Dave’s Ramblings

For those not yet aware phpBB has released another update, now up to v2.0.14. Mostly some minor bug fixes, but also some potentially vulnerability patches as well. Patch up now before we see any more exploits roaming about. The ‘Official’ announcement, patch files, and more more is located here. There is also a mailing list that you can sign up for to receive email alerts of any changes or updates to the base code on their site.

For those still not running the latest version of phpBB, I suggest you update IMMEDIATELY, our boards are still taking and subsequently rejecting over 6,000 hits a day from the santy worm. If you need assistance with adding rules for your .htaccess to stop these little nasties just let me know and I’ll happily post them here for your use. They’ve been employed since the worms first showed up and have shown to be most effective, but still not a replacement for updating your software! Even extremely heavily modified forums such as ours are easily updated.

Some of my more recent finds for Free SEO tools to pass along.

An awesome compilation of free tools, Keyword Analysis Tool, Link Popularity Tool, Datacenter Q- Check,
Google Yahoo Q-Checks all courtesy of McDar.

Curious to know what pages have been recently indexed by Google but hate doing the math to figure out the unix time/date stamp ie…. site:blog.captivereefing.com daterange:2453474-2453474 let this page do it for you.

Just recording spider hits as Googlebot seems not to be finding as much reason to poke around through CaptiveReefing our Coral Reef Forums nearly as often as a couple weeks ago.

Pretty slick little hack that I added to phpBB to record hits for me and store them in the database. Though the plug-in for WordPress is really sharp for tracking what pages/posts where hit and when. I’ll try to get some links up here shortly to where I found them.

Web Crawlers Visits since Jan. 29, 2005
Google visits: 27074 | MSN visits: 20685 | Yahoo visits: 8990

Found another great tool, thanks to the folks over at DigitalPoint, now check for percentages of duplicate or similar content between web pages with the Similar Pages Script. There are some other tools located there as well I have not yet evaluated, but this one is pretty good. Tells me I need to make additional changes to a few things on CaptiveReefing, seems my robots.txt had some things commented out that I’d rather weren’t to keep the spiders from crawling forum pages as well as posts that were archived off as HTML, but still lived in the PHP versions. Results 58% similar content between them… I’m sure Google will slap my hand for that one here pretty quick unless I do something soon.

Found an interesting sight while goofing off, a lot of resources and helpful idea on how to edit and customize your blog. Why pay someone $100 or more to do it when you can learn just a touch of HTML and CSS and do it yourself as often as you want. Take a look at Susie’s Design Blog