The recent discovery of the swine flu and the number of people that have apparently become infected and died is becoming quite concerning to many.   We can see that there are many people taking quite seriously.  The price of oil has dropped $3 per barrel on this news.

The good news is that it the deaths seems to be few and contained to Mexico.

Below are some resources that I have found useful for tracking the swine flu.

Google Map of outbreaks

• Pink markers are suspect
• Purple markers are confirmed
• Deaths lack a dot in marker
• Yellow markers are negative

Google News/Swine Flu

CDC Page on Swine Flu - Includes a current table of confirmed cases and their locations.

Tips for preventing the Flu

Friends, please be safe and well.

I had been seeing the error “Could not remove the old plugin” any time I tried to auto upgrade a plugin.  A search of the wordpress forums revealed that this is apparently a common problem that does not appear to impact everyone, and there isn’t a known fix.  The error looked like this:

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/related-posts.zip

Unpacking the update

Deactivating the plugin

Removing the old version of the plugin

Could not remove the old plugin

Plugin upgrade Failed

So, I spent some time last night trying to find out what the problem was.  As it turns out, some upgrade or plugin along the way created a bunch of nested wp-content directories.  It looked list this:

/home/mydir/public_html/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/plugins

The filesystem driver code in wordpress doesn’t handle this very gracefilly.

It turns out that the fix needed is to delete the extra wp-content directories.

rm -r /home/mydir/public_html/wp-content/wp-content

works quite nicely.  After deleting this directory, rerun the auto upgrade and it should complete successfully.

NOTE:  You should make a back up before you perform the above operation.  Deleting the wrong directory will result in a dead site.

I was driving my family to lunch yesterday when my 8 year old son asked “Dad, why are so many stores going out of business?”.  I thought for a second and gave him an 8 year old appropriate view of what has happened.  As I was talking to him, I couldn’t help but think that he is living through what may well turn into the second great depression.

A lot of insanity has transpired lately.  We have seen an unprecedented level of government intervention trying to stop the economic bleeding.  The US has declared handfuls of companies “too big to fail”.  The US was already spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, now nearly a trillion dollars more to save some key companies.

With all of that in mind, here are my humble ideas for getting the US back on track:

Stop spending so much damn money

1. Discontinue the practice of injecting money into troubled companies.

Instead, let bankruptcy work the way it is designed to.  In extreme cases, facilitate an orderly unwinding of a dying company, such as AIG.

GM does not need $25B from the US to stay afloat.  It needs to fundamentally restructure itself.  This is what chapter 11 bankruptcy is for.  It is possible, even likely, that one or two of the “big three” will not emerge from bankruptcy.  Yes, it will be a terrible set back for the economy, but it is inevitable.  The US automakers have been slowly dying for decades now.

2. End the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to save money

3. Unwind a majority of the new, post 9/11 surveillance infrastructure and foreigner harassment programs to save money and start making the US a world travel destination again

Leverage the savings from 1 through 3 above to establish the following programs:

4. Establish a program to offer new mortgages at a rate of 4% for a set period of time

The near nationalization of the US banking system, and having Freddi and Fannie in a conservitorship should make this possible.  Note that I am not recommending the relaxing of lending requirements.

We do not want to try to re-inflate the housing bubble, but at the same time, the broken and dysfunctional state of housing is likely to be the weight that carries us in to another depression.

5. Establish a series of large scale, nation wide programs to address specific infrastructure issues, such as bridges, water distribution, or power.

For some reason, economic stimulus in the US has to come in the form of a check from the government.  I think that is a fundamentally bad approach to the problem it’s trying to solve.

I generally identify myself as a Libertarian, and some of these ideas are uncomfortable to me, but in many ways, the direction has already been set, now we have to find a way to undo the damage and get back on the right track.

I was glued to my TV and computer 3 years ago when Katrina hit, and watched the disastrous aftermath unfold.  What struck me, other than the incompetence of managing the situation at every level of government, was the sheer futility of a inhabiting New Orleans.    So, as we watch this storm lining up to deal NOLA a blow through it’s still unrepaired levees, we have politicians announcing that the country stands beside the people of New Orleans.  After I tired of the spectacle of Katrina, I started to resent New Orleans.  Residents and officials have known for decides, if not hundres of years, that New Orleans is in a precarious place.

So, billions of tax dollars, and billions more from insurance companies have poured into NOLA.  Tonight, we likely get to watch all of those dollars get washed out to see again.  And tomorrow, the country will be united behid our friends in their time of need.

I say that’s a load of crap.  How many times does your community have to be obliterated before you get the hint: maybe we should build somewhere else.  Now, I know New Orleans is a rich historical place, with amazing culture, but that does not change the facts:

1. Much of the city is below sea level
2. The sea lives just on the other side of levees
3. The city is located in a place where hurricanes are likely to happen EVERY YEAR
4. The city has proven over the past 40 years that it is not fully behind spending the money and doing the things that need to be done to allow it to whether storms

So, we will watch the city get devistated again.  We will see the state and federal government dutifull spend our money to “do the right thing” and rebuild NOLA once again.

The only goodness is that there wll likely be far fewer deaths than last time.

I read this blog post recently, proposing an idea for social security tax reform.  The net of the story is that the FICA tax is regressive – it impacts the poor more than the rich, so lets turn it around.  Put a lower limit in place for salaries, below which there is no FICA burden.  Remove the cap that is currently in place where FICA drops off after the first $97,500.  Then, lower the overall FICA rate from 6.2% to 3.2%, making the people in the middle income brackets happy as well, but sticking it to the rich.

I don’t agree.

Here’s my response to the plan:

Let’s assume that the total income of the nation is $1,000,000.
So, currently the 60% of people making less than $97.5k contribute $37,200 to the pot. Let us generously assume that the greedy buggers over $97.5k don’t pay any money into the pot (which we know is not the case, but we can not derive the right percentage).

Under your plan, all 100% of the income is taxed at 3.2% (which we know is not true, because people below the poverty line would not contribute). 3.2% of $1,000,000 is $32,000. Which is less than the $37,200 above. $32k is actually going to be less, and $37.2k is actually going to be more. So, you have made the problem worse.

Now, being one of the greedy buggers making over $97.5k, I will actually see my overall FICA contribution drop by about 1/3. not bad. Now, another approach is to leave FICA at 6.2% and drop the ceiling. The problem then becomes that I, and all of my money grubbing, elitist cohorts will demand equity for the increased contribution. So, the amount of money required to fund my retirement is going to be substantially higher if I pay more in. Again, this doesn’t fix SS.

The system is fundamentally flawed. It is a pyramid scheme and it is suffering the fate of all pyramid schemes once you pass a critical mass. In this case, the rate of growth of the work force is not sufficient to keep the program solvent. So, we are forced to drop it, introduce gross inequities, or fund it through some new tax scheme de jure.

The major problem with reforming social security is inequity.  The plan presented above seems to make a lot of sense.  Those that can least afford it will not be burdened, while those that can most afford it will contribute the most to the pot.  The two fundamental problems are:

1. people making less than the lower limit will have their retirement subsidized, potentially without ever contributing any money.
2. in order for the plan to work at all, there would need to be a fairly dramatic cap on benefit payments, meaning that someone who contributed $10,000,000 to the social security fund is only eligible to collect his or her $3000 per month

Both of these problems will are foundational issues that will prevent a reform including these ideas from being passed.  Like it or not, in the US it is not the poor that make laws.  It is the wealthy – be it democrat, republican, independent, green party, etc.
I am certainly not on the side of leaving things as they are.  I am proposing that we look for solutions that have a chance in hell of being enacted.

I was headed out with my son today to one of the local jump/bounce places for the birthday party of a neighborhood kid. Having been to these places before, I know that they generally offer free wifi access. I packed up my laptop, thinking that I could work on some web site issues I have been trying to fix.

I got to thinking about the risks of someone sniffing my logins to the sites. That reminded me of a post I wrote recently about an idea to conserve IP addresses. Most of my sites are hosted on a shared IP address on my server. I simply don’t have enough IP addresses to cover all of my sites. Without dedicating an IP address for each, using SSL is simply not possible.

The vast majority of web sites do not have SSL capabilities, in the same way that mine do not.  At the same time, the instances of hacking, snooping and data theft are spiraling out of control.  As well, the “Starbucks” culture of camping out in a restaurant to surf the web on a laptop is growing, leading to many more opportunities for the trivial capture of passwords and other sensitive data.

Certainly, financial data such as credit cards and logins to financial institutions are generally well protected by SSL.  The types of information that can be lost at the local coffee shop is more likely to be a facebook username and password, or the username and password to a webmail account.  Useful to the hacker, and damaging to the victim, but not at the same level of severity as a credit card number.

So, in a nutshell, modifying the SSL protocol to allow for the negotiation of the requested domain *before* the SSL tunnel is established has another advantage – allowing sites on shared IP’s to use SSL to protect the private information of the users of a site.

It seems to me that the certificate authorities would jump at supporting this idea – it opens a substantially large new market.

Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site

There are now tens of billions of web pages on the Internet. Driving traffic to your site can be very difficult. This post is meant to serve as a basic primer to increasing the amount of traffic on a site.

Sources of Traffic

There are a few ways that web surfers can end up on your site:

• Traditional advertising
  • This can be Television commercials, bumper stickers, T shirts, etc.
• Online Advertising
  • Target relevant key words for your site in an ad campaign using a service such as Google Adwords.
• Search Engine Results
  • Visitors are directed to your site after searching for a term.
• Link From Another Site
  • Visitors find your site by way of a link from another site.

Not all of these methods will be appropriate for all types of sites, or all budgets.

Traditional advertising

Posting yard signs with a short teaser phrase and a web site around town has become a very common practice in advertising.

Order some T shirts and other items from Cafe Press with your site address and logo. A very effective idea is to order some tight T shirts for female friends & family to wear.

Bumper stickers, trinkets, etc can be ordered with logos and web addresses to use as give away advertising. Cafe Press also provides these.

Television and radio advertisements can get quite involved. A company called Spot Runner has emerged that allows the for the easy & cheap purchase of advertising time.

Online Advertising

There are many options for advertising online. The basic concept is that you “buy” keywords from ad networks, who will display your add on search results pages when that key word is searched for, or when a page related to your keyword is displayed.

The two most popular online ad programs are:

Google Adwords

Yahoo Sponsored Search

There are many, many others that have different programs and different features.

Search Engine Results

Ranking well in search engine results for a popular key word can drive high volumes of traffic to a site. The best part of search engine referred traffic is that it’s free!

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that ranking highly on search engine results pages can be extremely difficult.

There are a few general factors that impact the placement of a site in search engine results:

• Quality of the content on the site
• Links from other sites, where more authoritative sites count more.
• Rate of change of the content
• Age of the domain being used

Link From Another Site

Having a link to a site placed on the front page of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Fark, and others, will generate a large volume of traffic for a short time.  Done well, posts on the front pages of these sites will generate discussion or controversy on other sites that will, in turn, link to the promoted site having the additional benefit of improving search engine placement.

While the traffic generated from these sites can be great, it is important to understand a few things:

• Unless you are using a technique that is “cheating your way to the top”, a promoted site must have content and a look & feel worthy of being on the front page of these sites.
• If you are “cheating your way to the top”, the success will be short lived, and you will have to deal with being banned and any future submissions from the promoted site will have a much harder time rising to the top.
• The traffic volume is good, but will quickly decay, due to the nature of these sites wanting to get new and interesting content to the front pages.
• Know your audience and plan accordingly.  The readers of these sites tend to be very technology savvy, and are sick of looking at ads.  Most readers of these sites use ad blocking software, potentially rendering the effort to promote a site worthless.  These types of visits should be viewed as “getting the word out”, not a source of income.

There is no obvious way to add images to the Google Image Search for the beginner. Google Images search results come from the pictures that Google’s web crawlers find on the Internet. To get an image included in GIS, you will need to:

1. Find a place to host the image, such as photobucket
2. Place a link to the photo on a web site using the <img> tag.

Alternatively, images can be uploaded to a blogspot or wordpress blog when writing a page or a post by using the “add an image”.

Additional suggestions to allow GIS to properly categorize your images:

• Label the picture with a caption.
• Use the “alt” phrase in the <img> tag
• Name image file to relate to it’s contents.  i.e., pictures-of-lilies.jpg vs. DSC001.jpg

Getting Google to crawl your site is another trick.

This is a list of common terms and acronyms and their definitions.

• Back link
  • A link placed on a different site that links back to the target page or site.
• Dofollow Link
  • By default, back links are considered ‘do follow’, if the link code does not contain the tag “rel=nofollow”. Do follow links are processed by search engines and used in the calculation of site relevance.

• Link Baiting
  • Generic term for a way to lure visitors on other sites into visiting your site. This is generally done with a controversial teaser.
• MFA (Made For Adsense)
  • This is a term used to describe web sites whose clear goal is to host advertisements.  They are often lacking content and poorly organized.
• Nofollow Link
  • A type of back link that contains the tag “rel=nofollow”. Most search engines essentially ignore these links in the determination of site relevance, as the owner of the site with a ‘nofollow’ tag is indicating that the appearance of the link is not a vote for the relevance of target site. These are commonly used on forums and blogs where the general public can post links without the approval of a site owner. Some SEM’s believe that using ‘nofollow’ on a site will prevent that site containing the links from being negatively impacted ranked by the quality and/or quantity of links on that site.
• Off Page Optimization
  • A general term that refers most commonly to link building to a site.
• On Page Optimization
  • Structuring the content of a page to maximize the value that search engines perceive as they crawl a site. This is generally done via meta tags, titles, H1 tags, and the repeated use of a specific word or phrase that the optimizer wishes to have a high SERP for.
• PR (Page Rank)
  • A 0 to 10 ranking issued to all web sites by Google that indicates the level of authority that Google has interpreted. Page rank can be viewed when using the Google Toolbar and visiting a given site. Page rank is allegedly one of roughly 200 variables that Google uses to determine the SERP of a particular site for a particular search term.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Marketer)
  • The business of, or someone who works to increase the SERP ratings for a particular web site or web page, generally for the purposes of making money.
    
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer)
  • Same as SEM.
    
• SERP (Search Engine Results Position)
  • The position of a web page in the result set from a search engine when a particular key word or phrase is searched.
• Splog (Spam Blog)
  • This term describes blogs that are the web page equivalent to spam email.  They serve little purpose other than to promote a site or product.

There are several simple but effective SEO tricks to optimizing a Simple Machines forum.

URLs

First, is the URL structure. Search engines value the descriptiveness of a URL. By default, SMF uses URL’s that are worthless for SEO. An SMF mod, called Pretty URLs, will rewrite your URLs to be far more useful for a search engine. Pretty URLs is very simple to install, but a common problem is to ensure that .htaccess is writable, and that the root directory is writable.

Notice the difference (these links all go to the same post):

• Default SMF URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php?topic=2969.0
• Search Engine Friendly URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php/topic,2969.0.html
• Pretty URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/offtopic/unleaded-gas/

Pretty URLs use the title of the post topic as part of the URL.  This will help search engines to properly classify the page and build a stronger connection between the the page and the title of the post in search results.

Robots.txt

Next is duplicate content. Search engines will generally penalize the appearance of the same content multiple times. The interpretation is that the site is trying to “stuff” in content to make the site more favorable for certain keywords. This is a problem because each message is individually accessible, as well as the thread, and then there is a separate view of the same content in a printer friendly format. What we want the search engines to do is simply index whole threads only, thus avoiding content duplication. All of this is easy to fix with a robots.txt file in the root html directory that looks like this: