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Sometimes it would just be great to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time. Some web applications just love to eat memory in Firefox, some web pages go crazy if you have JavaScript enabled and sometimes you just want different sets of cookies to let you manage two accounts at the same time.

I’ve been trying to do that for years and did the most exotic things to make it happen. I’ve used four different browsers in parallel and I’ve even used a virtual PC running within my PC (that kind of defeats the desire to use less memory, but it feels neat anyway). In the end, a collegue in the office, who happens to use emacs as his main web browser , pointed me into the right direction.

Now I have three completely independant instances of Firefox running at the same time!

So what’s the trick?
Continue reading ‘Running Firefox in parallel’ »

All of the websites I put together at the moment are used for playing around and testing things. It’s fun to set up a site, try some things out, delete it or just let it sit and then - usually much later - start over and try something else. The only problem is that by the time I am ready to start over, I have forgotten my password. I can find my user name, it’s in the FTP client and visible in my hosting control panel, but the password is not visible anywhere. The secure way would be to just pick a new password, but let’s assume you need your old one . The following will also work for email passwords stored in your email client, by the way.

What we’ll do is “sniff” the connection that your FTP client builds up, we’ll take a look at the packets sent out and received. Remember that other people can do this as well - say if you’re on an insecure wireless connection on the road — use secure connections and protocols whenever you can!
Continue reading ‘Go hack yourself - recovering your FTP password’ »

Google’s webmaster tools has a neat feature that lets you download your query and click statistics (once you have verified ownership of your site). The data you can get from there is quite comprehensive, but hard to break down for use in Excel. As a fun exercise I put together a small Python-script that takes the CSV file downloaded from your webmaster tools account and turns it into new CSV files for queries and for clicks (both with the position numbers as well).

Python is a neat little programming language, I like it more and more as I use it .
Continue reading ‘How to use Google webmaster tools stats with Excel’ »

I finally got around to getting the statistics for September 2007 for the Google Webmaster Help Groups finished up. I have to admit the numbers for September aren’t the best, especially the counts for the posts by Googlers. Getting started at Google took quite some time and a lot of learning . And wow - look at the Googlers post in October (great work, everyone!).

On a slightly sader note, I don’t think I can continue to provide these statistics here. I hope I can work something out as a replacement though, we’ll see.. or maybe I would be better off just posting in the group instead .

Without further ado, here are …

The numbers

• Number of new threads = 1157
• Number of new posts = 5902
• Average number posts/new thread = 4.81
• Number of posts by new users = 915 (15.5%)
• Number of threads by new users = 696 (60.2%)
• Average number of posts in threads by new users = 4.8
• Number of new threads started by Googlers = 2
• Number of new posts by Googlers = 35

Feel free to compare to August and July 2007. Comparing those numbers to the previous months there’s a visible drop, especially in the number of posts (-1774 or 23%) and threads (-172 or 13%). I hope we can push that back up soon (and answer more questions in the FAQs so that fewer threads are needed ).

Top posters

Thank you, top posters!! It’s great to have you in our community helping so many people to get their issues solved. You’re the best! Come on back, JLH, we’re missing you.

1. webado = 746
2. cass-hacks = 207
3. Phil Payne = 195
4. JLH = 178
5. cristina = 168
6. Admin Aaron = 163
7. Robbo = 157
8. abracadabra = 145
9. seo101 = 117
10. burchman519 = 94
11. IceGiant = 80
12. dockarl = 67
13. Red Cardinal = 53
14. Sam I Am = 51
15. Randy P. = 49

seo101 and Randy P. - feel free to give me a site to link to, even if it isn’t yours .
Continue reading ‘Google Webmaster Groups statistics for September 2007’ »

Untitled Document

We’ve all seen it - “untitled document” is a popular page name, probably the most popular one out there. I wonder who decided that “untitled document” was better than no title at all? There are a lot of those pages out there, do they even know that a good title can do wonders?

Being “untitled” doesn’t make your pages uncrawlable though. If you wanted to go all out, you could make sure that your page has no indexable content at all and heck, just use Flash to display the whole homepage while we’re at it.

Of course doing that, you would think that it would probably destroy your site’s chances of being shown in search results. I suppose it generally would, but imagine if your site was still #1 in the results for your niche.
Continue reading ‘Being #1 with “Untitled Document” and Flash’ »

So I went to visit Google in Mountain View …

… and learned that every second sentence has to be prefixed with “so”. Wait, that’s not all.

I’m sure you’re all just reading this to hear about the secret information they’ve been feeding me, heh. Sorry, you’ll have to join Google yourself to find out more about that part. It’s been really interesting so far, so many documents to read and digest, so many neat people to meet and chat with, so much good food to eat (good thing I’m only here for a week). The Google campus is really neat, but it’s also good to get out and do something else, like getting some neat toys for the kids (bribe my way back to getting them to recognize me when I’m home)…

Where are you in local search?

So I’m off to find a neat toy store that has more than the average plastic junk. Of course I’ll try to use Google local search to help me find one, I’m sure there are lots of really great stores around here…
Continue reading ‘Opportunities in Search’ »

Hi Richard, welcome to my blog! When I look through the top posters in the Google Webmaster Help groups, you’re almost always in there - it’s great to have you there and your posts bring in a lot of background knowledge that I’m sure many site owners appreciate. It’s interesting that you are - as far as I can tell - the only one of the top posters who is professionally active in the website-area.

Hi John. Thanks so much for asking me to participate - it’s a great honour to talk with you. Odd that you mention about my professional background. It has dawned on me that I might be the only professional SEO on the group (I wasn’t sure about this), and I’m slightly surprised that there isn’t more participation by other professionals. I’m quite sure that there are lurkers from the SEM industry, as the group is an excellent educational resource. More thoughts on this aspect a little later. Back to your questions now.

Why do you spend so much of your time in the Google Webmaster Help groups - isn’t that almost like giving away the work that you would normally charge for? What’s in it for you?

Funny, I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t get more time to contribute on the group. I’m not sure why that is, but I suppose I feel a small amount of ownership having posted as regularly as possible. I actually went to my profile recently to try and see how I first came across the group. I can’t say with 100% confidence how I found the group, but I was able to uncover what it was that sent me there. I was trying to find out whether Google would give .EU cTLD any special treatment in terms of country level searches. My first interaction with the group was with another ‘regular’, and that individual gave his time and knowledge freely. There’s something very endearing to actions which are without motive.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Richard Hearne (”Red Cardinal”)’ »

Another month goes by, here are the statistics for August (and some comparisons to July in brackets) 2007.

The numbers

• Number of new threads = 1329 [+5.3%]
• Number of new posts = 7676 [-1.0%]
• Average number posts/new thread = 5.48 [-4.5%]
• Number of posts by new users = 1061 (13.8%) [+30.0%]
• Number of threads by new users = 813 (61.2%) [+13.4%]
• Average number of posts in threads by new users = 4.9 [-2.0%]
• Number of new threads started by Googlers = 4 [+33.3%]
• Number of new posts by Googlers = 54 [-36.5%]

More posts by new users is nice to see - I hope that’s because the “feel” of the Groups has improved and not just because of strange things going on in the index .
Continue reading ‘Google Webmaster Groups statistics for August 2007’ »

If you have to do things over and over again, it’s a good idea to use a tool to make things easier. Windows is a bit limited (or very - when compared to Linux) when it comes to batch file scripts and “wget” is limited to what it can do right out the box, so I sat down and wrote a few command line tools to help me with some of the website checks that I like to do.

The tools I included in this set can do the following:

• Check the result codes for a URL (and follow in the case of a redirect) - or for a list of URLs
• Create a list of the links found on a URL (or just particular ones)
• Create a list of the links and anchor texts found on a URL (or just particular ones)
• Create a simple keyword analysis of the indexable content on a URL

Continue reading ‘A set of command-line Windows website tools’ »

Hi Craig, welcome to my blog ! Craig is, for those that haven’t noticed, an alien from some solar system far away. At least that’s the conclusion I came to after reading his introduction, the overview page on his site and his “my first computer” posts. I’m pretty sure that he’s either alien or very, very creative (as in creative writing), I mean seriously, “I built my own computer when I was 12.“?! Craig has been a frequent contributor in the Google Groups, bringing in a lot of background knowledge, helping with stylesheets, javascript and all sorts of other issues that arrive on a regular schedule.

I know that wasn’t a question but I would like to comment anyway. Although you are not the first to suggest I am not of this world, serious or not, I feel it is not so much a question of identifying the “where”, but identifying the “when”.

I think had I lived 150 to 200 years ago, I wouldn’t seem as much an alien as I do to so many people. More often than not, people who I communicate with over a period of time before ever meeting in person say something similar, I seem odd to them because they try to identify me with a place and fail but after meeting me in person, understand it is not a matter of identifying a place, but a place in time.

Many people are still put off after realizing that but a few people are able to take it in stride. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to extreme situations and I guess I can be a bit extreme at times.

Someone once called me an “anachronistic anomaly”. That seems to describe me as well as any other description I have heard, at least descriptions appropriate for mixed company.
Continue reading ‘Interview with Craig “cass-hacks”’ »