404 Tech Support » Webmaster

Bing’s Webmaster Tools

Jason — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:31:10 +0000

Bing has announced on the Bing blog (and it's corroborated on the Yahoo! Search blog yesterday) today that the testing with Yahoo! implementing Bing search results is underway. Of greater importance to webmasters and SEO experts, Bing is warning/encouraging webmasters to investigate how their site is showing up in search results using the newly updated Bing Webmaster Tools, also announced today.

During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results.

In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Bing’s Webmaster Tools

Onto the Next Theme

Jason — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:31:44 +0000

All weekend, I've been tinkering with a new theme here at 404 Tech Support. If you've visited over the course of the weekend, you've definitely seen it (and I apologize if my tinkering disrupted your visit). I've still got a small handful of changes I'd like to make but the majority of the installation is done. I'm enjoying it because it has made my site more responsive and introduced new features. For a reminder of what the old theme looked like, here's your reminder.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Onto the Next Theme

Woopra Provides Real-Time Site Use Tracking

Jason — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:44:34 +0000

Woopra does for your website the same thing that Google Analytics does, it provides insight to your visitors and audience helping you learn how they ended up on your site and what they're hoping to get out of it. By using analytics, hopefully you can tune your website to give your visitors what they're looking for more easily. I've tried Google Analytics before but somehow Woopra works for me where as Google Analytics just didn't tell me anything useful. Between the WordPress.com Stats I was already getting, I didn't need another static analytics package adding more Javascript to my page. Woopra, on the other hand, processes its information and sends it to your dashboard so you get real-time website analytics. You can see that somebody just visited your site or is visiting your site, how they got there, where they're from, what page they're looking at, and all the other usual analytic metrics.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Woopra Provides Real-Time Site Use Tracking

Ass-Scapes.com and Other Problems With Domains

Jason — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:06:19 +0000

This post is Safe For Work!

I'm sorry to say but there is no pornography here at 404 Tech Support. Why do I lead with this disclaimer you ask? Well, if you read yesterday's PvP Online webcomic and were curious enough, you might already know. You might also understand if you're one of the thousands of people I had visit yesterday, indirectly referred here by PvP Online. You see, the comic, which continues an arc that started last week, mentions a domain name ass-scapes.com. It's meant to shame the character and it's implied that it is a porn site to which Cole subscribes. You can read the strip yourself for the exact context:

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Ass-Scapes.com and Other Problems With Domains

Ask 404TS: From My Experiences, Tips on Starting a Website

Jason — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:40:23 +0000

I was asked by a friend the other day about the details on running a website. From the effort required in maintaining a site to hosting and domain costs and what you should look for in a web server. The best way I could figure to answer all of the questions was to go off the only thing I had on the subject, my experiences running the WordPress-driven 404 Tech Support and a phpBB forum. After writing this up and talking about my experiences with others, we came to the conclusion that this information might be insightful for individuals wanting to know how to start a website and informative for those that are paying somebody to setup a website and know where their money is going. Although my experiences have been based on WordPress and phpBB, by-and-large this carries over to any general web hosting experiences.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Ask 404TS: From My Experiences, Tips on Starting a Website

New Improvements to CAPTCHAs with NuCaptcha

Jason — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:00:48 +0000

CAPTCHAs, those images of squiggly letters that are a pain to solve, help digitize books, and are increasingly being cracked by bots, are taking a new approach. Instead of being a still image, CAPTCHAs are now being made into videos of moving text so they're easier for a human to solve but more complicated for a bot with NuCaptcha.

NuCaptcha's Basic service is free and still works without Javascript. Flash, however, is required. NuCaptcha Basic, says the company site, promises:

High quality video NuCaptchas
Enhanced security
Greater usability for users
Better conversions
Peace of mind

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: New Improvements to CAPTCHAs with NuCaptcha

Host Your Own URL Shortener with Shorty, YOURLS, or Others

Jason — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:05:31 +0000

I've been in a domain buying mood lately and decided to purchase 404ts.com to complement my primary but longer domain 404techsupport.com. While thinking about having a short URL for the sake of convenience, what else am I supposed to do with it than setup a URL shortening service? Similar to Bit.ly, TinyURL, Is.Gd, and the dozens of other sites out there that provide URL shortening, hosting my own service gives me a few features none of them can: control and branding. If I became dependent on one of the sites out there and they decided to close up shop because they found there's no revenue in the URL shortening business, all my links would go with them. By hosting my own service, I have full control of the database and the service operating on my server. Also by hosting and using my own domain, I get to brand my links as 404 Tech Support-affiliated instead of a random long link. So here's an overview of two of the services that I checked out, Shorty and Yourls, with other options at the end of the article. If you have your own hosting, these services are so easy to setup, it's worth looking into.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Host Your Own URL Shortener with Shorty, YOURLS, or Others

Turning Down Technorati Media and Looking for Ad Networks for Small Sites

Jason — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:09:18 +0000

If you've visited 404 Tech Support recently, you'll have noticed a few additional ads. One was on the right column and another was on the home page following the most recent article. These ads were provided by Technorati Media. Today, after testing the ads for the past week , I have removed all Technorati Media ads and will not be going back to the service.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Turning Down Technorati Media and Looking for Ad Networks for Small Sites

WordPress 3.0 Final is Available

Jason — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:20:09 +0000

WordPress 3.0 Final has been released and as the engine behind 404 Tech Support, I'm interested in their progress. Dubbed "Thelonious" it's gone through 3 different release candidate versions so hopefully it's well-polished now and plugins have had time to update. 3.0 has been worked on for half a year and includes "1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements". Big new features that I'm excited about include the merging of WordPress MU and WordPress along with, custom post types, and bulk updates for plugin updates.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: WordPress 3.0 Final is Available

Google Announces a New Indexing System It Calls Caffeine

Jason — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:13:06 +0000

Google announced on its main blog and the Google Webmaster Central blog that it has created and implemented a new search index it likes to call Caffeine. The new index moves away from a layered approach to a faster refreshing index that can add new or newly discovered items into search results faster.

This is an excerpt of an article from 404 Tech Support. Read the full article here: Google Announces a New Indexing System It Calls Caffeine