Ok. Earlier i was playing with the pcmcia (some people call these pc cards or smart cards) and pushed it out but couldn’t get the release button back in. It is quite simple. Just use a pen or something to push it in further than you can with your hand (but don’t force it).

I really should get back to some SEO posts…

Just a little post, after spending a long time searching and finding nothing and then finally getting through to Orange support:

If you try and install the Live box installation and it just brings up a help box about firewalls and anti viruses, either give up and call Orange support, or do the following at your own risk

Assuming everything is plugged in correctly -

• Open up your browser (Internet Explorer or FF) and enter: 192.168.1.1 (this connects to the livebox router)
• Login, using username/pass as admin/admin
• Under my services, click internet. Then type in your username (in the form of yourusername.wanadoo.co.uk@fs or whatever – ie everything in your email after the @ and add on @fs) and password
• It should then work…

Setting up a wireless connection to your livebox

Assuming you have a wireless card in your computer, go to start – connect to – wireless connection (or similar, depending on your system. It may be under network connections/control panel/etc. Now go and press the”1″ button on your live box. This enables pairing for the next 10 mins or so. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to connect (and it will try and connect to your livebox for ages but not actually do anything!… Then go back to your pc, hopefully it’ll list the live box. If it does, click connect (if it doesn’t, move closer to the live box or seek other help!), you will need to enter a “WEP” code. This is on the bottom of the livebox so go and type that in. (If you are connected via a patch cable, just go to 192.168.1.1, go to the wireless settings, and copy the WEP key (and put it on a usb stick and put it on your other computer etc) to ensure you have the right code… It should all work.

Hope this helps someone. It isn’t the best write up, but to be honest it is more help than I got from orange support. I called up once saying i just couldn’t connect wirelessly, and he tried to get me to pay for some guy to come out and fix it. All I had to do was press that “1″ button on the back of the livebox.

Leave comments if this has helped you or if you have any other tips for the Livebox.

• (the usual) take a high %  (or even 100%) of unique WITHOUT any referrer data (that also are not a bot)
• Make a “bookmark this” link, but make the bookmarked url something like “http://example.com/?camefrom=bookmark”. Then just do something like

• if ($_GET['camefrom'] == “bookmark”)
  {
  // +1 to your stats thing counting bookmarks (database? etc)
  }

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there – it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

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.

What is robots.txt

I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.

It is normally just found in your root directory, for example http://domain.com/robots.txt. Most robots will read it – some of the spammy robots or nasty ones won’t, and there isn’t much you can do about it (not related to robots.txt, anyway). You could use a htaccess or a script to block nasty bots, but that isn’t for this article.

How to block all robots from all of your pages

This is quite simple, however at this basic level I doubt you would want to use it much

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: * includes all user agents (* is a wildcard – standing for anything, any length). There are many pages on the internet which will help you, such as this one with a massive list of user agents.

User agent info:
Some common search engine user agents that you may be interested in are as follows:

• Main web search (some also image search):

• Google: googlebot
• MSN: msnbot
• Yahoo: yahoo-slurp
• Ask: teoma
• Alexa: ia_archiver

• Google: googlebot-image
• MSN Pic search: psbot

So if you wanted to block just Alexa from all directories, you would use:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

How to block a certain directory (or more than one) using robots.txt

This isn’t very different to the previous example. This will block all user agents to /private/ and /cgi-bin/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/

Comments in robots.txt

Comments in robots.txt are simply written after a “#” sign, for example:

User-agent: * #this is a comment here
# another comment
#
# another one! robots.txt is so much fun…
Disallow: /temp/

Other things to add to robots.txt

There has been a Extended Standard for Robot Exclusion proposed, adding features such as request rate (# of requests per # of seconds) and visit time (time that the bot should visit, such as 0400-0800). Some bots will follow it, but you can’t count on it (at the moment, anyway) being too handy. Here is a basic example of it in action.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/
Request-rate: 1/3
Visit-time: 0400-0800

Further Reading/Related Links

• Robots.txt Generator – a neat robots.txt generator
• Robots.txt blog on Webmaster world. Making very good use of its comments feature…

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:

• line 46 (connecting to server)
• line 66 (selecting the database)
• you may also want to edit the html from around line 312

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:

• Tell them that something is wrong!
• Put a link to a Google cache (in the form of http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/)
• Try the coralize site – in the form of http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8080/
• Put a retry button/link

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.