Archive for Issue 29 - March 2010
Live Web Hosting Error Logs in LPCP
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One new innovation to come to our LPCP web hosting control panel is live error logging. The error log, for your web hosting account here at Lunarpages, is one of the most important account specific statistics you can gather.
This is the place where your account’s server at Lunarpages will send diagnostic information and record any errors that it encounters. When problems occur, it is the first place to look when troubleshooting hosting problems, because it often has details of what went wrong on your hosting account and how to fix it.
How to Access the Error Logs in LPCP
To reach your web hosting account’s error logs, you must first login to your account’s LPCP control panel. Next, find the link that reads “Server Error Logs”. Click it to go to the Server Error Logs page within LPCP.
Next, you will see your account’s error log displayed in a large textarea field. The web page within LPCP with the error logs will refresh automatically every three minutes. If you need it to update immediately, just click on the refresh button.
If you are having web site problems, the error logs are the first place you check when it comes to troubleshooting your problems. LPCP has made reaching these details very easy, so you can get your web hosting issues solved as soon as possible.
Google’s Real Time Search Future
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The way Google indexes your web sites might be changing soon.
Rather than relaying solely on the crawling method, they will also be indexing your content instantly. This means as soon as you create a new web page, it will be up on Google in seconds, not days or weeks. This is great news for small time web site publishers, because they can get their content on Google even faster, and build up their own audiences too.
What is PuSH? This all goes back to a Google developed project called, PubSubHubbub (PuSH for short). It is a real time syndication protocol that will notify any group, service or company of your latest updates. It kind of works the way a Really Simply Syndication (RSS) feed works.
To help explain, check out this video put together by the guys behind PuSH:
How Does PuSH Affect Me? Now chances are Google might not stop crawling links all together, because they would need a way to find your PuSH information. However, over time this would make content indexing and searching a much richer, faster and efficient task to do.
Can I Play With PuSH Now? Yes! Go check out this page to learn more about this simple, open, web-hook-based protocol:
I do have to say, this does sound very interesting. I am also very excited to hear that Google is looking to make content submission and crawling a much easier and better process.
Introduction to CSS Web Design
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Adding a Cascading Style Sheet to your current web site layout and save you time and make your web site look a lot more professional in the process. Cascading Style Sheets, or sometimes called CSS, is a style sheet language used to describe how a web page should be formatted.
For example, if you wanted to make some text on a web page look bold, you might use this snippet of HTML code:
<strong>this will be some bold text!</strong>
Which seems simple enough. However, what if you want to chance the color, font, and how this text is shown in that spot across all your web pages? Well then your HTML in your pages become a rambling mess. That is where Cascading Style Sheets come in handy.
Cascading Style Sheets allow you to, in a much more organized way, sort out how your web site design looks in a totally separate file, or chunk of code in between the head tags. For example, let say you wanted the title of your page to be bold, green, and a different font style than the rest of the page. In your HTML code, you would use something like this:
<p class=”mycooltitle”>this is my page title</p>
That tells the browser that everything within this paragraph or <p></p> tags will follow the design setup class I have defined as “mycooltitle”. Now, in between the head tags (<head> </head>) I want you to add this:
<style type=”text/css”>
.mycooltitle {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
color: #336633;
}
</style>
This CSS code tells the web browser to apply these design settings to the class marked, “mycooltitle”. It does three things. It says it will use the Verdana font, the font will be bolded, and it will be colored green (#336633 is the HTML color code for a shade of green).
That is how you apply Cascading Style Sheets to your web design and layout of your own web pages. One major benefits of using CSS is that it helps to separate your web site code with your design. This way, you can change one aspect very easily in the CSS file (when or if you start to master external style sheets). I will save that lesson for another day.
Make Your Twitter Page Stand Out
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How often do you use Twitter? You might just use it to follow a few friends, or you might use it to market your web site projects. There are a lot of ways to use Twitter as a service. My question that I pose to you is, how can you make it better looking?
Twitter Backgrounds – Many people have customized the backgrounds of their Twitter pages to display more information about them. This can easily be done by using a really big background image that you type the content on as a part of the image. Darren Rowse (as seen above) has done an excellent job at that on the @problogger Twitter account.
Twitter Colors – Want to change the default color scheme your Twitter profile uses? All you need to do is login to Twitter.com, and then click on the Settings link at the top of the web page.
Next, click on Design – and you will be given several default design choices.
You can also click the “Change Background Image” button to change your background image or click, “Change Design Colors” to tweak the colors that your profile uses for the backgrounds, text, and links.
When you are done – just click on the button labeled, “Save Changes”.
Your Twitter “About” Link – Have you added your web site’s URL to your Twitter profile? You can do that by going to Settings > Profile.
Some people will put in their web site’s URL, which is perfectly reasonable. One neat tip you might try though is to create a special page on your web site dedicated to people who find you from Twitter. For example, you could create yourdomain.com/twitter, and on that page welcome your Twitter followers and post specific content geared more towards that audience and topics they might be more interested in.
When there are millions of people using Twitter every single day, you have to use a little creativity to make your tweets stick out from the crowd. Remember, you can follow Lunarpages on Twitter too @lunarpages.com.
Fix Web Site Errors with Webmaster Tools
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Did you know that Google Webmaster Tools could help you find and fix errors on your web site? As Google crawl through your web site links, it finds and logs all the errors it encounters. It then (if you have your domain setup with a Google Webmaster Tools account) will turn around and tell you what the errors are so that you can get them fixed.
How to Troubleshoot Crawl Errors
Log into the Google Webmaster Tools, and then select your web site from the list of those you setup. That should take you to the dashboard for that particular web site.
Next, click the Diagnostics link in the left sidebar menu, and then click Crawl Errors. This will give you all the issues Google has encountered when crawling your web site.
Currently, there are no Unreachable web pages hosted on this site, however you should also check the other error categories they provide to you. They include:
- HTTP Errors
- Errors in Your Sitemaps
- Not Followed
- Not Found (aka a 404)
- Restricted by robots.txt
- and Pages that Timed Out
Out of the Not found errors, let us take a look at one in particular:
Here it tells you the link that is giving the error, what type of error it is, a link to show you who is linking to this page (leading to the error) and the date Google found it.
I can confirm the page is not there. So next, I click to see who is linking to this web page.
Since I control both of these links that have the bad link on them, I can correct them, to take care of this bad link issue. Now my links will be correct, and both web site visitors and Google should no longer find an error there in the future.
Remember that Google will not know you fixed the web page automatically. You will have to wait for them to re-crawl your web site to find out that the error was fixed. So, do not freak out if you fix an error and it says you still have one because Google’s error monitoring is not real time.
I hope this helps you get a little more use out of your Google Webmaster Tools account. It really is a handy resource for several web development issues.
20 of the Web’s Best News Sources
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When you have your own web site, and you talk about things that are current, it is your job to stay in the know about the latest news. Now with all the sources of news out there, this might be a mighty task. To help you out, we have gathered 20 of the best news sources out there online today.
PopURLs.com
Popular urls to the latest web buzz.
Google News
Google’s meta-site filled with all types of news, from a worldwide slew of sources. It is customizable, and always up to date!
Fark.com
Social networking & aggregator news site.
Retweet.com
A social news site powered by people and Twitter!
Yahoo! Buzz
The most popular stories, right now!
Reuters.com
Business & financial news, breaking US news and international news to boot. Great news resource!
FoxNews.com
The web site for the cable news outlet, Fox News!
BBC.co.uk
Great news source from our friends across the pond!
Wowd.com
Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what’s popular on the web right now.
Topix.com
Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every town and city.
MashGet.com
All the mashed up news, at your fingertips!
Newsified.com
Creates easily-scanned pages of the top information on popular social media sites like digg, delicious, and YouTube.
Delicious.com Hot List
All the most popular links shared via Delicious.com!
Newsvine.com
A web site consisting of community-driven news stories and opinions.
Digg.com
A social link sharing service, that introduced the world to the whole “voting good stories up” idea.
CNN.com
They recently went through a major site re-design, so if you haven’t checked it out – it is well worth the visit.
Technorati.com
Currently tracking 86.2 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media, Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the Web.
Reddit.com
Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online.
Wikio.com
Wikio is a personalized page of news, including a news search engine that searches media sites and blogs.
Google News Timeline
Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically.
Have another favorite news source you would like to share? Feel free to leave it in the comments, if you think it is worthy to be number 21 on this list of the Web’s best news sources out there.