Fed up with how Apache memory usage grows (and grows, and grows), I’ve changed all of my sites on my external server (where, for instance, this very blog is hosted) to lighttpd, a.k.a. Lighty.

I began by changing the most problematic site to Lighty (listening on port 81), and using Apache’s proxy module to redirect it there. After the results were promising, I went and changed each site at a time, dealing with the particular problems of each (I use lots of redirects, and the syntax is a bit different, and, furthermore, Lighty doesn’t support .htaccess files.

WordPress was relatively easy (just one line). MyBB would have been even easier (nothing to do), if not for the fact that I use an SEO mod which uses an .htaccess file for nicer URLs. But everything was easier than I expected.

After each site had been “moved”, it was just a matter of stopping Apache and moving Lighty to port 80.

Memory usage is way down, and so is swap file usage (basically, it’s not being used, and it was, before — a lot). Barring any future problems, I’m quite happy with this set-up, and would advise this change to anyone who’s never tried anything other than Apache on an Unix system. I’ll probably try doing the same thing on my home server, too.

… go read this post of mine (including the comments).

You’ll never look at a blog that hasn’t had any new posts for a while the same way again.

I know, I know, Twitter is last week‘s news, so I’m late. Sue me.

Twitter is a system where you can tell, easily and quickly (for instance, by instant messaging, or cell phone), what you’re doing. You can also “follow” other users.

Anyway, I just joined. My username is “Dehumanizer”; feel free to add me (I like to convince myself that people are actually interested ).

Twitter, at first glance, looks a little fun (it’s a new thing, after all), but completely useless, and even a bit self-masturbatory. However, looking at how other people use it, I’ve found that it’s not just for telling the world about useless stuff like “I’m going to the toilet”. People are using it as a mini-blog of sorts – with quick 1-2 line posts. Unlike a “normal” blog post, a Twitter post is so short that you can simply write something you’ve just thought or done, without interrupting your normal flow.

It’s also a way to, in a way, keep in touch with people, even if you don’t usually talk to each other, such as former co-workers.

Anyway, we’ll see if I keep using it or not. I probably will, but not “religiously”.

I finally had some time today to move Way of the Mind (note the new URL) to my Slicehost virtual server. The new WotM Forum is also up, using MyBB, instead of phpBB like my other two. So far, I’m liking it (MyBB) a lot, though it’s a bit weird to have the entire theme inside the MySQL database instead of normal .php or .css files.

Moving the WordPress blog was simply a question of following these instructions. Basically, you go to the WP options in the old blog, change the 2 URL fields to the new address, dump the database, do a search & replace to change any images and other URLs in the database to the new address, import the database to the new server, copy the files, and that’s the proverbial “it”.

As for redirection, there came the eternal dilemma: if you redirect everything, then people will be lazy and keep using the old address (thus wasting your bandwidth); if you don’t, it’s inconvenient, and you lose everything you had in terms of incoming links and SEO.

What I did was to redirect (301, to signify a permanent move) every URL except the front page, which shows a message telling people about the change, and redirects after 5 seconds. I believe that this is the best of both worlds. Any link to an individual post will be redirected transparently, but whoever arrives at the front page will told about the change of address, encouraging them to update their bookmarks.

If, like me, you use the current CVS version of AWStats, you may have found that, since they recently added Sapo to its list of known search engines, if your web site is located in Portugal (like mine are), your top search query is, suddenly, “Resumo“. Even if your site is in English.

“Resumo” is, in this context, Portuguese for “short version“, and it’s included by default in all Sapo queries. But why is this happening?

I’ve tracked it down to an AWStats bug, which I reported to the author, along with a patch. That patch, in addition to fixing that problem, also adds support for Clix queries. For more details, including the patch itself, please visit the SourceForge page for this bug.

SEOmoz has a post called 5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should). I’ve learned a few things there, which is always a good thing. I’ve been doing web pages for years, and didn’t even know those tags existed…

Most of this blog’s subscribers speak English, and I know how annoying it can be to have a post in your feed reader that you can’t understand. And this post of mine, from “A Arte de Blogar”, doesn’t really make sense for people outside Portugal… at least, I think so. But it should be relevant to the Portuguese readers (and they exist, indeed ); therefore, here’s a link to it: Os Portugueses e a Web.

An excerpt, to whet your appetite (if you do speak Portuguese):

Por outras palavras, Portugal é como uma “selva inexplorada” em termos de SEO, e é facílimo ultrapassar os sites “a sério” em termos de posicionamento nos motores de busca (como disse, acontece frequentemente mesmo sem se tentar). Porque, por cá, ninguém sabe o que é SEO, ou como é que a Web funciona… e nem se quer saber.

Yup, it’s out. A lot of interesting stuff, too.

My first community, which no longer exists, used Drupal, some years ago. It’s a pretty powerful system, with lots of options, tons of plugins and themes, sane defaults, and pretty easy to use.

I think I’ll play with the new version in the next couple of days… I don’t know whether I’ll actually use it for something, or just play with it. We’ll see.

Sometimes, using AdBlock in Firefox may be too restrictive; by default, it blocks all ads, and you may just want to block the annoying ones: popups.
Firefox blocks them quite well, but it’s not perfect; some ad services have found ways to get around the blocker.

In this particular situation, I found that denying, in my Squid proxy server, the ad services which bypass the popup blocker, works very well.
This has the advantage of blocking them for a complete network, instead of just one PC, too. And it’s independent of browsers.

Popups are already annoying enough; to make them work around a popup blocker (which means that the user really doesn’t want to see them) is evil. So, the fact that these companies’ ads are blocked even before they get to the PCs is a nice bonus.

Here’s my current list, which I block using dstdomain in squid.conf:

.zedo.com
.paypopunder.com
.t2t2.com
.profredirect.com
.dellonlinedirectly.com
.farssearch.net
.searchs123.com
.freefa.net
.clicksor.com
.paypopup.com
.adserver.com
.yieldmanager.com
.fastclick.net
.tribalfusion.com

Whenever I see a popup ad, I just add its domain to the list. As you can see, it’s not huge – Firefox works quite well.
Enjoy.

EDIT: I’m not included popups which Firefox 1.5.x does block, or any other kind of ads. I can live with those – if not, I’d be using AdBlock.

EDIT 2: I’ll be updating this post whenever I find new ones. I’ve already added 2 domains since I wrote this post.

When you work with IT and the Internet, it’s sometimes easy to forget that what is easy and obvious to us, may not be so for “regular” people. My recent feeds tutorial, for instance, was quite successful because of exactly that – because it didn’t assume that people already knew most of the stuff.

And so, I have just written a new tutorial, this time about social bookmarking, using del.icio.us as a practical example. Like the feeds one, this is probably not for you, now reading this blog, but it may be useful for showing to your less tech-inclined friends or family.

Without further ado…

• Social Bookmarking and del.icio.us (English version)
• Social Bookmarking e o del.icio.us (Portuguese version)

I hope you enjoy it.

In remote times, web designers used HTML <table>s for positioning text on pages, which these days is frowned upon by every single book or tutorial. The proper way is to use CSS for positioning, or any other kind of formatting.

However, many people, aparently, don’t really understand why using tables for formatting was “bad”; they only hear that “good designers use CSS instead”, and, therefore, seem to think that any use of the <table> tag is evil. I believe I’ve even seen a web tool which analysed pages, and complained about any <table> it found (I don’t remember what it was, though).

The thing is, these people are missing the whole point! It’s wrong to use <table> for positioning stuff on a page, for several reasons, sure. But there is a proper use for HTML tables, which is what they were originally intended for: tabular data! Maybe you want to reproduce a section from a spreadsheet in HTML, or create a “real” table with rows and columns. In these cases, <table> is the way to go, and you shouldn’t be “ashamed” of using it. Anyone who complains about it is simply showing that he didn’t understand why using tables for formatting was wrong in the first place; he is just “going with what he hears”.

You can still apply CSS to tables, of course, to manage how they look. That’s what CSS is for.

One more tip: any table you create probably has row and/or column headings. The headings cells shouldn’t be <td>s, but <th>s, instead. Not only does it help with screen readers (for blind people), but it also allows you to easily apply different CSS stuff to the headings (you probably want them to look different from normal table cells).

Yesterday morning, I completed a new mini-site, Chess: basic principles. It’s a short, 1-page site with some principles for chess openings, intended for “advanced beginners”. As I usually do, I submitted it to several social bookmarking sites.

The results were amazing, much better than I ever got in the past. Digg mostly ignored it, and the Portuguese Digg clones (where the Portuguese version, Princípios básicos de Xadrez, was also submitted) are too small to make a difference. But several others…

Impressive, right? But it was also picked by Lifehacker (and I didn’t add it there):

Want to see the difference in my stats (those are for all my mini-sites, that’s why there was traffic before)?

Before you ask: no, this isn’t a magic recipe for AdSense, since users from those sites almost never click on ads; they’re a bit more technically inclined than “Joe User”, so they tend to use ad blockers, or at least ignore ads. It shows in the browser stats, too – more than 60% of those 7000 or so visitors use Firefox.

A couple of days ago, I needed to create a basic, static HTML page, with mostly text and a couple of images, for another mini-site. I usually create those by hand, using a simple text editor; however, when the page is longer, it can be annoying to remember to close all the tags, replace every accented character with the proper ampersand code (e.g. á is á), and so on. In other words, it’s tiresome, because you can’t simply write the content.

On the other hand, I tend to dislike WYSIWYG HTML editors, as they, mostly, create “write-only code”. All I needed was for it to do what I said in the paragraph above: create the paragraphs automatically, replace the accented characters, and so on. And, also, create simple, readable, easily editable HTML, without adding unneeded stuff. In other words, what WordPress already does… but I didn’t want to use WordPress for that; it was to be a simple, static page.

I was pleasantly surprised with Nvu. It did exactly what I wanted, and the generated HTML was clean and virtually perfect – so much that, after I generated the initial version, I never touched Nvu again, it’s perfectly readable in a text editor.

(you can find the mini-site here, but, be warned, it’s in Portuguese, though an English version is coming soon.)

I’m guessing that Mozilla Composer (from SeaMonkey) would work equally as well, though I don’t have it installed.

Eric has an intriguing post called The Single Page AdSense Site. It’s, in a way, an even simpler variant of Making Money with Niche Websites, and it’s something I’d be doing in spades if I wasn’t such a lazy guy.

Just saw it on Ricardo Saramago’s blog: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth-powered Windows Live Local preview. Prepare to drool.

Impressive technology, certainly, and it’s nice to see that MS can do something “cool” without restricting it to Internet Explorer, requiring ActiveX, being Windows-only, and so on.

Of course, I doubt that 1) this will ever have more than a few places, and 2) this will actually be of use to someone, in place of a GPS navigation system, or even as a Google Earth competitor. It’s great, however, to impress other people, as they’ve surely never seen anything like this.

On Asymptomatic, there’s a recent post called Statistics, anyone?, where the author gives his impressions on a lot of stats packages, including Google Analytics, AWStats (which I use), Mint and others. Nice details concerning the pros and cons of each one.

The ensuing comments are useful as well – it’s always nice to have more opinions.

I think I’ll keep using AWStats, though I’m curious about some other stats options. The ones I’ve tried so far, however, have disappointed me – including Analytics.

Of course, AWStats isn’t an option if you don’t have access to the server logs…

It’s Google News!

In related news, sub-zero temperatures in Hades have been reported.

SiteAdvisor looks intriguing.

It’s a system of bots which subscribe to websites with generated email addresses, and then monitor how many mails it starts receiving in those addresses – and how spammy those mails are.

Then it rates sites based on how much they spam you – the demo shows what’s probably a browser plugin, warning you when you are about to browse to a “dangerous” site.

It accepts testers, as of now. Maybe I’ll try it later.

Best of the Web, a popular directory site, has a new Blogs section. It is currently free of charge, which is great.

They seem to be very demanding about what blogs they accept, though, and they review submissions manually. Unfortunately, one of the requirements is that the blog must be 6 months old or more, and none of my blogs are (this one is little more than 4 months old, and the others are even newer). Blogs must also, of course, be active, and not “spammy”.

I’ll be sure to submit this blog there, a month and a half from now.

Recently, there has been a discussion on Slashdot about RSS, and about how only 4% of users knowingly use it. Most of the people involved in the discussion said things like “RSS is just a fashion these days”, or “I have no use for it – I’d rather go to any sites I’m interested in, myself”, or even “it’s just the second coming of 1998′s “push” technology, in disguise.”

The following is a translation of a comment of mine in Carlos Rodrigues’ blog, which I believe deserves a post here.

RSS is useful for much more than subscribing to news sites, or to a couple of blogs.

For instance, yes, I don’t subscribe to feeds for sites which have new stuff every day, and which I visit daily. In such cases, there would be no point – the feed would simply be a repetition of information. I just go to the site myself.

But what if it’s a site (say, a blog) where everything there interests me, but the author only posts very rarely – say, he may post 3 times in a particular week, but then only post next month. Does it make sense for me to go there daily, knowing that most of the time there won’t be anything new there? To me, that would become a chore. Nope, it makes a lot more sense to subscribe to that site’s feed. When there’s something new, I’ll know it. When there isn’t, I don’t even have to remember that the site exists. Best of both worlds.

Another case: comment feeds. I subscribe to those for all my own blogs, and, so, I know I don’t miss any comments – even for older posts, which have long left the front page. A lot of my posts are technical or other guides, which are timeless, and comments in them make sense. And if they’re spam, and somehow got through the spam filters, I can delete them. If it wasn’t for comment feeds, it would be quite easy for me never to see some comments. In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons people disable comments for older posts in their blogs, or even turn comments off altogether – an idea I strongly dislike, it seems to me much like stopping using email because there’s so much spam.

The same thing exists for wikis (a feed of recent changes, which has helped me detect some spamming attempts in my wiki, before I plugged a hole there).

Or for web forums, such as phpBB. A feed with new comments can make sure you don’t miss anything, even in a very active forum.

And there’s more. Search feeds. Instead of subscribing to a feed for some particular site or blog, you subscribe to a search for one or more words, say, using Google’s Blog Search, or using Bloglines‘ own functionality. Then you get everything new about those search terms, no matter where it was posted – news sites, blogs, whatever.

And, finally, yes, RSS feeds are the only way to keep up with more than half a dozen sites. Which, if you plan to someday be a full-time blogger, is essential.

It’s amazing that this thing has been posted in at least two places (this blog is one of them), and I’ve seen nothing, anywhere, coming from it. No blog entries. No discussions. Not even comments under the two blog entries. And it works – even my 2 “late afternoon” attempts have been actually making me money, which, considering that they don’t cost me anything in terms of time, effort or money, is great.

Let’s put it like this: imagine you can do something today, that, starting 6 months from now, will make you about a dollar a day. That’s $30 a month… insignificant, right?

But you can do it several times. As many as you want.

So, if you do it 10 times, in six months you’ll be getting 10 dollars a day (in average). $300 a month.. you can’t quit your job, but maybe you can pay a few bills with it, or, perhaps, finally buy that Nintendo DS you’ve always wanted, plus a couple of games.

What if you do it 50 times? 100? More? You see, it’s something that you can do relatively quickly, and which requires no maintenance.

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you have probably already guessed what I’m talking about: static, niche mini-sites.

And the “six months” estimate is quite conservative on my part. Consider the following: I have two mini-sites, each made in an hour or two. One of them is a joke, which I created mostly for a few experiments with CSS. The other is a recipes site in Portuguese, which only has 4 recipes so far (I intend to add more, but I keep forgetting or delaying it). Both are very simple, only a bunch of static pages, no images, and one AdSense ad at the bottom of each page. Both were created about a month ago.

And yet they make me money. They get very few hits (they’re niche stuff, not very well SEO’d, and probably “sandboxed” in some way), but for some reason CTR (click-through rate) is quite high – much higher than in any of my blogs. Not a lot – about 20-50 cents a day, in average. There’s certainly a lot of room for improvement.

But what if I made more of them? (I certainly intend to do so.) Better ones, too? They cost virtually nothing in terms of time, work, bandwidth, hard disk space, whatever. They require no maintenance – it’s basically “fire and forget”.

And they make money. And anyone can do it.

Strange, isn’t it? It seems that almost nobody knows about it – I certainly haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, except for the blog entry that I linked to in my own, and which inspired it.

Take a look at it.

“Crawlers? We don’t want no stinking crawlers around here!”

(seen on BlogSEO)

The ugly:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. It “works”, so you launch it. You lose 20% of your potential clients, and more of 50% of the “tech-savvy” ones.

The bad:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. You see that your site doesn’t work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and/or Safari, so you waste days trying to fix hundreds of HTML bugs. After that, you find that it no longer works properly in IE 6, so you end up using Javascript to detect the browser, and giving different versions of code to each. You curse those pesky Firefox / Opera / Konqueror / Safari “weirdos”, who just have to be “different”, refusing to use the “standard browser,” Internet Explorer, and only increase your workload.

The good:

You code a web site according to standards, which, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes, means that it works in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. You test it in IE, and find that some parts don’t work properly due to IE bugs or lack of support for parts of some standards, so you work around those — sticking to the standards — and ensure that it works in IE as well. Again, assuming you didn’t make mistakes, it still works perfectly in the standards-compliant browsers. Furthermore, the site degrades gracefully (that is, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works, and all the content is accessible) in cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs, etc..

Seen on ProBlogger, an interesting report: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now. It’s not really a tech report, but, instead, a report for marketers.

Which I am not. But I found it intriguing anyway – seeing how “the other side” thinks, and which arguments can affect them (since they’re not that concerned with “the standards” or “doing things right”, or even “using and supporting the best software”, like I am.)

Eric Giguere of An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google has been doing an AdSense case study from some time now, which I’ve found quite interesting. Basically, he’s been creating a small site about invisible fences for dogs, and each stage of the site is archived, so you can compare them.

For instance, the first stage, “content”, only has text and some AdSense ads; the second stage is SEO’d, the third adds images and the fourth moves all formatting to CSS, incidentally improving the looks a lot.

Along with this article, this case study has been one of my main inspirations for my new mini-sites.