You see, I use vim to write all my websites. I know its not the best way to do things but gosh darn-it for some reason I just always end up coming back to it. One of the shortcuts in vim is Shift-A. This starts editing at the end of a line.

I was happily updating my sitemap by hand when I ended up pressing Shift-A on extra time. Unknowingly, I committed that miss-placed capital “A” into my sitemap and published it. Google happily crawled my sitemap not too long later and found the typo. They could have looked the other direction and threw a warning on webmaster tools, but instead they entirely de-listed me. Sounds fair to me.

But, theres a ray of hope. Chrome has built-in XML error checking. If you simply open up your sitemap in Google Chrome before actually making it live, it will display any validation errors in big red letters at the top of the page.

I of course fixed problem as soon as I saw it i webmaster tools and resubmitted my sitemap. Google even shows my pages as indexed but just will not display them in searches. I’m assuming is a temporary thing and that they’ll re-list me, but I can only guess. They’ve crawled and accepted my new site map, but are apparently waiting over a week to re-list me!

I’m sorry Google! Stop the madness! Can’t we be friends?!

Then, of course, as soon as you do that, Google can just change a gear in its system and you’re dropped right out again. I’ve been going down this road with my game server hosting startup HostedGameServers.com. I have a great service on servers that perform great. I ping 16 to my server and I’m over 1,500 miles from it! We’ve got a few clients and its the best we can do with manual promotion while we work to get listed in Google. Right now we’re about position 408… except if you typo the search.

First, search ‘Game Servers’ in Google. Not listed. Well, we are, but we’re on page 48 or something stupid.

Next, search for ‘Game Severs’. Note the missing r. Yep, we’re first page.

Our keyword significance is perfect. It’s #1 Game #2 Server #3 Hosting and our backlinks aren’t bad (about 125). Our site does nothing against the Google laws of sneaky code, either. I feel like I also have plenty of content.

My best guess as to what is going on involves the proper term ‘Game Servers’ being too valuable to list me, even if I am perfectly relevant. This search term gets a lot of hits, so Google has some high requirements for who gets listed. I’m not sure what those are exactly.

Other searches, like the typo’d ‘game severs’ get much less volume. So much less volume that I show up right on the front page. Why? Because I’m relevant but just not trust worthy enough for some reason. I have never had ’severs’ anywhere in my code base. I grep’d it.

I have no idea what Google wants form me. We provide a good service and our site is relevant for the right terms. We’ve even spent hundreds of man hours trying to get out there and spread links. Man its a hard world with Google!

It said search bit.ly . All I had to do was type bit.ly . Chrome takes you right to bit.ly and shows you the shortened URL.

Works great, no addons required! Nice and fast.

Our does work just as well as advertised! Thee are things that need improvement but overall its a really great experience!

All you have to do is point your Android browser at http://droidmuff.in/downloads/swype-preview/ and install the apk by running it. Just make sure you have 3rd party apk files enabled.

I actually wrote this entire posting from wptogo and swype on my Android!

First, you’ll need to install the exif tool:

su -c 'yum install perl-Image-ExifTool'


Then, I ran the following command:

screen -S sort nice find ./Pictures -type d -exec exiftool '-Directory

./Pictures being the location of the stuff I wanted to sort relative to my working directory, and Orginized/ being the dir I want to move them into.

The screen -S command starts up a screen session so you can press Control-A then d to background it and keep doing other work. The nice command makes my pathetic little Pentium 1.6 not explode into flames. Don't you hate it when that happens???

This worked on Centos 5.4, i386.

Basically, the site used to be at Hostedd.com and was doing ‘ok’ for Google rank. It was steadily climbing the ladder toward page one. I decided since the domain hostedd.com had only been around for a month or two, I would re-brand the entire company to Hosted Game Servers so relevant things were in the URL. I also went ahead and added a keyword or two in my page URLs. I set my prior domain hostedd.com to be a 301 redirect to hostedgameservers.com and figured all was well. I setup the old URLs to redirect to the new slightly longer URLs with keywords in them in case anyone hit the old URLs.

I generated a new sitemap, added the new site to google analytics and google webmaster tools. A strange thing happened. Google appeared to crawl one of the old non-existent pages that I had a redirect for… detected it missing (thats how it handles RewriteRule?!!?) and left my site promptly! It didn’t return for days. Considering I had a current sitemap which mentioned NOTHING of these files; its rather weird it even tried to visit them.

Wow I thought… what a setback. I’m sure this kind of thing is on my record with Google for awhile….

So I went and requested removal of he old URLs from google at both the new and old domain names. Google denied them 24 hours later because they were not restricted by my robots.txt. In the mean time google crawled my website again, ignored what was listed in my html and xml sitemaps, hit a redirect and reported it as a couple 404 missing pages. WTF? My web host is wasn’t even having outages! I did all this sitemap and immigration work and google tagged my domain with a big red F for having what it thinks are 404 errors. Total crap!

So anyway, I requested removal again after adding the old url’s to the robots.txt file and they were accepted. Google crawled my site again, indexed two pages, and left. My site is ranking horribly, even if i search for all the words in the new domain name and all I can do is wait.

It’s common practice o use rewrite rules and rename pages. I’m really surprised this caused complications with the internet giant. It’s really frustrating and for an internet business can be deadly. Maybe google has become scored and petrified of google rank stealing tricks?!

Apparently you can use the .des files from the Chinese version over top of yours and it works fine.

Found the solution at the bottom of this thread.

But, because you don’t need to go chasing links… here’s the .des file in the form of a .rar as linked on the forums (no registration required to download for this site!).
CLICK HERE

Open up this folder for 64bit:
C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\Aion\bin32
For 32bit, AION will just BSOD in Win7 right now, I’m assuming this is going to be fixed by Aion later.

Then rename GameGuard.des to GameGuard.bullshit and copy in the one from the rar supplied here. Presto, it works! You’re Welcome!

If you appreciate, please drop a comment thanks!
Oh.. and if you can’t extract it, download winrar from www.rarlabs.com

(written from windows live writer)

I found a bunch of random ways to fetch the weather forecast in plain text… and a lot of complicated grep/sed/curl commands to get there. I wanted something as simple as possible.

So first, the shell script to get the weather in plain text…

echo " Weather for Palmyra, Virginia:"
lynx --dump "http://mobile.weather.gov/port_mp_ns.php?CityName=Palmyra&site=AKQ&State=VA&warnzone=VAZ048/" | head -n 7 | tail -n 1 | sed -e 's/\ //g' | sed -e 's/°/°/'

The echo is just for looks, obviously. You’ll need to change it to whatever you want it to be headed up by… or remove it completely.

The first lynx command fetches the website how a browser sees it.
The second head takes only the top portion of that resulting website.
The third command, tail, only takes the bottom line of the resulting head display.
The fourth sed command takes all the spaces out.
The fifth command gets rid of some weird character interpritation from lynx and makes it nicely have a Fahrenheit symbol.

You’ll need to get your own weather url and replace mine with it by entering your zip code here: http://mobile.weather.gov/.

Okay, so now we have a way to get the local weather. I actually setup an alias in .bashrc for this, too.

Next, we have the script that puts this at the bottom of your /etc/motd file. That script, in my case, assumes that you have sudo without entering your password:


cat ~/sh/backup/motd.backup > ~/motd.new
sh ~/sh/weather.sh >> ~/motd.new
echo "" >> ~/motd.new
sudo mv ~/motd.new /etc/motd


The first line copies my standard motd message into place within what will be the new motd file. This makes sure we maintain the same static message at the top. You’ll have to update that line and point it to a basic motd message file that serves as a template.
The second line, runs my weather script, which you’ll need to update and point to where yours is.
The third adds a blank line to the bottom of the new motd file, for better formatting.
The last of the 3 lines moves the new motd into place on top of your current.

Then, I scheduled that last script to run each hour in my user’s crontab with the command ‘crontab -e’:
0 * * * * ~/sh/generateMOTD.sh

It looks like IE7’s fault – like normal – because Chrome and FireFox do it right. Taking out either lightbox’s javascript or Adobe’s makes it work… but no combination of the two I see does.

Anyway, If i have both of these javascript files in the header of any web page, I get the following:

Line: 3975
Char: 9
Error: Object doesn’t support this property or method
Clode: 0

The image then comes up as if it were linked to directly.

Total crap!!! Anyone else getting this out there?

Sounds kinda stupid, but I was unable to find a trigger with du or dh to show the size of the directories in my current directory. If i did du -h it showed me the size of the file, but also showed me the size of every file within. I just wanted a high level overview of the total size of each folder I had in front of me.

I noticed du -h DirName showed the size of the dir or file on the last line….

A quick for loop solved the problem! Maybe it will be useful for someone else, too!

for d in *; do du -h "$d" | tail -n 1; done