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.

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.

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

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 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

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.

Quick and dirty PHP script to turn a CSV file into a table in a MySQL database. Used for a Drupal project, so I ran it with drush php-script. Couldn't find anything better online. Feel free to use it.

If I need it again some time I will probably make it a bit nicer (I might also make it nicer if you ask me nicely and/or pay me to do it).

In the project I'm using it, I first converted an .mdb file to .csv with mdbtools.

<

pre>
<?php

$handle = fopen("/tmp/test.csv", "r");
$headers = fgetcsv($handle);

This took me enough time to get right to post a little blog post about it:

        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteMap lc int:tolower
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (shared|Shared|download|Download)/[A-Z]
        RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

Note that this doesn't work in .htaccess - you have to put it higher up in the Apache configuration.

I'm working on a project to convert a big ASP website into Drupal. On Windows OSes there is not really a distinction between upper and lower case characters in filenames. At first I thought to just leave the capitals, but on web pages links were sometimes with capitals and sometimes lowercase. So I added some stuff to the Apache configuration, usually inside the VirtualHost directive (this does not work in .htaccess):

<

pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]

For my little project site about swimming pool construction I decided I needed some way to spread links better over Dutch sites. So I hacked around a little bit in Drupal's Service Links module and I just uploaded some files to support nujij en eKudos. I want to add some more Dutch sites, but there ain't that many it seems.