deteriorate. Despite several emails now (3 i think), and after about 2 days... i still have not gotten a response yet.

My First Permalink!

2006-01-06T19:51:00.000+08:00

My thanks to the author of IT Related Blog for being the first to link to my new blog. Thank you!

Gmail as a Forensic Tool

2006-01-06T17:11:00.000+08:00

This may sound weird, and i tried to get this idea published (It was rejected, for obvious reasons). But thank God for blogs. I can CHOOSE to publish it here!

More to the point, how does one turn Gmail into a forensic tool? Before i tell you the answer, how about you guys try to guess how we did it in our labs?

Guy Kawasaki's Blog

2006-01-06T14:37:00.000+08:00

Guy Kawasaki is one of my favorites. I read 3 of his books already, (one of which he personally signed!) and some video and audio materials as well. Now that he has his own blog, we can get to read about his ideas almost on a regular basis!

Confused!??

2006-01-04T21:16:00.000+08:00

I have heard of terms like del.icio.us, tag cloud , RSS, feed aggregator and the like. And frankly, i'm a bit confused by all these. While i will endeaver to learn these in the future, maybe you can help me out by leaving comments or pointing me to the right direction?

How exactly does having a del.icio.us tag help out my blog?

Keep Search Engines in Mind

2006-01-04T21:11:00.000+08:00

This was one of the advice on Blogspot help on how to promote your site. But i'm one of those chaps that need to find the shortest path to an objective. I don't have time to read the whole theory behind making a site 'search-engine' friendly.

Thankfully, Mark Martirez of Box.com.ph, sent me an email with just the right tip! He suggested i use a free seo (Search Engine Optimizer) tool found in sitening. I tried it out and it does check out a lot of common errors.

This blog rated at 65%. How does your site rate? Find out!

Blog Creation Time is critical

2006-01-04T21:00:00.000+08:00

I have never thought of this matter, until i read Chris Garrett's view on the matter. Indeed if one is to have a blog, it would have to span several time zones, with different periods at which your visitors arrive.

So how do you know when the bulk of traffic arrives? Simple! Get a traffic stat service like the one i have on this blog. Its called mapstat from Blogflux. I got this idea from Pangasinanstar Provincial newspaper( a neighbor blog).

After a while of getting the statistics, you should be able to figure out the peaks and valleys of traffic to your site. With that info at hand, you can time the creation of new blogs to just before this peak hits your site.

This is good practical advice. I am glad i regularly read Performancing.

Getting more relavant Adsense Ads

2006-01-04T17:17:00.000+08:00

One web property we have is a browser based email reader. The problem with this page however, was that the ads for my users tend to all be related to exchange, imail, mail, email, spam, anti-virus and a lot of techie stuff, that frankly, my readers don't care at all for these types of ads.

I tried to influence the type of ads that come out via the 'section targetting' feature of adsense. Section Targetting allows you to tell google adsense, the parts of your webpage where it should put more importance, in selecting the ads that will pop up on the page.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:


This is the text that needs to be given more importance



Unfortunately, the section targetting article also mentioned a 2 week delay for the crawler to visit the site. So in 2 weeks, we should be able to report on whether or not this works.

Promoting your Blog by Enabling"Post Pages"

2006-01-03T21:38:00.000+08:00

One of the best tips i encountered was from this article in blogspot help. By turning on Post Pages option in your blog, you make your every blog as its own web page. This makes it more linkable (permalink) and "more links to your blog means more traffic to your blog".

However, the help file did not show us where the setting was. I found it here.
Login to your account, select the Settings Tab, then under it, choose the Archiving tab. The window will have two user selectable choices, one for Archive Frequency, and the other for "Enable Post Pages?". The latter choice is what we need to turn on.

Easier Blog Backup

2006-01-03T12:45:00.000+08:00

It is always a great idea to backup your blog. The misfortunes that beset a famous Philippine blogger, sassylawyer, where she lost a huge swath of her blogs due to a corrupted database, just goes on to show that backing blogs is a worthwhile, and sensible thing to do.

But backing up is ALWAYS a tedious thing. And as I was exploring the blogspot interface, i discovered to my horror, that there wasn't an easy way to do this. While Blogspot Help has this 10 step way of doing the backup. It was too complicated for me. I suspect that goes the same for you as well.

So i 'googled' for what other people ahead of me had to say on the topic. And sure enough, this forum discussed a program called httrack. I went over to the website, downloaded the program, and installed it. Sure enough, the httrack program was able to make a complete copy of my entire blog in a few seconds. Seems to be like this could be a winner and a good substitute for backing up your blog.

Having done this myself, i would recommend that you make a copy of the template of your blogspot blog as well and keep it on your local computer...just in case.

Minimizing Robot Generated Comments

2006-01-02T16:14:00.000+08:00

My other blog usually gets spammed with a lot of automated entries from robots. For every 10 posts i delete, the robots are able to create 10 more. Fortunately, blogspot has a feature called "word verification".

This feature can be activated by going into the Settings/comments tab. If you select 'yes', all posters will be required to enter the matching code from an image into a word verification window. The theory is that the image can't be deciphered by robots, and only human beings can do it.

Adding Adsense to your Blog

2006-01-02T14:59:00.000+08:00

Blogspot now comes with adsense built in. You can add adsense by going into the template/adsense and following the steps there. However, the problem one encounters is that the option given in this adsense interface is rather limited.

For example, i wanted to have the adsense ads come out on the left hand side bar. The default of the adsense interface on blogspot was on the top portion of the screen.

Fortunately, there was ample documentation in http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=974 to teach me how to do it. In short, edit the template, locate #sidebar and then paste your adsense code below it. Experiment with various ad layout and colors to see which one will fit your blog.

email publishing @ blogspot

2006-01-02T14:31:00.000+08:00

I just had to try it out. Being able to publish to my blog via email was
too irresistible to NOT try out. I already imagine myself using a
blackberry to update my blog using this.

Cool feature. I hope it works.

Blogspot appearing in wrong language

2006-01-02T14:19:00.000+08:00

Being able to read and write chinese, i have chinese loaded as a language option in my internet browser. Surprise, surprise! When i wanted to create a blog of my own on blogspot, the whole main menu appeared in chinese.

This got me thinking, of how i can set my default www.blogspot.com to appear in english. Since there were no menus on the main screen to let me choose english. I had to figure out why the main menus were appearing in Chinese.

Better yet, figure out how to restore the settings back to english. I found that the tools/internet options/language had a chinese module installed. I quickly deleted this and tried re-loading the www.blogspot.com homepage. It was still showing up in Chinese.

I then deleted all the cookies in the browser, did a reboot, and was finally rid of the chinese only setting in blogspot.

Hope this helps others out there with a similar problem.