Phine Solutions web work notes

This morning I wanted to search some Ringling Brothers tickets and I hit the big G. For some reason almost all the top search results have this warning “This site may harm your computer”. And a warning page would display if I click through it.

This is weird. I know those sites are very legit. So I tried some other keywords it seemed all the organic search results on the top are “labeled”. Using another data center showed the same result.

This became very annoying very quickly. This is probably a Google glitch. With people increasingly relying on search engine to look up information maintaining the service quality becomes more and more important.

Update:

Here is why.

I have been ignoring the sitemap for a long time. It is nice and easy for the WordPress powered site since there is plugins for that but for other sites I have to write a script to do it. Finally I decided to add it.

Google has a nice sitemap generation tool here. It is written in Python but don’t be scared away if you don’t know Python. I don’t. And it took me about 2 hours of work to set it up (including other scripts that I had to do). Here is what I did:

1. Wrote a PHP script to generate multiple URL files. They are basically text files which have URLs in them. It is one of the ways to feed the Python script to generate the file sitemap.xml. There are other ways too, but this one is the most suitable choice for my situation. The “feed”, among others, can be configured through a config.xml file and the Python script will pick it up. So there is no need to mess with the Python code at all, at least at this point.

2. First I ran my own URL generation script, and then the Py fella. The script can be run from the command line and at the end it will automagically ping Google to notify the updated sitemap.xml. Oh, did I mention you have to have Python installed on your server? I really don’t see why it’s not there if it is one of the Unix cusines but it doesn’t hurt to verify it.

3. I manually submitted the sitemap.xml to Yahoo and Live search. If you haven’t signed up your site there you’ll need to login (assuming you have an account) and add your site.

4. After some staring at my Unix console I started thinking, “since the Python script can notify Google, why not the other two?” So I dig a little bit into the Python script. Although I didn’t know the language it didn’t take me long to find out the location of “NOTIFICATION_SITES”. It is an array that has the notification list of the sites. This is what you can change it to to make it ping Yahoo and MSN/Live as well (while they are still two companies).

NOTIFICATION_SITES = [
('http', 'www.google.com', 'webmasters/sitemaps/ping', {}, '', 'sitemap'),
('http', 'webmaster.live.com', 'ping.aspx', {}, '', 'siteMap'),
('http', 'search.yahooapis.com', 'SiteExplorerService/V1/ping', {}, '', 'sitemap')
]

5. Combine these command lines into a shell script and stick it into the cron.

So there you have it. Now I am just waiting to see the floor of traffic that will be brought in by using a sitemap.

This past weekend my PC was infected by malware and basically it keeps opening the Firefox windows with different websites. After spending hours on how to remove it I gave up. Frankly I think a lot of those sypwares or malwares are created by people who sells the spyware removal software but it is another subject.

So I  upgraded to Vista hoping for a more secured OS.

I have read a lot of negative reviews about Vista and I was always hesitant to upgrade but so far the experience has been quite positive.

The PC I am running Vista on has Intel Dual core processor and 3G ram on it so I didn’t feel a slight slowdown while running applications on Vista. As a matter of fact, I feel everything is a bit faster than XP.

The graphic interface is quite nice and there are certainly a lot of improvements. It seems to me Microsoft also borrowed some ideas from Max OS X, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of people are complaining about the Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) security prompt. Basically you get a lot of popups when you try to install something or run something that needs to open a port or changes system files. Yes it is annoying but I am not too much bothered by it, as long as it really helps to protect my system (fingers crossed ).

The areas that I think can be improved:

Why so many versions? “Home”, “Business”, “Premium”, “Ultimate”…they are just confusing. The pricing ladder can probably help Microsoft targeting different users and make more money but too many version also create more work on marketing and support.

The UAC is there for a reason but it can be designed better. I know it is not Unix so “sudo” command is not an option but maybe something cleverer so less users will choose to disable it after installation?

Sometimes Vista feels clunky to use. Possiblly because it is designed to incorporate the new features and the old ones so there are many ways to get to the same destination. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and Mac OS shows. Maybe WIndows 7 addresses this issue better?

I have only used it for a week so I can’t say for sure Vista’s improved security really delivers. Hopefully I didn’t waste my time and money to upgrade.

Update:

One big hassle that I ran into using Vista is the “safely remove the USB drive” feature. I have a Seagate portable hard drive and I used to use the “safely remove hardware” icon on the toolbar in XP to make sure the data doesn’t get corrupted when unplugging it from USB port. But the feature doesn’t work well in Vista. The icon is still available but Vista always tells me “it is in use and close any program or window that might be using the device…”. I tried some suggestions such as disabling the caching but it didn’t work. Finally I found this Drive Tool page that really saved my time. Thank you Uwe Sieber!