Kasper Souren a.k.a. Guaka | from free software to free life

Back to blog: more posts coming up

Submitted by Kasper Souren on January 19, 2012 - 23:06

It's due time to write some more blog posts on this site. I've started tons of websites all over the place but I think it's probably better to spend some more effort here. This site will be more interesting and it will also be easier to actually score in Google for a wider range of terms. Since that's my main occupation these days: playing the Google game, for fun and profit.

So I'm going to move some stuff back here, starting with some pages from another site, such as this list of websites and domains I have in English.

Watch out for Autoblogging!

Submitted by Kasper Souren on September 6, 2011 - 23:12

I’ve been looking around at flippa.com, an online marketplace for websites and I’ve come across quite a few funky, dodgy and murky things. This is a short post just to tell you not get involved in this one thing: autoblogging, which doesn’t have much to do with blogging but more so with automatically copying other people’s blog posts.

Spyrestudios wrote a good post about why autoblogging sucks, main reasons are that it’s not nice to those who have the original, and it’s also won’t lead to a healthy SEO situation. Google doesn’t like copycats.

The best way to spot autoblogging is to run the frontpage and a couple of other pages of a site through copyscape.com.

Of course it can still be interesting to buy a website that was created through autoblogging – if the price is low enough. But you’ll have to spend quite some time and money on cleaning up the site afterwards if you want to create a sustainable business auto this.

My first mobile site, in Drupal of course

Submitted by Kasper Souren on July 8, 2011 - 21:58

In 2008 I built my first Drupal site, for the furniture business of my family. The site proved to be a big success and we started some other furniture sites as well later on. I also worked on many other Drupal sites and the web in general hasn't been standing still. So last year we decided it was time for an upgrade. Not as easy as thought with a site that is ranking extremely well for a wide range of keywords. It also appeared more difficult to get to a new design.

As it happens, last month we managed to acquire a top domain name for our business: teakmeubelen.nl. My brother and I took upon the idea to use our development site for this new domain name. We already had taken over an aged website that was ranking pretty well for some good keywords, the domain name (teakdump.nl) wasn't that great though for the quality furniture. We had just transformed it into a Drupal site a year ago without doing much with it.

I moved the entire teakdump site to teakmeubelen.nl, which is super easy with Aegir, added the new theme, and many of the custom modules I had developed for the new Souren Meubels website. With that most of the site was ready except for some settings that weren't easy to grab in code.

As early adopters of technology (especially within the furniture world) we'd also been entertaining the thought of having a site that works well on mobile phones. I had already seen and heard of Mobile Tools, so I gave it a quick try.

The Drupal modules

I was pleasantly surprised by the integration with Display Suite and Context. That plus the Fusion Mobile theme gave me fairly decent mobile site in a very short time.

The mobile build mode make it a snap to get a slightly more usable rendering of nodes on mobile devices and the mobile context makes it easy to quickly rearrange the entire site for mobile devices.

I noticed an issue though: the Display Suite build mode was showing on the desktop site! I had to disable Mobile Tools and look back into this the next day.

Then I checked WURFL but that seemed to just complicate matters a bit more.

As it seems now there was a little bug in the code that sets the build mode, at least I wrote a patch for the Mobile Tools that works very well for me!

The main other thing I ran into was the caching of the theme. I'm using two different themes, one for the desktop version and one for the mobile version of the site. This doesn't work at all if you have the same URLs. So finally I had to take the redirect out of Aegir and into my nginx configuration so that m.teakmeubelen.nl also points to the same install (without a redirect).

SEO

From blog posts I gathered that Google doesn't seem to consider the same content on both desktop and mobile URLs as punishable duplicate content. I just wonder how Google is supposed to detect the mobile URLs (which is one more reason for a nice blog post about my first mobile site).

Now things still need some work here and there but overall I think this site looks great, both on the desktop and on mobiles. And I wonder where to put the iPad and other tablets, as I think the desktop site is just fine on an iPad but Mobile Tools probably considers it mobile hardware anyway.

Releasing a Drupal site? Check robots.txt!

Submitted by Kasper Souren on June 30, 2011 - 22:18

Whenever you release a site for which it's somewhat important that it's indexed in Google: check your robots.txt.

Last month a new website was released that I had worked on for 2 years. Somehow robots.txt wasn't checked after release. I was curious how the new site was doing in Google but when checking the indexed pages (using the super useful site: operator) I noticed some weird things, pages in Russian were showing on top whereas the Russian language was actually to disappear from the site. So the next thing to check was robots.txt. It looked a bit like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Which was the exact robots.txt that was used on the development site. This is good for long-term projects. You never know how Googlebot might find your dev site, and once it's found you'll have to change your URL unless you don't care that random people (including folks with bad intentions such as spammers) are looking over your shoulder.

This is how it the crawl rate graph looked in Google Webmasters after fixing this:

Also, if you're on Drupal 6, it's good to uncomment the /sites/ line in robots.txt as it will stop Google from indexing any of your images and other files that are stored in /sites/:

# Disallow: /sites/

Cheapest way to get from Brussels to Maastricht (and vice versa)

Submitted by Kasper Souren on May 20, 2011 - 18:23

I just got this question and I think it's good more people know about this option to get from Brussels to Maastricht for just about less than 10 euros. Well, I'm actually going to discuss the third cheapest way to get from Maastricht to Brussels. Of course the two cheapest ways are hitchhiking and walking (in this order, since you'll be very hungry when walking from Brussels to Maastricht). If you take the train in Belgium often enough this works.

The normal price for a one way ticket on the train on this trajectory is 18,10 euro. Then there is a special ticket that you can buy at the counter of which I don't know the price.

I just checked at NS Hispeed online and apparently there's also a way to get a return ticket for just 20 euro but you be able to change the dates.

So my way of taking this train is to get a Rail Pass, a ticket that you can use 10 times to get from one Belgian station to any other Belgian station. You have to write down the date and the stations and that's it. It costs 74 euros. And you can also use it with several people.

If you're under 26 you can go for the Go Pass which is quite a bit cheaper.

The problem with this Rail Pass is that it's only valid until the last Belgian station. If you're going abroad you need to get a ticket from the last Belgian station till your destination on the other side of the border. Fortunately there's a special ticket from Visé (yes, the last Belgian station) to Maastricht for "only" 2,40 euros. If you buy it in Maastricht, it will cost you an extra 50 cents "service fee" which is a bit silly since there's no way to get the ticket from the machines.

Here are the steps:
* make sure you will be taking 10 rides in the next year in Belgium
* buy a Rail Pass for 74 euros
* buy a ticket from Vise to Maastricht for 2,40

If you're currently in the Netherlands you won't able to use this the first time you take this trip since the Rail or Go Pass can only be bought in Belgium. The alternative would be taking a bus (for 3 euros) to either Bilzen or Hasselt, and take the train to Brussels from there. This is also the best way to get to Antwerpen from Maastricht (and vice versa). And since the train is often cancelled (without reason!), the bus towards Hasselt is also good in cases where you would otherwise wait 1 hour for the next train. The bus stop of the Belgian bus lines is just outside the train station, a bit behind the local ones.

Dumped by Parked.com

Submitted by Kasper Souren on May 20, 2011 - 13:12

I decided to check out what Parked.com is about, apart from parking domains. I copied 10 domains in their application form (that's the minimum) and received this a couple of days later:

In order for Parked.com to pay industry leading payouts we have to ensure traffic quality for our network is of the highest standards.
Our traffic quality department has analyzed your application and has determined that it does not currently meet the standards we are looking for in new Parked.com partners.

Sincerely,
The Parked.com Traffic Quality Department

Dumped. An outright refusal. But not really clear about their actual reasons. Should I have applied with more domain names? I entered some domains based on keywords that have a high click value and are googled quite often.

I didn't feel like wasting more time on this than googling their message. I found some forum posts where people have some interesting suggestions: 1. contacting Parked through the contact form, 2. going through an affiliate banner somewhere, 3. having an address in the United States. Don't feel like dealing with any of these as I am pretty sure there are other companies that do want my business. I just signed up at Sedo. Seems to work fine.

P.S. Sedo is not playing hard to get. Within 30 minutes that included a text message from Sedo, I had my first parked domain. I can also add domains to Sedo’s market place now – which seems like a good thing to do.

Five reasons you should you start developing your domains right from the start

Submitted by Kasper Souren on May 15, 2011 - 17:13

I'm not an average domainer. I have a strong IT background with tons of experience with search engine optimization. Hence I have a different outlook on this business that can be valuable to this business and to everyone on the Internet. Here you find five reasons why you should you start developing your domains right from the start.

Domain age matters. Website age matters. The sooner Googlebot comes over to see what's going on the better. Even if there is just a standard template, this will be better than nothing.
It's annoying for people who are interested in buying a domain to not find any kind of website on the name of their liking. Avoid this. Ideally potential buyers will be able to find you without too much hassle. Most people never heard of whois so they won't go to the source
It's even better if you develop a little bit more and actually provide some kind of value to the visitor who stumbles upon your domain - first of all for Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp. This way you might already start scoring visitors and you can think of the next reason...
You want to earn back the cash you spent on acquiring the domain name. If you have some kind of content that gets some visitors a little bit of adsense can do this for you for many domains For some domains I even earned back the money without any effort but registering the domain name.
Of course it's a slightly ADHD approach, but well, I think this should be part of the job of a domainer: having an idea and turning it into a website within a couple of hours is great. It's highly addictive once you also manage to score in the engines. I pimped this site to the first page for "domain pimp" within much less than 24 hours of the initial idea - and results like that keep me going like a mad pimp on crack cocaine.

I really take this very seriously myself. I immediately point my domains to a server that will serve something that is slightly relevant to the domain name. Automatically. In many cases I take it a step further by setting up the proper software (usually Drupal, sometimes WordPress, and rarely MediaWiki or.. a custom solution I write up).

Of course it becomes harder (possibly even almost impossible) to get to this kinda speed if you're dealing with the slightest form of bureaucracy, colleagues or outsourced programmers. That's why it's great to be independent.

Slicehost DNS API Python code

Submitted by Kasper Souren on April 24, 2011 - 17:58

I'm setting up quite a few domains these days. The interface of the company is far from great and it doesn't allow bulk updates for DNS records. Fortunately I still have a Slicehost account. At the moment I don't have any VPS running there but they still allow their customers to use their DNS services. I think that's a smart way of retaining clients - and getting new ones.

I've been using their DNS services at times when I, a friend or a client was in need for it. And like Slicehost slices, the services have been very reliable. So I decided to check out their API and I was happy to see there was some Python code. I dove into it and wrote a nice script (I love Python) that allows me to create and update DNS zones and records for the many new domains I recently got.

I thought it could be useful for someone else as well, so here it is.
If you don't have a Slicehost account yet, and you want to create one (because of this script? ;) please use sign up through this link to give me some Slicehost credit :)

If you're on Debian or Ubuntu you can fetch the required pyactiveresource library like this:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pyactiveresource

The code

"""
Slicehost DNS API Python code

written by Kasper Souren in 2011

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.  See http://unlicense.org/
"""

import urllib, re, sys, os
from pyactiveresource.activeresource import ActiveResource

api_key = 'YOURAPIKEY - GET THIS IN YOUR SLICEHOST CONTROL PANEL'
api_url = 'https://%s@api.slicehost.com/' % api_key

class Record(ActiveResource):
    _site = api_url

class Zone(ActiveResource):
    _site = api_url


def new_record(zone_id, rectype, name, data, ttl = 3600):
    myrecord = Record({'record_type': rectype,
                       'zone_id': zone_id,
                       'name': name,
                       'data': data,
                       'ttl': ttl,
                       })
    myrecord.save()

def new_zone(name):
    myzone = Zone({'origin': name, 'ttl': 3600})
    myzone.save()
    return myzone



def set_default_records(zone_id, ip, domain):
    new_record(zone_id, 'A', '*', ip)
    new_record(zone_id, 'A', '@', ip)
    new_record(zone_id, 'A', domain + '.', ip)
    new_record(zone_id, 'NS', domain + '.', 'ns1.slicehost.net.')
    new_record(zone_id, 'NS', domain + '.', 'ns2.slicehost.net.')
    new_record(zone_id, 'NS', domain + '.', 'ns3.slicehost.net.')
    records = Record.find(zone_id = zone_id)
    return records


def update_zones(domainlist, ip):
    zone_dict = dict([(x.attributes['origin'][0:-1], x.attributes['id'])
                      for x in Zone.find()])
    for domain in domainlist:
        print domain
        if zone_dict.has_key(domain):
            zone_id = zone_dict[domain]
            print "existing", zone_id
        else:
            zone_id = new_zone(domain).id
            print "new", zone_id
        print [x.attributes for x in set_default_records(zone_id, ip, domain)]

domaintext = """                                                                                                                                               
yourdomains.net to-update.to can-be-put-here.com
separated-by-whitespace.org
"""

domains = domaintext.split()
print domains
update_zones(domains, '123.123.123.123')

So, I got some dot .so domains

Submitted by Kasper Souren on April 4, 2011 - 11:51

I've decided to focus on creating a reasonable and steady income through SEO efforts. I'm not super proud of this activity but it gives me a lot of freedom (from offices, deadlines and clients) and I think there will be many nice side effects. The main vehicle for the Dutch language effort is ~~Proemevlaai (actually, it's Limburgish for plum pie)~~ PR9.nl.

In this light I participated in a domain land grab, for Somalia's .so domain. I somehow hope some of this money will actually go to turning this part of the world into something nicer (though I realize this is quite unlikely).

Apart from stip.so, which I got for a project a friend of mine is involved in, I managed to get the following domains:

Italian

adesso
incasso (also Dutch actually)
ingrosso
~~lus.so~~
percorso
permesso
rimborso
sposo
tasso
Treviso

Spanish

bolso
paraíso
progreso
proceso

Deutsch

~~inkas.so~~

I tried some more but these are still pending, so I guess I won't have them.

And then I got Kasper.so as well :)

UPDATE: Two domains sold and mobili in teak got all content from lus.so.

Books LLC scam on Amazon

Submitted by Kasper Souren on November 25, 2010 - 17:50

I love books about linguistics and I've been learning Hebrew and Arabic for a while now. So I was happy to see this title on Amazon: Semitic Linguistics: Proto-Semitic Language, Semitic Root, Status Constructus, Broken Plural, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Emphatic Consonant.

Scam LLC

I ordered it without too much thought. When the shipment arrived I was a bit surprised at how thin the book was, which costs almost 10 quid. I took it with me on a trip without looking into it. In the train I opened the book and I felt had. It's fucking scam.

Apparently Books LLC is taking articles from Wikipedia and putting them up for sale on Amazon. Perfectly legal, thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. But it's still a fucking rip-off. Especially since they can come up with tons of new "books" every day like this.

The problem lies with Amazon

The main problem here lies with Amazon. I really don't understand why they accept selling this book. It screws up their name and it will be a while before I order books again there without deep scrutiny of the books - which makes it less likely I'll buy there.

Today I shipped back the book, which costs me 6 euros, but it's worth every euro if it makes Amazon consider taking Books LLC crap off of their online store... And apart from writing it off with this blog post I left some more reviews for books from Books LLC on Amazon.

Meanwhile it would be good if the Wikimedia Foundation dives into this and starts selling printed Wikipedia articles themselves. I would be happy to buy these since it would look much better, and the money would go to support Wikipedia. And if it turns out to be a genuine success we won't have to look at Jimbo next year whenever we look up something on Wikipedia ;)

Remove all blocks from a Drupal theme

Submitted by Kasper Souren on July 20, 2010 - 12:17

Very useful when moving towards Features:

DELETE FROM blocks WHERE theme = 'your_theme_name';

From drush sql-cli, of course.

This is especially useful when building a subsite, for which I'm now mostly convinced by Sections.