the blog of
Shawn Plep

Different Subdomains, from Different IPs – on the Same Domain

There are times when you might want (or need) to set up sites or scripts that live on different servers than your main site. There are a myriad of reasons for doing this, and they may include your main server not meeting the requirements to run a specific script – or wanting to add confusion to where your other site(s) or server(s) are located. I won’t get into the “why” here – only the “how”.

These instructions apply to a domain registered at GoDaddy, but the principles apply to most registrars.

1) Login to GoDaddy and go to your Domains. Click on the one you want to use and you should see the screen with all that domain’s details including the nameservers and under it should be “Total DNS”. If it says “available”, great – go to step 4. Else, go to step 2.
2) Click on Nameservers, click on Default, and select Default Hosted Nameservers.
3) Refresh until you see that Total DNS is available.
4) Click on Total DNS Control and MX Records.
5) Under “A Host”, you should see a line with the “@” and an IP, and next to it an “Edit” box (the one with a pencil inside of it). Click it and change the IP to whatever the actual IP is of your site’s server.
6) Now, you want to click on “Add a New Record” in the “A Host” box. Do it, and you want the record to be a “*” and the IP address of the subdomain you are hosting elsewhere.
7) After this is done, check to see if your site still shows up and then verify that your subdomain shows up.

Both are on different servers. Yay!

This can seem confusing when you have, for example, a hosting account at Lunarpages and one at Hostgator – and you want *only* one particular subdomain to be served from Lunarpages (and the main site and all other subdomains served from Hostgator). Don’t be confused; just set up hosting at Lunarpages with your “main” domain name, and define the subdomain in the control panel, and proceed as usual. There is no way your main site will be served from there as long as you define that specific subdomain to be served from the Lunarpages IP in your A Records (at your registrar).

SEO Software I Actually Use – My Honest Opinion of Market Samurai

As a SEO/web developer, I need to do various tasks related to the following:

• Keyword research
• Site comparison
• Rank tracking

Only recently have I gotten a handle on the tasks (and I’ve been trying to find a solution for weeks). Originally, I was using Brad Callen’s SEO Elite software. It was “o.k.”. I used it for rank tracking. But I was never happy with the software – at least, not 100% happy. I mean, it did what it was supposed to do, but the problem is that the program is a bit “clunky” and just plain ugly for one thing – and it’s slow. To do a backlink analysis takes a looong time, especially if you check off a few of the factors (like PageRank and domain age). If I have to measure 10 competitors’ sites it takes all day. Not cool.

So then I started programming my own. I made a dashboard that allows me to see sites’ rank for specific keywords, as well as other domain-related info such as backlinks, etc. A lot of this comes from various APIs. I store all the info in a database and run the scripts via cron. I like doing things myself, because I can get exactly the data I want. And once I store it in a database, I own it and can run whichever types of reports I want.

But I still needed a good tool to do site comparisons. I tried SEO SpyGlass, and I like it, but it was too limited for what I really wanted. I wanted something to do it “all”.

Oh yeah, and I needed SEO software that could run on a Mac. There’s not a lot to choose from in the world of OS X SEO software. (BTW I was running SEO Elite from a VirtualBox Windows XP install.)

I hate buying something only to find out it’s not really what I needed. So I finally (after hearing about for about a year) tried something called Market Samurai. I don’t know why I never tried it before, but it was probably because of the name – it doesn’t sound like it’s primarily SEO software. But they have a free trial, so I was able to take it for a test drive. (You can try Market Samurai for free here.)

It does all the things I used SEO Elite for, and I think it compares well with SEO SpyGlass as well. I bought it right before my trial ran out, and I’m very happy with it. It’s a very well-made, feature-rich, and well-supported SEO program. It’s way more solid than most SEO scripts and programs I’ve seen over the years.

And, another factor that led me to make the purchase decision was the fact that the license allows you to install and use Market Samurai on two machines. It works out perfectly for my wife and I: she has a Windows 7 laptop and I have a MacBook Pro, and we can each run a copy of Market Samurai. (It’s an Adobe Air app, so it can run on both OSX an Windows.)

My wife uses it for mainly keyword research (on her real estate site) and I use it for SEO stuff – mostly comparing site metrics and finding ranking factors.

So, how does it fit into my daily SEO tasks? Well, I use my custom-coded scripts for my daily tasks. But when I see a site I want to gauge or a site where I want to analyze their backlink anchor text, I use Market Samurai. I often export the data (you can throw it into a CSV) and use the data within other scripts. So it’s not my “main” SEO tool but it has a lot of supporting uses for me.

Would I recommend it? Overwhelmingly, yes – because I’m totally satisfied with my purchase. But everyone’s different: If you don’t already have an SEO tool, then just get it. It does almost everything you will need to do. If you have a tool that doesn’t work for you, check out the trial version and see if this would be an improvement. If you already have a tool you use and are happy with, then maybe try Market Samurai – but I’m a believer in using what works for you.

If you want to give Market Samurai a try, get your Free Trial copy here.

Run Multiple Sites with One WordPress Install

Using a single codebase of WordPress to run more than one site has never been easy to do – all previous methods involved hacks, and never allowed 100% compatibility with all plugins. I’ve experienced both homebrew single-codebase hacks and I’ve also used Virtual Multiblog (the best previous method).

However, with the release of WordPress 3, multiblog support is included natively. And it works great – the plugins I tested are all usable with none of the previous issues I’d seen with the “hacks” I had tried in the past.

In addition, by using a plugin (a plugin intended for WP-MU actually), you can run your multiple WordPress sites on their own domain names.

Best of all, it can all be done by using a single shared-hosting account.

At present, WordPress 3 is still in beta, but that hasn’t stopped me from putting it to use. I currently have a fully-functional network of around 20 sites, all running from a single install of WordPress 3 on a Hostgator shared hosting account and it hasn’t thrown up any errors or anything. For the most part, WP 3 is probably stable for most uses. Just back up your data regularly – especially before you attempt to upgrade anything.

Here’s how to do it, in very basic steps:
1. Install the latest WordPress on your hosting account. (These instructions assume cPanel hosting.) At the moment, version 3 is located here.
2. In your cPanel account, enable wildcard subdomains. This is done by creating a subdomain of “*”. Yes, just an asterisk.
3. For each of the domains you plan on hosting, add it as a Parked Domain. (Of course, this excludes your “main” domain.)
4. In your wp-config.php file, add the following: define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
5. In your WordPress admin, go to Tools->Network to enable the hosting of multiple blogs. Choose the subdomain option. Do not choose the subdirectory option!
6. Create your sites from within the new “Super-Admin” menu.
7. Download and install the Domain Mapping Plugin.
8. For each of your “sub-sites”, login to the admin and go to Tools->Domain Mapping. Enter the domain name and check the box.
9. Go back to your main site’s Super Admin menu.
10. Click on “Sites” and edit each site. For each one, change the domain to it’s full actual domain name.

At this point, you should be able to login to each of the sites’ admin section from it’s domain name. Each site will have access to all the Themes and Plugins, and you can easily upgrade all the sites at once. Easier maintainability for sure!

Javascript to Allow Editing of ANY Web Page

This code snippet comes in handy for the times you want to edit a page quickly and print it, or take a screenshot, or just to see how something looks. It has some valid uses and can probably be used in some sneaky ways as well – but nevertheless it’s a useful code snippet.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Just go to whatever page you want to edit, paste the code in your address bar (and click enter) and you will be able to edit and delete anything on the page.

Copy a MySQL Table

This is a simple query but in case you keep forgetting how to do it, and hate searching for it every time you need the query, bookmark this post. Here’s the query:

CREATE TABLE new_table SELECT * FROM existing_table

Creating Better CSV Files With Excel

Excel is a great tool for a number of reasons. But when it’s used to create CSV files, it usually throws something at me that’s hard to parse.

I often need to use a script to parse CSVs (datafeeds, database exports, or just spreadsheets of data) and grab data, or reformat the CSV, but a problem I’ve run into many times is the fact the Excel exports to CSV and does not allow me to enclose the fields in quotes, double-quotes, or…anything. And it separate the fields by commas. And that’s just how it is. (No options!)

So, instead of doing regex acrobatics or parsing contortions, there’s a way to make Excel export in a much easier-to-parse format.

To do this, you must change a Windows XP setting. Click Start->Settings->Control Panel->Regional and Language Options. Next to the Language, click “Customize”. Next, chnage the “List Separator” (under the Numbers tab) to something very unique. I use a tilde (“~”) symbol, due to the fact that I rarely find that within the data I’m working with. But you can use something else such as a pipe symbol.

Then, export your data to CSV. Your fields will have a more unique separator which you can easily distinguish. If you want, you can easily do a search-and-replace of that symbol as well. It’s saved me a lot of time!

How to Use an Affiliate Datafeed (Effectively)

In the world of affiliate marketing, there are a whole lot of tools available. Merchants want you to sell their stuff for them. And even if you (as an affiliate) are unsuccessful, they still benefit due to the inbound links and citations you provide to them.

So, if you’re an affiliate, you need to understand how to properly use the tools provided to you so you can benefit from them as well (and actually rank, and sell stuff). The most important (and common) tool you can find is the datafeed.

A datafeed is usually a CSV file containing the products from a particular merchant. The fields consist of the product name, description, price, link, and maybe a few others. Merchants on affiliate networks such as Shareasale will typically have datafeeds.

Here’s how you should use a datafeed, with SEO in mind…

• Change the content. As you pull in a datafeed, you should always make some alterations. For one thing, I like to “clean up” the data – because I often find weird mistakes, strange abbreviations, or undesirable formatting. Secondly, I like to replace words and/or phrases with different ones. I do this across the board, just because it will make my data slightly different than what everyone else has.
• Add to the content. You can get as fancy as you want with this, but the fancier the better. At the very basic level, you can make what’s already there more “wordy” – just another variation on replacing words (as noted above). But the better option is to add totally new additional content. If you can scrape content and add a snippet of info to your product entry, your site will have the datafeed content plus the scraped additional content. One example of this (that I do) is a t-shirt site I own. The products all come from the merchant’s datafeed, but in addition to that data I write an additional few sentences or paragraphs about the shirt. If applicable, I embed a related YouTube video. Get creative and you can probably think of tons of ideas like this, for your datafeed.
• Re-format the content. Again this is basic, but can only help – especially when compounded with the other changes. If the datafeed uses bullet points, take out that formatting and use CSS or just dashes and linebreaks. If the description comes before the price, put the price after the title but before the description. If there is no “sale” price…add one! Put a strikethrough on it and put it in red. Pull out the first hundred characters of the description and make it into a short description, and re-order the sentences – and use that on your site’s landing page to link to the product. Get the idea?
• Re-do the images. For images, you should download them (either by actually downloading, or if not possible by caching). You should re-name them with the product name. You should re-create the thumbnails in a different size (even if only slightly different.
• Do not link to the merchant. (If you can help it.) Mod_redirect is your friend. I have been saying for a while now that learning htaccess is one of the most important things a web developer can learn, and this applies to aff. marketing as well. Maybe more. You can avoid linking to the merchant through various means, and if you can’t do it super-clean via htaccess directives you can do it through other means as well (with your favorite scripting language). The end result needs to simply be that all links and all assets either are being served from your site or they look like they are.

I probably don’t have to say it, but if you have scripting skills and can at least find your way around a server, you’re ahead of the game. To do any of the above manually will take a long time and become tedious quite quickly. I recommend learning PHP, becoming familiar with mod_rewrite, and learning how relational databases work. (A little regex can’t hurt either!)

There are other aspects to using datafeeds, but this list covers the big issues and will get you around most of the SEO issues that plague an affiliate. And surprisingly, most affiliates don’t even implement one of the changes on my list! So if you do what I suggest, you may end up in the top 5% of affiliates – thus giving you an advantage in your site’s optimization and avoiding  having exactly the same content as everyone else (including the merchant).

Datafeeds are a starting point, best used as a basis to build upon. To use them effectively, you must enact the fundamental rule of SEO which is to provide value (by adding it, in this case).

My Theory of Perfect Simplicity

Many “popular” things are not popular or widely-used because they’re better (in the sense that they “do” more or are superior in their design). They’re better in the sense that they’re accessible to the greatest number of people, or they do one thing extremely well. Popularity – lasting popularity – is a result of something having that “thing” I think of as “perfect simplicity”.

When I do just about anything in life, whether it’s for work or for pleasure, I relish opportunities when I can do something simply but well. There are many opportunities to do this in the field of programming. A program, well-written, can be a beautiful thing. Perhaps only other programmers can understand that statement, but I think the truth is comprehensible to just about anyone when they think of what a program is: it’s a set of directions for getting from one place to another.

If I can give those directions very clearly and accurately, the program will work as it should. If I can be succinct and pithy in my “wording”, the program will work quickly and run efficiently. Accomplishing those things is perfect simplicity. (Unfortunately, I am not usually able to do things that way in a typical work environment, but sometimes it happens.)

A great arena in which perfect simplicity can be seen is music. There are a few bands I never grow tired of listening to, but they’re not all “great” musicians. Steve Vai is great guitarist. Buckethead is a great guitarist. But those aren’t the musicians I listen to over and over again. However, I can throw in the Ramones and enjoy their music fairly consistently. Why is that? Part of the reason is that the songs are so simple, and so perfectly executed. The songs are almost all extremely catchy. Because of that, the Ramones are a best-selling band to this day. Technical musicians like Vai don’t sell many CDs, however, in comparison.

So what does this all mean, to you and I? It means we need to demonstrate perfect simplicity in what we do, if we hope to be successful. A way to do that is to specialize in one aspect of your interests, and become good (really good) at something. I personally enjoy a great deal of things: playing guitar, writing, gardening, building things, drawing, programming, playing drums, working out, etc. However, I can’t ever hope to do all or most of those things at an expert level. So I pick one thing (web programming) and do it as best I can.

We can all do that, and I think we’ll see greater success as we maintain focus on one thing in our lives. This perfect simplicity is what we gain from focus and practice, and it breeds success.

Thanks For Clearing Up that Metatags Thing, Google

I’ve thought this for some time (based on writings by some SEO guys I respect) but until now it’s been an educated guess that meta tags (specifically, the keyword tag) exhibit no influence upon Google’s ranking of a page. So I must say thanks, Google, for making it clear to all of us who care. Meta tags are not an all-important piece of SEO.

The headline of a recent Webmaster Central blog entry should say it all: “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking“. But if you want to know more, you can read or watch Matt Cutts elaborate further.

Now, another minor point: it might not be a total waste of time to at least fill in a few keywords. I say this because of the Bing webmaster blog taking a somewhat neutral position on meta keywords. It makes me think that perhaps Bing “pays attention” to the meta keywords, at best. But I don’t see it as any sort of actual ranking factor whatsoever.

Update: I found this excellent and balanced perspective on the meta tags issue by John Andrews. I recommend it highly.

Use CSS to Show the Current Nav Point

Here’s a quick but useful CSS technique. Learn it, and love it – this technique will let you do with CSS what other people have to do with a scripting language.  (Remember: the less scripts you run on a page, the faster your site will load. Make the computer do less.)

First, let’s start with some example nav code:

<ul>
<li><a class="home" href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a class="about" href="/about/">About us</a></li>
<li><a class="contact" href="/contact/">Contact us</a></li>
</ul>

The important thing to note is that each nav item has it’s own distinct class. After you’ve given each nav item a class, move on to your body tag.

For the body tag on each page, give it an id that matches the class name you gave that page in the nav. (So, the body tag for “About Us” would have an id of “about” and so on.)

Last, make a CSS rule to make the magic happen…

<code>#home .home, #about .about, #about .about, #contact .contact
 {
 text-decoration: underline;
 }

Obviously, you would make the CSS rule do whatever it is you actually need to happen – but hopefully you get the idea. When the nav class and the body id coincide for any item, that rule takes effect.