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Bloggers, you are being monitored

Today, Malaysian bloggers community appeared on The Star and Yahoo News, for something that is not to be proud of. The message is clear. You’re being monitored, watch your word bloggers!! To whom the message is addressed is not very clear, but it seems that this is specially directed to bloggers who are writing something that’s against the government and/or government will, rumours, lies and etc.

The minister’s accusation against bloggers is quite outrageous. Yelling the warning in the news won’t make the situation better. In fact it is like pouring water into the burning fire. Why not taking a softer approach or a lower tone of voice. Maybe you think you’re talking to your officials, or perhaps students from a sport school.

While I agree on the monitoring of the internet activity could perhaps benefit our growth in internet related industry in a long run and fight the SCAM such as get rich quick spam, but I don’t agree on certain directions such as monitoring bloggers’ activities. The initial intention maybe to filter political related blog, but it could be expanded to wider categories and soon, perhaps bloggers will require to register their website. What the heck!

After all, we’re just a small and tiny group of citizens blogging to voice up our concern and dissatisfaction of what is going on. Anything wrong with that? As long as we’re within the limit, I don’t see why monitoring should be in place and nothing should be afraid of.

With polling days coming closer, more and more blogs are writing about the election, either with the intention of providing informative stuffs, persuasive and provocative or even solely to get traffic from the current search trend. So far I haven’t seen any political ads appearing on the net (or maybe restricted by SPR) but, there’s a couple of politic/election related videos available on Youtube.

To my fellow bloggers, I hope that you’ll soften your voice to avoid unnecessary action being taken against you such as summon or court action. It is not worth even a single cent, with everything not being on your side. Avoid attacking on personal issues, but attack on the corrupted policies. Provide facts to support your post. That’s all folks!!

Admin 22 February 2008 Malaysia Inc 28 Comments

Top 9 validators for blogger

One of the lesson learned from yesterday’s incident is how important for you to validate the content or coding that you have done. Human tend to make mistake, so this is how software plays their part to assist human in order to make if perfect. I compile some of them that might be useful for me and you. W3.org has huge numbers of tools useful for your website, in fact I’ve never heard or use some of them. icon wink Top 9 validators for blogger

Markup validator – Validate your HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML, WML
This is the common and mostly used validator especially by web designer, template designer

Tools
http://validator.w3.org/
http://w3schools.com/site/site_validate.asp – Validate your HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML, WML

Link Checker
Check your anchor and link for broken links

Tools
http://validator.w3.org/checklink

RSS/Feed validator.
Most of feed is now delivered by Feedburner or Feedblitz, so rarely we’ll see this error

Tools

 
 
robots.txt validator
Robots.txt important to restrict or allow certain directories of files in your server from being indexed by search engines

Tools

  
.htaccess validator

Tools
 
permalink validator

Tools

 

Metatag analyzer

Tool
http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

Generate your meta tag
http://www.submitexpress.com/metatags.html

Sitemap validator

Tool
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html

Ops, this is not related to internet, but I list it down as FYI

credit card validator

Tools

 

SSN validator

To validate social security number. For the US folks only
 

If you know other useful validator that I missed, please suggest on the comment section or contact me.

 

Admin 19 February 2008 blogging 22 Comments

how to fix 500 Internal server error in wordpress

500err how to fix 500 Internal server error in wordpress

First of all, my apologize to you for not being able to access blogjer this evening, it’s due to 500 Internal server error. I’m not sure when it had started, but in my spot check on the error log (only shows the last 300 lines), the oldest one is at 11 AM GMT (6.00 PM Malaysia time).

I have seen this error a few times before, so I guess I know what is going on. But it turns out that I’m wrong. In fact I’ve no idea of what is going on, and why it happens??

Ok, before that, to give you a basic idea about 500 internal server error, it normally happens when your .htaccess file is corrupted of having syntax error. Keep in mind that this is NOT due to server down or Apache error.

What happened

My web-hosting company had just upgraded the cPanel to the latest version. When I logged in to cPanel, I was a little bit panic when I didn’t see my .htaccess file. To make me feel more nervous, other websites that is hosted on the same hosting package have their own .htaccess file and their .htaccess invisible too, but all of them work just fine.

I then opened an ftp connection to my web-hosting, oh I’m relieved,  could see that the file is still there. I compared it to my other blogs’s .htaccess, it is similar to the others though. I lost!!

Without any delay, I cut a ticket  to my hosting, and within 20 minutes everything is settled. Kudos to NetKL!!  It turns out that this is syntax error, where there is a duplicate close tag in the .htaccess file. But.. the extra close tag has been there for quite sometime and blogjer works fine so far.

...........
...........


Redirect temp /xxxxxxxxx

I don’t understand why it works before and not after the cPanel upgrade. Need more digging perhaps.

On why the .htaccess is invisible from cPanel, this is the security enhancement on the new cPanel version. The files are only viewable and editable from FTP client.

What I can suggest if you get this error?

errorlog how to fix 500 Internal server error in wordpress

  1. Open your cPanel, locate where your error log is. See the screen shot above. It is located somewhere at the bottom of your cPanel main menu. In my case, I saw an error something like this which mention about .htaccess
    2. [Mon Feb 18 17:59:22 2008] [alert] [client xx.xxx.xx.xxx] /home/public_html/blogjer/.htaccess:  without matching  section, referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=DELL+MALAYSIA&btnG=Google+Search
  2. If you can view your .htaccess file from your cpanel, that would be better. Otherwise you need an ftp client such as coreftp or filezilla to do that. From your ftp client, download your .htaccess file to your local machine.
  3. Validate your .htaccess file with Alterlinks. This tool would be able to identify anything wrong with it. Fully loaded yourself with more info at .htaccess page
  4. After identify what’s wrong try fixing it by yourself. Google is always there for you. And don’t forget your web hosting company!!

Preventive action

There is nothing better other than having a backup of your .htaccess elsewhere. Preventive is better than cure. Utilize your cPanel backup function

Further reading

There are a lot of HTTP status codes, 500 is only one of them. To know more status codes such as 200, 300, 400, are, turn your browser to HTTP status codes.

Happy reading and blogging!!

Admin 18 February 2008 SEO & Webmaster 25 Comments

Top commentator contest update, blogging, web hosting and FA cup


tshirt Top commentator contest update, blogging, web hosting and FA cup

It’s Sunday, the time where blogsphere is slightly silent.

Top commentator contest
A quick update about this contest due to a couple of requests from readers. After a deep thought, this is what I think fair to everyone.

  • 1 commentator is only eligible to win 1 t-shirt during the 6 months period contest.
  • There is an overall winner for the top commentator during this 6 months. However I haven’t decided on the reward yet. It could be another t-shirt or paypal fund.
I have also scrapped down my plan to design and print my own t-shirt due to several reasons. Instead of that, I will choose t-shirt that’s available from marketplace such as lowyat.net, websites and lelong.com.

The contest post has been updated to reflect these changes as well. The contest is still ON.

I’ve designed a new 125×125 ads banner for the contest, I should say it looks simpler and more eye-catching.

hosting Top commentator contest update, blogging, web hosting and FA cup

Hosting discount coupon
I’m in search for another web hosting, preferably overseas. At the moment, all my websites are hosted locally on 2 different companies, and both of them provide a relatively good support so far except for some performance issues when it was accessed from outside Malaysia. As for now, I’m happy, and I’ll stick to my current web hosting, however, I’m on the lookout for something that allows unlimited add-on domain, greater performance + support and hosted overseas.

On the look out, I found 2 hosting packages that is quite good and with discount coupons. However, I haven’t decided which 1 I’ll take, but it seems that these are of a good deal.

Company : Hosgator
Coupon code : HEART

company : Dreamhost
Coupon code :QUICK97 from QuickOnlineTips

Gloomy week
For the past 2-3 weeks, I had been slowing down on my blogging activity notably on writing and commenting. Even though the traffic was more or less the same, but this has resulted in less comments in this blog.
But I’m back, I hope to maintain this momentum and get things better. I’m not really that quiet actually, I’m also doing the housekeeping of other websites which supply more income than Blogjer. But blogjer is still my darling.

I also work on a few offline and online projects together with my friends.

MUvsARS Top commentator contest update, blogging, web hosting and FA cup

Ahh, 1 thing, MU thrashed Arsenal 4-0 yesterday. What a game!!

Last but not least, BIG thanks to everyone for making this blog alive and cheerful.

Admin 17 February 2008 blogging 32 Comments

VisionApp Remote Desktop enable the remote connection of multiple systems in just 1 click

Managing bunches of servers and systems is not an easy task especially when each them has weird name and different credential.  If you have multiple systems (server, desktop or notebook) in your local network LAN or even WAN, Visionapp Remote Desktop comes in handy to get you remotely connected with just 1 click (or 2 clicks). It’s never been easier than before.

But before that, of course you need to get it setup.

Download your VisionApp Remote Desktop here

Create credentials (allow multiple)
Let’s say you have multiple systems with multiple credentials. For each credential, create 1 profile complete with user name, password and domain.

Multiple folders to keep system with different profiles
For each credential that you have created above, create 1 folder. Set the folder to inherit that credential. Add systems to the folders according to their credentials.

*Automatically connected and login in 1 click
The best part is, once you have completed item 1 and 2, remotely connecting to the system has never been so easy than before. In just 1 click you have logged on to the system.

Other notes on VisioanApp Remote Dekstop

  • Free of charge
  • Only 1 instance of VisionApp available (opened) at one time
  • *Click once is only applicable to the system with WinXP, Window 2003 server only. Win 2000 will prompting you to key in your login id each time you’re trying to establish connection even if you have set it earlier to connect automatically

Screenshot below shows how VisionApp Remote Desktop looks like.

visionapp VisionApp Remote Desktop enable the remote connection of multiple systems in just 1 click

Admin 16 February 2008 Software 9 Comments
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