Think Bohemian » systems administration

How I got WhySpam.Me from Page Rank 0 to 4 in Four Months

Richard Schneeman — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:00:37 +0000

Back in January I got serious about improving, my disposable email app, WhySpam.Me’s search engine ranking. I started religiously checking Hacker News and paying specific attention to search engine optimization (SEO) articles. Since then i’ve gone from page rank (PR) zero to four in a little under four months, you can see for yourself using prchecker or rapidSiteCheck. This is the story of how I did it:

Page Rank 0 to 4 in Four Months

Pretty Permalinks with Wordpress and Nginx

Richard Schneeman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:31:34 +0000

A permalink is a permanent link to an article or blog entry. Its what you get when a user clicks on the titles of one of your wordpress entries, so if they want to give the link to someone else, the url will always be the same. By default wordpress will make the permalink to the article the articles ID, so it would look like example.com/?p=123, which isn’t very descriptive. Instead if you log into your admin panel and select settings and then permalinks you can change the format of your links to something a little more human readable, and much more search friendly such as http://www.thinkbohemian.com/2010/01/29/national-instruments-extreme-video/ which tells you not only the date it was published but the title too.

You may find after you’ve changed your permalinks that your articles now all get a 404 error. This is because your server thinks that your looking for a file in the /2010/01/29/national-instruments-extreme-video/ directory. So we need to let our server know not to do that. There are plenty of examples of how to do the re-write if you’re using apache, but if you’re an nginx fanboy like I am, there wasn’t very much information. So to make this happen we need to add a few extra lines under our nginx.conf under the location / { section like this:

       location / {
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^.*$ /index.php last;
         }
        }

Enjoy the pretty permalinks!!

Update:

Waterloolabs

Richard Schneeman — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:56:53 +0000

It’s official, I’ll be re-designing and re-writing Waterloolabs.com woohoo!! Even better than that, i’ll be hosting the site on my own servers. It’s hard to believe that in two years time i’ve gone from not knowing how website applications worked to hosting my own stack and serving a site capable of getting 100, 000 hits on a episode launch day (btw, thats only from the second episode, one can safely assume that number will increase).

Install RMagick and MySQL with SnowLeopard

Richard Schneeman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:29:31 +0000

This post is mostly for myself, but the easiest way to install RMagick is to download the script from:

http://onrails.org/articles/2009/09/04/rmagick-from-source-on-snow-leopard

and to execute it by entering into terminal

sudo sh rmagick-build.sh

If you get errors related to “jpeg” or “jpg” then make sure you don’t have the macports library installed:

sudo port uninstall jpeg

Then run this install script for only installing image magick and all of its dependencies:

http://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl

After that install RMagick, and you should be good to go

sudo gem install rmagick

To install MySql from source you need to follow these instructions:

http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-mysql-on-snow-leopard/

Note: some of the version numbers don’t line up, but that’s an easy fix…just means you can’t copy and paste. Then you’ll probably want mysql admin:

MYSql Admin Download

then to get mysql admin to work with OS-X, we need to make sure mysql is running and to set the default configurations in a new terminal window type:



mysqladmin -u root password "mypassword"

Where “mypassword” needs to be replaced with your actual password. Once done you can launch mysqladmin from your application directory and connect to it using these settings:

Servername: localhost

Username: root

Password: mypassword

Now you can then create new tables by going to “catalogs” and selecting the “+” button under schemata. Type in the name of your database and you’re good to go!

You can change your password in terminal any time by typing:

mysqladmin -u root -p'mypassword' password "mynewpassword"

Note: there is no space between the -p and ‘mypassword‘

Starting Fresh

Richard Schneeman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:39:42 +0000

As I’m re-installing all of my system software, i’m taking the opportunity to learn about why, i’m doing the things i’m doing. I’m familiar with the whole sudo make install dance, but theres alot more going on that many how-to articles don’t touch. Here are a few really good articles discussing systems administration and the why of why we do certain things in unix and unix-like operating systems (OS X):

Note: none of these contain current instructions on how to install things, just interesting side information about why and how some of the installation items function.

Compile_Software_from_Source_Code

Using /usr/local

Installing Ruby, Rubygems, Rails, and Mongrel on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (indepth with explanations as to why)

Installing MySQL on Mac OS X

Thats all for now, i’ll update this article as i come across any good reads.