Very Simple Process to Claim Authorship of Pages with Google

Posted on May 9, 2012 by curiouscat

There are lots of posts explaining how to claim authorship of pages with Google. I find them very complex, by and large.

I was able to use this simple process.

Include by author text with a link to the author page using rel=”author” In WordPress you can just edit the theme page to have the author link include the rel=”author” tag.

<a rel="author" href="http://johnhunter.com/">John Hunter</a>

For WordPress blog with multiple authors here is the syntax to use (this pulls the author url from their profile. The author can update their web site url when logged into the blog.

<a rel="author" href="<?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?>"><?php the_author() ?></a>

Then connect author page to Google+ profile. You can make this most any page (Google may exclude some free sites). Most people use the about page or author pages on the same blog they are trying to claim authorship of. But all that really matters is linking this page to your Google+ profile (obviously substitute your url), I have many sites with my material so my home page is what I used, I just added the following to that page.
```
<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/123" rel="me">Google+</a>
```
Then link your Google+ profile to the authorship page you want to use. You can add it under Other profiles or contributor to. This is the trickest part do to very bad UI of Google+ you have to go into edit mode and then click on the areas (there is no indication they are editable until you click – extremely bad UI, Google seems to very much like this hard to understand hidden UI elements lately, hopefully that will end soon). Likely Google will fix this at some point so this part will no longer matter. All you do is at the page you want, for me

To test out whether things are working you can go into Google webmaster tools to the rich snippets area. Test out a url you claimed authorship of and you should see something like:

Google can now use your Google+ profile to include a photo (from your Google+ profile) next to search results

With those simple changes over 1,000 posts on my blog were updated. It took far longer to search for and read a bunch more complex ways of accomplishing this than actually doing this once I was able to see what little had to be done. Writing this post took way longer. Now I just have to do step one for other sites and blogs and they will all be updated to show my authorship (for those I already had on my Google+ profile, if they were not listed there yet they have to be added).

There are many benefits to establishing authorship through Google.

Google can include your photo next to search results. Especially until people get tired of this, it will likely increase clicks on your links. And even after people are tired of it, if they notice your photo (and respect you) that may well increase clicks.
Builds your personal brand
Google can use authorship as an additional factor in calculating the worth of a page for a specific search.
Google can get a feel for what areas you are an expert in. First by just analyzing what your write about. But more importantly they will be able to use this extra layer of information to determine AuthorRank (similar idea to PageRank) by seeing links to your authored material.
Hopefully this can allow for RSS feeds by author (no matter where the content is published) eventually, if it doesn’t already.

Knowing authorship will allow Google to improve search result quality, so I can understand why they are pushing for it. It is a bit annoying how they keep pushing Google+ but this implementation seems tolerable. Some posts make it sound like you have to make your “authorship page” the Google+ profile, but really you can decide the authorship home page (for me johnhunter.com). They do pull your profile photo from Google+ to use, which is less than ideal.

Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard

Posted on April 29, 2012 by curiouscat

I had all sorts of trouble installing MySQL on Snow Leopard. I never had any trouble installing mysql on Ubuntu.

Installing it normally on Snow Leopard would give me a success screen saying it had been installed but it seemed to have completely failed to install.

I then installed and used macports and that was the start of the solution. If I was trying to install MySQL on Lion or Mountain Lion I think I would try macports first.

You need to get xcode (to use macports) if you didn’t have it already you are going to have some challenges because I couldn’t find it in the Apple developer center (they removed it since I guess you shouldn’t be still using Snow Leopard in their opinion). Luckily I already had xcode installed.

To install mysql using macports

sudo port install mysql5

Then you will avoid a bunch of frustrating errors (though you may enjoy that process) if you realize you need the server msql also.

sudo port install mysql5-server

Pay attention to the messaging when you do that and you will see, suggestion to

sudo -u _mysql mysql_install_db5

See the instructions that show for lots more on how to deal with that failing, as it did for me. Or celebrate if it worked.

Go ahead and add mysql to the default path open your .bash_profile or .profile

vim ~/.profile

Then I tried sudo /opt/local/share/mysql5/mysql/mysql.server start but that failed. At which point I found that macports has its own version

sudo port load mysql5

Which worked.

To login to MySQL you can use (root is created with no password on install).

mysql5 -uroot -p

Go ahead and change the root password as the first thing you do.

Set the Web Server to Use the Domain Without www

Posted on April 26, 2012 by curiouscat

The main reason to bother with this is to help search rankings. Sub-domains (for example, www.curiouscat.com and curiouscat.com) are treated as separate websites even if you have entirely the same content displayed for both. If 20% of the links to your site use the www and 80% don’t then your sites ranking by search engines is less than it would be if it was just treated as one site.

You can set the domain to use in Google webmaster tools. But that doesn’t do anything for all the other search engines. Also if you have both, some reports some will keep statistics separately for the non-www and www domain (Google Adsense does this, for example).

Using virtual hosts file (sites-enabled)

For Apache you can place the following code in your virtual hosts file (in the sites-available directory under Apache).

Replace curiouscat.com with your domain name.

<Directory /srv/www/curiouscat.com/public_html/>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</Directory>

Then you need to capture the update and reload Apache.

Disable the site (in order to enable it with the updates)

sudo a2dissite curiouscat.com

Enable the site

sudo a2enssite curiouscat.com

Reload Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If when you try to reload you get this error message:

“Invalid command ‘RewriteEngine’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration” then enable modrewrite on apache:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

You should then be told to restart apache

udo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Using .htaccess

Or you can include the following in your .htaccess file

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you wanted to force www to be used instead just flip the regular expression around:

<Directory /srv/www/curiouscat.com/public_html/>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^curiouscat.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.curiouscat.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</Directory>

Customizing the Command Prompt for Terminal in Ubuntu

Posted on April 21, 2012 by curiouscat

To customize the look of the command prompt for Terminal in Ubuntu you can insert code into .bashrc (if you are having trouble with updates in .bashrc not working you may want to see if it is set in .profile – thus overriding your .bashrc). Those files are found in your user directory /home/[username]

echo $PS1

will show you the current settings. You can make a change directly from the command line but it will only work for that session. For example:

PS1="\d\w $ "

This is the code I have in my .bashrc related to the terminal prompt

# set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below)
if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then
    debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot)
fi

# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color) color_prompt=yes;;
esac

if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then
    if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then
        color_prompt=yes
    else
        color_prompt=
    fi
fi

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
fi
unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

Testing Email Using The Ubuntu CLI

Posted on April 17, 2012 by curiouscat

For a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or any other web or other server you should have alerts sent by email for various things. So for example if you automate security updates for an Ubuntu web server you want to be notified if there is some issue with the automatic update.

In order to check and be sure email is setup and working on the sever there is simple command line code to use:

mail -s Test

you then get a prompt to enter

To: [enter the email and press return]

Cc: [press return]

then a blank where you can type in any text you want in the body of the message.

Then you send the message with by pressing CTRL-d

CTRL-d

If you don’t receive the email then you can troubleshoot what is going wrong.

Keeping Your Hosted Ubuntu Web Server Software Up to Date

Posted on April 16, 2012 by curiouscat

To setup automatic security updates follow the instructions from Ubuntu.

A full update of all packages can be done using the follow, remember this may create some issues is one update makes something else you have no longer work properly…

First update the local package index (to find what needs to be upgraded).

sudo apt-get update

Then upgrade the software.

sudo apt-get upgrade

Adding a Key to Your Server for SSH Login

Posted on April 5, 2012 by curiouscat

Using Ubuntu

An authentication key allows your server to authenticate the computer you are using has the right key and should be granted access. This lets you use the key instead of a username and password when using ssh.

If you don’t already have a key on your local machine (look for a file named id_rsa.pub in your user home directory under the .ssh folder

cd /.ssh

will get you to the right directory) then you need to generate the key pair. On your desktop machine use:

ssh-keygen

Next you copy the file to your server. scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub [user]@[server]:.ssh/

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@servername:.ssh/

Rename the file on the server to authorized_keys2

mv id_rsa.pub authorized_keys2

The key is for to authenticate your computer. But on the ssh login Ubuntu will look in the user folder. So if you also had user2 access to the server and tried to ssh into the server you would not be authenticated because it would look in user2/.ssh for the authorized key file and not find it. You can put the same key in any user folder on your server to have that user also be automatically authenticated.

WordPress: Multiple Blog Network on One Server – Overcoming Conflicts

Posted on March 5, 2012 by curiouscat

I ran into a problem when I added a second WordPress blog network to my server. I had the Curious Cat Blog Network up and running for quite some time with sub-domains for each individual blog in the network. WordPress automatically dealt with routing the sub-domains and having urls work. It really is very nice how easy it is to create a new blog and have everything up and running – just add it in WordPress, no need to touch the server directly. Blog networks are a new feature in WordPress 3.0 (I think) which are very nice. I would imagine it builds on effort with Wordpres MU but it is just part of regular WordPress now.

When I added the second blog network however the new faux-sub-domain that should be used affordable-funeral.moneyite.com would instead be redirected to curiouscatnetwork.com and since no such domain existed on curiouscatnetwork.com it gave the standard error message WordPress generates for the case where a sub-domain url is not recognized.

The main domain for the new site was working: moneyite.com. I tried searching around for some solutions to this problem online but couldn’t find any. I am not sure if multiple wordpress blog networks should work on the same server without any special needs. But it wouldn’t for me. I found a solution that did work so I will share what worked for me.

I created new sites-available records for each of the sub-domains and once you reload Apache everything seems to work. I am not sure their isn’t some problem with doing things this way that I haven’t uncovered yet. But it is working for me so I wanted to share this in case it can help anyone else trying to use multiple wordpress blog networks on one server.

Cleaning the Screen of Your Mac Air or Mac Powerbook

Posted on December 21, 2011 by curiouscat

My Mac Air screen can get dirty and I am a bit worried about cleaning it due to the warnings that using various cleaning products of methods can damage your screen. From what I have been able to determine the best strategy is just using water and a microfiber fabric. I use one microfiber which I get wet with water and clean the screen. Then I dry it off with another microfiber. Using chemicals can damage the screen. And using even paper towels can result in scratches on the screen.

I have had very good success with just water and the microfiber cloth. I imagine water and microfiber cloth is the best way to clean an iPad (when kids and cats play with it) but I haven’t tried it myself.

From Apple’s web site:

The materials used to make Apple products vary; in some cases each product may have specific cleaning requirements, which may vary by the part you are cleaning. Here are some tips that apply to all products to get you started:

Use only a soft, lint-free cloth. Abrasive cloths, towels, paper towels, and similar items may cause damage to the item.
Disconnect your Apple product from any external power sources.
Disconnect any external devices and other cabling from the product.
Keep liquids away from the product.
Don’t get moisture into any openings, and don’t use aerosol sprays, solvents, or abrasives.
Do not spray cleaners directly onto the item.

Disconnect the display from power, from its connection to a computer, and from any external devices. Next use the cloth that came with your display or another soft, dry cloth to wipe dust from the screen. If additional cleaning of the display panel or case is required use a soft, slightly damp, lint-free cloth. Avoid getting moisture in openings. Don’t use window cleaners, household cleaners, aerosol sprays, solvents, alcohol, ammonia, or abrasives to clean the display.

Warning: Don’t clean the screen with a cleaner containing alcohol or acetone. Use a cleaner intended for use with a screen or display. Never spray cleaner directly on the screen. It may drip inside the display and cause damage.

When cleaning the outside of your Mac mini, first shut down your Mac mini and unplug the power cord along with other connected devices. Then use a damp, soft, lint-free cloth to clean the computer’s exterior. Avoid getting moisture in any openings. Do not spray liquid directly on the computer. Do not use aerosol sprays, solvents, or abrasives that might damage the finish.

Checklist: Setting Up a New Domain on VPS

Posted on May 5, 2011 by curiouscat

Two great hosts for Ruby on Rails are Slicehost and Linode. With these hosts you fully manager your virtual private server, installing the operating system, modifying apache (on Ning…), etc.. I use Ubuntu as the operating system and Apache as the web server.

If you are moving a domain from elsewhere it can be wise to reduce the TTL time to say 5 minutes a few days before you make the switch. This is make the change propagate across the internet more quickly.

And DNS entry on your profile (login to your, for example, Linode account)
Add a new file for /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_site_name.com

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com

The file would look something like this: with your ip in place of 8.8.8.8

<VirtualHost 8.8.8.8:80> ServerName example.com ServerAlias www.example.com ServerAdmin your_gmail+example.com@gmail.com DocumentRoot /u/apps/example.com ErrorLog /u/apps/example.com/error.log </VirtualHost>

ServerAdmin is the address Apache will use to send error messages to. Using gmail and the + option lets you use one gmail account and just use rules to filter all your sites.

create the directories needed on your server
enable the site (for apache)
```
sudo a2ensite example.com
```

You should see the file you created /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com now also at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/example.com

Test the site out to make sure the setup is working properly. Create a index.html page and just verify the page is displayed. Change your local hosts file to point to your server IP address for the new domain you created. If not, take steps to get this to work, before continuing with the rest of the checklist.
copy over the site – if you are moving the site from elsewhere
remember to move the database over, if the site relies on a database
restart apache
```
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
```

You can test the site out, before updating the DNS, by changing your local hosts file to point to your server IP address for the new domain you created.

Resources: Install the Apache 2 Web Server on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid)

Coding and Server Syntax Examples

Simple cut and paste code and cli syntax