Now whenever something bakes my noodle – and no one in the office can help, I turn to Google – and from time to time the big G lets me down too.

When that happens I turn to my friend DJB31st to see if he has an idea..

Once again, he saved the day

If you would like a wildcard redirect to move everything down a directory, then use the following line in your HTACCESS file;

RewriteRule ^new/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Replace new with the directory (or directories) you wish to remove from the cached URL’s

Example:

http://www.domain.com/new/page.php, Becomes; http://www.domain.com/page.php

Or

http://www.domain.com/new/test/another/,  Becomes; http://www.domain.com/test/another/

My next redirect blog post will be how to move an entire new site to a new domain, complete with wild-cards!

Upon further inspection i found out that the file in question had 2 lines of text added to the bottom of it, and my findings were not good.

After a scan of that websites account, we found a lot more infected files. Oh dear.

I did some searching, and NOTHING came up on Google. Now ive been “surfing the web” for 16 years, and i’ve NEVER been unsuccessful in finding what I want on google – so it must have been BRAND NEW!

A few days later and I managed to find a blog that was discussing the virus, and also talking about the different forms/variations it came in.

After much searching, editing of files, searching, editing of files, altering the search criteria, searching, editing files – we finally have gotten rid of this crap – but it was a long process!

We think the Trojan gains passwords from Filezilla and access the sites via ftp, edit all the javascript files, all the index.html, index.php, main.php and maintenance.php files to include some javascript redirect type code.

The overall “point” of the virus is unclear, we could do with some original virus files so we can rip them to pieces and analyse what its doing.

We do think its simply a redirect virus that will try and send you to a Viagra site or something – so its not the worst thing in the world.

It does however block users from viewing your website if they have found it thru google or if they have Virus/Malware/Spyware scanners running all the time on your pc.

Need help getting dis-infected?

Call our BUG SQUASHING helpline on +44(0)1623 650 333 or send us an email!

You see, the problem that we face day-in-day-out is that so many websites in the results pages do not follow the rules. There are far too many sites appearing high in Google, and yet shouldn’t be there. We are hoping that once the caffeine update has levelled out – all the erroneous results will disappear and the better sites will start ranking better.

Unsure if your website is “Caffeine Friendly” then give dijitul media a call and have a FREE on-site search engine optimisation report

Anyway – when it was launched in the UK, it was called Gmail – but as its proper launch got closer another company who had been using the term Gmail in the UK for years piped up and kicked up a bit of a fuss about it. A big lawsuit kicked off, and google ended up changing all UK sign ups to @googlemail.com email account – despite @gmail.com still working for all UK users as well!

It appeared that they had underestimated the popularity of the Gmail name!

I recently noticed that gmail.co.uk has stopped resolving the website for the contensis content management system email, and instead just shows a error page. I did a whois and suprise suprise;

Domain name:
gmail.co.uk

Registrant:
Google Inc.

I wonder how much they paid for that domain name? First registered in 1998 as well, so its not like to sat on it as soon as they heard google might be doing emails!

Seems to be the way copyright violations like this are solved in this world – buy out the competition! I wonder if they’ll do the same for Gmail.de?

Also, i wonder if i’ll soon be able to have an @gmail.co.uk email address? Now that would be awesome!

I cant fault them for the features it offers, its a fantastic bit of kit – but when it actually comes to the shortcodes to get it to display stuff – NextGEN fail big time.

So i google it every time, sometimes finding what i want – but most of the time having to piece it together from examples people have p=ut on forums.

Today, i found a blog that lists many of the Shortcodes – so i thought i’d repeat them so they are easier for people to find! – Thanks InfoPint!

List of Short Codes for NextGEN Gallery

Short codes are the piece of text which you add along with you text on your blog post or sidebars. Short codes can also be added inside the theme templates.

For a slideshow :[ slideshow id=x w=width h=height ]
For a album : [ album id=x template=extend] or [ album id=x template=compact ]
For a gallery : [  nggallery id=x ]
For a single picture : [ singlepic id=x w=width h=height mode=web20|watermark float=left|right ]
For a image browser : [ imagebrowse r id=x ]
To show image sorted by tags :[ nggtags gallery=mytag,wordpress,...  ]
To show tag albums : [ nggtags album=mytag,wordpress,...  ]

Create Special Effects using Short Codes  in the template files

Short codes can be called from any theme template files, using  do_shortcode template tag   from the template files. Here are some examples

<?php echo do_shortcode(’[ slideshow id=2 ]); ?>

You can use this technique to create special flash headers with rotating images or create a showcase effect like here www.StyleHaute.com

Display Gallery view

http://nextgen-gallery.com/templates/galleryview/

[ nggallery id=1 template=galleryview images=0 ]

Useful Links for NextGEN Gallery

http://nextgen-gallery.com/custom-fields/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/294912

http://dpotter.net/Technical/2008/05/nextgen-gallery-review-displaying-images/

http://www.visser.com.au/blog/list-of-wordpress-plugins-addons-for-nextgen-gallery/

http://speckyboy.com/2008/10/23/10-powerful-shoppingecommerce-plugin-solutions-for-wordpress/

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-decorative-gallery/

If you can think of any more shortcodes – or if NextGEN include any more in future releases then please comment.

We’ve had some site in particular that as we delve further and further into the really bad coding, we are finding things that make the team here at dijitul physically sick.

For starters, they had themselves hard coded into it so that they were receiving any emails that were sent through the contact form on the site, and were being notified every time there was an order placed!

We found out yesterday that the cheeky buggers also hard coded themselves an admin account so that they can log in and check stuff whenever they want, too.

I guess when you don’t know much about the internet and things like online shops – you don’t know what to look for or ask for when you have one built. Just be wary – and if you are spending a lot of money having something developed then make sure you go with a reputable company who will speak to you in plain English.

Also, unless you truly need to – stay away from customised shopping cart platforms – as they might tick all the boxes now, but in 6 month/1 year down the line they will need changing/updating and it costs a lot of money. Pre-made software is usually modular, so things can be added and removed fairly easily.

Would you like a quote for a new online shop?

There are limitations to this developers software, as it is what it is. With wordpress you can bolt so much stuff on to it you can literally get it doing whatever you want. However, this framework suited the job in hand perfectly and if it wasn’t for one small issue it would be totally flawless.

The site in question uses the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor for when adding/editing content to pages and blog posts. Everything works fine, but when the user went to upload an image they got the following error;

“The specified path is not a directory. Probably an incorrect setting for the filesystem.rootpath option.”

We did some google searching, found two config.php files in the admin folder (once in tiny_mce, and one just below it) we altered the filesystem.roothpath option in both, and bingo.

The problem was that it was set to a different absolute path in both config.php files – one was pointing to the OTHER site we had developed by this guy, and one was correct.

The lesson we learned here was that when we partner with people to work on projects with, do more research on them and maybe even talk to previous customers of theirs!

Hope this helps.

I received an email this morning from what appeared to be Facebook – but on closer inspection it turns out it was in fact a scam. There are a few things to look out for when deciding whether or not something is dodgy, here’s what to look out for.

a) Were you expecting the email? Have you added yourself to/joined any “Lists”

b) Is the email mentioned in the email already your facebook email account?

c) Are the links pointing to facebook.com?

There is of course the styling of the email that is questionable too – most emails from Facebook are styled with the facebook logos and the usual facebook blue colours. This email was plain text.

Here’s a screenshot of the offending email;

Upon receipt of this scam email i noticed straight away that the link URL was wrong. Facebook will NEVER send out an email with a link containing an IP address! It would almost always be facebook.com – so if you see that then DELETE IT. I also noticed the email account it was sent from, kingsib@gmail.com – that’s most certainly not a Facebook official email account now is it?!

Another thing that struck me as being strange is that it was referencing an old email account that i hardly use any more. I would never ask for my Maxxd.com email to be added to facebook – so again, this caused the red flags to go up straight away.

It just smelled fishy – and if you ever receive an email like this then either SPAM it, or report it as “Phishing” (Under the little arrow next to Reply in Gmail)

If your still not sure – do some google searching and you should find what you need to put your mind at rest

FreeIndex are assuring all users that this is no way connected to FreeIndex, and if you receive this sort of phone call, do not hand over any credit card details or make payment in any way. FreeIndex does not charge businesses to be listed on the directory, full stop.

The built in cold call protection which was integrated into FreeIndex earlier this year should stop them from making a large volume of calls, but if you do receive a call we would very grateful if you could get as much information as possible about them, e.g. Location, individuals name etc, and then let the FreeIndex team know so they can try and take action.

Thanks
(on behalf of the FreeIndex Team)

However, despite having tried everything, learnt from our mistakes and read every article known to man regarding SEO – there are still some things that baffle us!

We have been working on the X Cam Project for nearly 5 months, and although the website is ace, the content is all unique and we did some very careful link building – we COULD NOT get it to rank for the terms “the x cam” or “xcam mini” or things like “xcam pro”. Normally, clients want us to get them high in google for generic industry specific search terms, and the site usually ranks well straight away for the  brand specific terms – however in this case it seemed to be the other way round. We were starting to rank for the terms like “Helmet camera” and “Motorcycle camera” and were still no where to be found for the very specific brand-related stuff.

So lets analyse what is going off here?

We stopped doing ANY work on the industry specific terms, and put all our eggs into one basket so we could capture the customers who had heard of the new brand, and were looking directly for it.

We were linking the words “the x cam” to the homepage, and of course the front page of the site was geared up for that term – yet still, nowhere to be found.

Then I noticed something that made me think a little. I searched for the x cam in Google, and looked at the top right hand part of the screen near the amount of search results;

Results 1 – 10 of about 24,100,000 for the x cam. (0.36 seconds)

It seems that the word “the” was being totally disregarded by Google, was it this that was causing the issues? We couldn’t be sure that it was because of this that the X cam site was doing so poorly – it could have been because the term “X Cam” also applies to porn sites and “Cam sites” – but then if it was blacklisted by google then surely NO pages would be in the SERP’s?

The only way we’d know for sure if this was in fact the root of the problem was to try swapping the domain names. We picked “XCamera.co.uk” as it was still relevant, and it was a UK domain name that had never been used before and the word Camera is less porn-like than Cam.

Plenty of 301 redirects and edited config files later, and we’d ported the site over to XCamera.co.uk. All we had to do then was wait for google to update and see where we’d landed.

First impressions were not brilliant, it seemed to take ages to swap over – but once it did the results were fantastic. Its now page 1 in google for “Xcam Mini”  “Xcam Pro” “Xcam Wireless” and many other XCam related terms.

So it goes to show, simply by choosing the wrong domain name can cause weird problems on google, that im sure not even google themselves truly understand.