Month: January 2011

Categories
Google SEO Videos

Videos and Google

The origin of the information: http://www.reelseo.com/video-xml-sitemaps-video/

The best way to get it to google videos is by creating a video sitemap.

Once you make a sitemap and specify a URL where your video is supposed to be, Google will go to your page and verify that the video is really there.

Without these elements, the videos won’t be processed by Google crawler:

Title: <video:title> This must match the title of your page

Description: <video:description> This must match the description of the page

Thumbnail: <video:thumbnail> Thumbnail size recommended: 160×120 pixels.

Player: <video:player_loc>the url that will load and play your video (for the flash video for example)

Content location: <video:content_loc> the actual location of the video. The robots in this content directory should allow User Agent to be “Googlebot”

Every item on your feed should be unique: multiple items to a single URL should not be included. If there are missing mandatory tags, don’t put the item on your feed, because it won’t be taken

Highly recommended:

Duration

Expiration: format is (YYYY-MM-DD) or (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD)

Regional restrict

Notes:

Regarding the RSS and the content location, your feeds have to sit in the same domain and host as the loc urls only (this is not required for the player or the content).

In webmaster tools the sitemap has been indexed, but not showing in Universal search, or google video. The number of videos marked as indexed are the ones that will show on the web index, not in the video sitemap index.

Yahoo: submit mrss sitemap video.

Example on how to set a videositemap reference on robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.reelseo.com/sitemap-index.xml

Sharing (or liking button) on facebook seems to help

with the indexing of the videos.

Categories
SEO Web optimization Wordpress

WordPress: bringing a site from the ground up

These are the must haves, if you want your blog to be successful, and problem free

1) Active your Akismet plugin

2) Install Google Analitycs for WordPress from the get go.

3) Ditto for SEO.  Here’s a good plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/

4) Subscribe to the following free auto-listing and update services (under “Settings / Writting”):

http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

This usually ping the search engines to start indexing your site, but don’t count on it for that.

5) Generate a google site map, to let google know about your pages. Plugin: google XML Sitemaps http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Categories
PHP

Where is my php.ini?

So you setup a page with phpinfo() on it, and the php.ini path indicated by it does not actually contain a php.ini file? Kind of a weird bug I run across. After searching for all my php.ini files in my linux box (find / -name php.ini) and not being able to find the appropiate one (I keep making changes on them and not see the changes take place after the server restarts) I decided to move my php.ini-dist again to the location specified on the php.ini path of the phpinfo() page. Success !! It fixed the problem. Speculating on this, the problem may have been originated by running the ./configuration option with the prefix and a new path optio

Categories
PHP

Setting the user agent on a php based bot

The source says it all:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?s=54a41b4d013e9c78bbb65201b35f70c7&t=13408

Categories
PHP

Files not being uploaded on a PHP server

The solution may be something really simple you overlooked: make sure your form contains the enctype=”multipart/form-data” part.

Categories
Linux

Troubleshooting: fedora 11 admin interface not working to setup sshd on startup

It’s weird, but running system / administration / services fedora UI interface is not really changing the services when I hit the restart or enable buttons.

I couldn’t find the answer to the bug, but a workaround to fix it (at least for sshd being run at startup) is to enable sshd through the command line, with the following commands:

/sbin/chkconfig –add sshd

/sbin/chkconfig sshd on

Hope it helps !

Categories
Compatibility issues JavaScript

IE7 needs to load the DOM elements first before you can run any script manipulating them on the section

So weird, but if you are to define a variable in IE 7 as follows:

var dobj = document.getElementById(’dataDiv’);

and you do so on the <head> </head> part of your page, it won’t work, unless you call the function that contains that line from the  <body onload=… so you are sure that the ‘dataDiv’ tag is already loaded on the DOM

This is because on IE 7, the body has to load that element first before it is available for javascript to manipulate it.

Categories
mysql PHP

Extension not found error when trying to run the DB package for php Pear

This only means you did not configure that specific database to be compiled with php. For example, if you get that error when trying to connect to a mysql database, make sure that when you run ./configure (when installing php) you included the -with–mysql option.

Categories
Linux

you want to run a virtual linux on a windows machine

Use Sun Virtualbox. It is open source, it is free, and it runs great. Here’s the link to the tutorial:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/04/20/virtualbox-review/

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/10/27/build-your-own-dev-server-with-virtualbox/

Categories
Compatibility issues CSS

CSS: two elements that were suppose to be right next to each other vertically have a gap between them

Another thing that artificially creates an space between adjacent vertical   divs, at least in IE 7, is the <form blah blah ..> tag. I could not figure   out where the extra space was coming from, until I moved the <form>   starting tag somewhere else I could see that the problem was created by   that.