There are no real ways to know for sure how many people go to your site from bookmarks, but a couple of ways
Howdy
If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:
wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/
It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:
>/dev/null 2>&1
to the end of it.
There are lots of reasons why you may want to do this – to protect your admin area, hide some nasty scripts or to save on bandwidth (yeah, i’ve heard it done…). Of course, all people have to do is look at your robots.txt and find out a load of directories that you don’t want found… (Read more to see full post)
The close() won’t always work in Firefox – FF will only close a window with close() if a script opened the window.
So you have to pretend it did… ;)
Use:
<a xhref="javascript:window.open('','_parent','');window.close();">Close Window</a>
You see them all the time when a page gets dugg on digg.com or suddenly becomes very popular -
Can’t select database
We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the xxxx database.
* Are you sure it exists?
* On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.
Well recently I needed to make sure that if oen of my wordpress installs couldn’t connect or whatever that it showed a different page (well, different text). So if you want to do the same (at your own risk), open up wp-includes/wp-db.php and edit:
Hope that helped you. Now digg me (just kidding – who wants this at the top of digg!) to prove that it works (although – of course my host will cope with it ;). They have before)
Some ideas to put on your messages:
This is easy. Make a 404 error page, call it 404.php (or whatever) then in your .htaccess file enter:
” ErrorDocument 404 /404.php”
That is it!
For whatever reason you might not want rel=nofollow in all links in your blog that commenters leave. I certainly don’t. I only approve comments that are useful/no spammy sites. So why be harsh and put a link condom on?
Making all links in your word press blog (esp links in comments) not have a rel=no-follow is quite simple. Just edit a couple of files:
Warning: Editing files can **** up your Wordpress install. Only continue if you know what you are doing. Make backups!
This doesn’t mean you can just now spam away on this blog and get free backlinks… (they’re all moderated anyway).
This also removes rel=no-follow from trackbacks. Be carefull! Rel=no-follow was introduced for a reason…
A basic introduction to mod_rewrite.
What is mod_rewrite?
Mod_rewrite is a system for apache that lets you basically rewrite urls. It is quite advanced, while at the same time being quite simple.
Why is it so important?
It lets you change pages from something like viewnews.php?id=329579823948 to something like /viewnews/the-news-story-headline/. Of course, you will need to update your actuall links (from id=… to the new ones). But the reason it is so good is because firstly, who can remember 329579823948? And who can remember the-news-story-headline? Additionally, it is a lot better for seo to have keywords in the url, and most times your page title / etc will have the keywords in it.
Ok, walk me through a simple example using mod_rewrite
Ok. We are going to do a very simple mod_rewrite first, one that doesn’t involve any parameters (no id= or whatever).
For example, say at the moment our page is:
http://example.com/about_us.html
We want it to be
http://example.com/about/
Firstly you will need to be using apache. Make a file called .htaccess, and put it in your public html folder (same folder as index.php/index.html etc etc. In my case with my host, it would be /london-seo.com/.htaccess. Often it is something like public_html). You may have a bit of trouble making it in Windows. If you do, name the file “.htaccess“ (with the quotation marks).
Now you wanna put in .htaccess the following (first two lines are not always needed, depending on your server configuration):
Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^about/$ about_us.html [L]
See, its pretty easy. The ^ just means that represents the start of the string, and $ represents the end of the string. It is just regular expression stuff… You don’t need to worry about it too much for the time being. Note how the domain itself doesn’t matter (nothing about example.com is in there)
Now lets do a more complicated example. We want to change:
http://example.com/news.php?newsid=48672
to:
http://example.com/news/48672/
Well we would then put in the following code:
Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^news/(.*)/$ news.php?newsid=$1 [L]
The $1 indicates that it should replace whatever was in the first occurrence of (.*) (note – there can be more than one (.*).)
Well, that’s it for a basic mod_rewrite tutorial. Ideally you don’t wanna have id’s that relate just to a number, but you want some keywords. A good way to do this is to in your news.php only use the newsid=xx, but add in some extra, so you could have:
http://example.com/news/mod-rewrite-tutorial/89487/
The code for that would be:
Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^news/(.*)/(.*)/$ news.php?newsid=$2 [L]
Notice how there is no “$1“. As you get more advanced you will get used to this kinda stuff. Again, this is only a basic tutorial, there is a lot more to it, but this will get you started.