I’ve been working on a personal business site of mine (I’ll post the link once I’m done), it has been listed in googles index recently and to my surprise I’ve forgotten to optimize the urls on the site and only got the main page indexed. Google ignores everything after the ? for example, http://johny.org/index.php?post=2&bla=3, in this url google will only index http://johny.org/index.php and everything after the ? will be ignored. This is bad if your pages are dynamically generated (like most new websites).

To fix this, you need to create a new file on the root of your website and name it “.htaccess”. In this file we will put the redirection rules. This is what mine looks like

 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^montreal/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$ index.php?cat=$1&page=$2

 

The first line is required to enable rewrites.

 

The second line is the rule I’m using for the redirects, it looks complicated but it’s actually very simple! RewriteRule has 2 parts, the first part, the from part, “^montreal/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$” is to tell apache that if you get a url which looks like this, redirect it to the second part, the to part, which in my case is “index.php?cat=$1&page=$2“

 

The links on my page are **.com/montreal/category_example/page_example.html so when someone clicks on it, apache will redirect them to **.com/index.php?cat=category_example&page=page_example. In the from part I have 2 variables which are alpha-numeric, I’ve defined them by “([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)” (from a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _-]+)) the variable ends as soon as a character is reached which is not in the range I’ve defined, in this case it’s the ‘/’, then the second variable starts which is for the pages. As you can see in my case, I’m mainly targeting clients from Montreal, that’s because my main clientele is from there and this keyword inserted in all my links will give me a fair amount of boost in the search engines for the “montreal” keyword (which is a must have in my case).

 

Hope this helps someone out, let me know if you need any help

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Every once in a while, I challenge myself, I think of a small application that might be useful to me and time myself to see how much time it took me to write it. The latest one, the one I did yesterday night, was an alarm clock which plays mp3 files as the alarm tone (took me 2 hours, I’m not pleased at all). Anyway, I decided to post the app here and maybe someone might use it I called it FreeAlarm v0.1, it’s one executable file, no installations or anything and should work on all Windows OS. Let me know what you think of it!

The source code (written in C#) isn’t documented (not part of challenge, takes time ) but it’s pretty straight forward, I don’t mind uploading it if I get requests for it.

Click here to download FreeAlarm

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The first draw for the Woopra competition has taken place, the winner is “http://blog.dylx-infotech.com/”. Congratulations Please let us know what you think of Woopra! For all the others who participated, another draw will take place next monday and you will be automatically included.

Here’s a video of the draw:

-Johny

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I got Woopra invitations and I am willing to give them away but I don’t want to give them away to people who won’t really appreciate it much and therefore I decided to give them out as prizes for small competitions which will happen on Johny.org

For now I came up with 2 competitions:

The first competition consists of editing the demo video that I’ve posted, the link to download the video can be found in my previous post. All that is required is to make a 3-5 minutes eye catching experience so you’ll have to make some transitions, add some background, whatever you find suitable! Make sure you work on the high quality video I posted on Vimeo, the link to download the high quality video can be found in the previous post. Once the video is done, upload on Vimeo, post a comment with a link to the video, every time 10 videos are posted we will choose one and give the winner an invite, therefore for every 10 videos there will be 1 winner (eg: 50 videos = 5 winners…).

The second competition is simple, simply link to this post! I can see everyone who links here and a software will randomly choose a winner every week! The sooner you link the better since you will be automatically included in the next weeks lottery. For every 100 links there will be 5 invites therefore there’s a 5% chance to win (which isn’t really bad).

Good Luck

-Johny

Update: The first draw will be on Monday April 14th

I came up with a fair way to do the drawings, each website linking will be assigned a number. On Monday I’ll go on Random.org, generate a number between 1 till “x number of sites linking” and the number which pops on the screen will be the winner. To make sure that no one feels bad or cheated, I’ll record the process and post it on a video sharing website

Update: Second draw will be on 21/04/08

For now, here are the numbers assigned:

1 - http://www.windowsobserver.com/2008/04/08/woopra-invites/ (he has woopra running)

1 - http://www.lnahinu.com/blog

3 - http://blog.dylx-infotech.com/22/woopra-fo… (winner on 14/04/08)

2 -http://fredscapes.nl/index.php/2008/04/13/win-een-woopra-invite/

Update: April 21 2008

Not alot of participants so I decided to end the competition, I sent an invite to the 2 remaining candidates.

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I’ve been a beta (actually even pre-alpha :P) user of Woopra for a while (one of the first, if not the first), so it’s now time to pay my dues by posting a video about it, the video was made with intent to be modified (some editing and adding step by step explanation) and placed on the Woopra demo page but due to lack of time it stayed as scrap and in the meanwhile newer version of Woopra got released and therefore I decided to post it before it becomes totally useless

If you haven’t heard of Woopra yet, “Woopra provides real-time stats delivered via a revolutionary client-server application, and includes unique features such as the ability to identify and chat real time with visitors to the monitored site. The beta version of Woopra was quietly unveiled to a select audience of 200 at WordCamp Dallas, but news rapidly spread to over 2 million as buzz began to grow.”

Enjoy!

For those interested in an invite to Woopra, I have a small challenge, download the high quality video from Vimeo (on the videos page) and edit it. The best edit will receive an invite!

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And I thought I was fairly good in soccer… It’s amazing what these guys can do.

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A very interesting research from Princeton with a demo video about cold boot attack on encryption keys which are read from RAM and not the usual hard disk keys.

Here’s the video:

“Abstract Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images…

(more…)

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Here are two quotes that I’ve come up with and thought I would share for criticism:

1) “Life is a set of dynamic priorities.” - JohnyB

I’m sure that all coders know what a dynamic priority list is, but to those who don’t, it’s a list of elements that get updated according to a rule you set in your code. For example when 2 normal users print on the same printer, the first one who presses print will be assigned top priority and the second will get the second spot. But when a super user prints, he will be assigned the first spot on the queue and won’t wait for the others… That’s how I think life works, we have a set of things to do but a limited time, we just have to figure which one goes before the other…

A real life example would be, you’re watching TV and the door bell rings, you assign the door a higher priority and go open it and then resume your other lower “priority” such as TV.

2) “The older we get, the dumber we become” (edited- I actually won’t take credit for this one as it returned 2 results on google)

Let me know what you think!

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I recently got a new pc with an Asus P5K motherboard, after reformatting it the built-in sound card was not working anymore.

This is how I fixed it:

1. From control panel, add/remove, remove these 2 softwares if they are installed, “Realtek High Definition Audio Driver” and “High Definition Audio driver Package - KB888111″.
2. Restart Windows
3. Get the latest Realtek drivers from here.
4. Install it, and reboot.
5. Should be working now!

I think this should work on all Asus Motherboards that have a built-in HD Realtek Soundcard.

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Author: Hussam Al-Tayeb

Metacity is the default window manager for the Gnome desktop. The next major version of metacity (2.22) to be released later this year, will have a built in composite manager that will be enabled by default if libxcomposite is installed.

First you need to have ‘glx’ module enabled in the system’s xorg.conf file.

Section “Module”

……….

Load “glx”

……….

EndSection

and the xorg composite extension enabled. This should be enabled by default in xorg-server 1.4.x but for older releases, you need to add the following changes to your xorg config file.

(more…)

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