Everyone knows about spam email and how annoying it is. But, really, it’s not that big of a deal. Be careful who you give your address to, change addresses often, and delete the random junk messages that do make their way in.

Spam’s ugly online cousin, spam-bots, can be much more difficult. Of course, not all bots are bad. Without them, we wouldn’t have search engines or aggregated news feeds. But, even those useful bots can do a lot of damage. Looking over my access logs and reporting, I find that bots are consistently around 50% of the traffic to all of my sites. That means that 50% of my server load is spent delivering pages to non-humans.

And then, even worse, there are the evil little bots sent out by the same jerks who think sending out bulk spam emails qualifies as a fun hobby. The thing that was good about them in the past was that they were so dumb you could trick ‘em real easy. Throw anything in a JavaScript tag and suddenly they don’t see it. Or just do the most basic of keyword filtering and knock out virtually all the spam comments on a blog (for some reason, they all seem to talk about viagra, porn, and online degrees a lot). Lately, though, I’ve seen some alarmingly smart little guys trolling out there.

I had an Ajax script being used for cost-per-click displays of phone numbers and got a huge wave of impressions on it from the same IP in a really short time. I figured it was some prankster, but when I investigated, I found that it was GoogleBot. Of course, this isn’t spam, but still it was alarming to see that a spider was out there hitting links that were only available by running a JavaScript function. So, clearly, I’m going to have to do a little re-thinking there and also start worrying about nefarious bots picking up JS capabilities too.

Then, today, I got a notification from WordPress.com that someone had posted a follow-up to one of my comments on another blog. I went back to the post and was very surprised to see my comment reposted again below the original with my name and a link to some spammy site (as my URL). That’s impressive. And scary. Now, it’s going to take more than a casual glance to figure out which comments are real and which are not. And, it’ll probably result in some legitimate comments getting blocked and visa versa.

So, moral of the story is, this isn’t the nineties anymore and you can’t just assume bots are stupid like they used to be. Watch out.

After Vista forced me to install some update or another, my built in FTP client stopped working.  Even so, I stuck with Homesite.  It was like an old, favorite, worn-in baseball glove by this point and I didn’t want to give it up.  But then, my hard drive started making this crazy noise consistently and Vista kept giving me bizarre errors and I realized my laptop was probably on it’s last legs.  Rather than panic after a crash, I decided to be proactive and get a new computer (a desktop) and I loaded it up with Ubuntu Linux distribution rather than continuing to deal with the Microsoft garbage.

Homesite doesn’t work with Linux so I was forced to finally find something new.  Bluefish Editor is what I came up with. It rocks. I easily connected it to all my FTP hosts (including the SFTP ones) and happily started coding away.

Only problem was that I kept forgetting what I had edited from there and then overwriting my own code with local stuff from the laptop. Plus, my wrist was taking some major abuse with all those clicks: save, switch window to FTP, change local directory, change remote directory, upload, change window to browser, refresh, switch back to the editor, etc. Finally, I decided enough was enough and I went out on the hunt for a new editor for my laptop.

The first thing I tried was just getting familiar with the VI Editor and working directly on the servers through a shell. Although this would have been wicked cool, it is a pretty steep learning curve and I just didn’t have the patience. Every time I wanted to do anything (cut, paste, search, replace, undo) I’d have to go back to the tutorial. That got annoying real quick. Plus, I found that the VI Editors on different servers are wildly different. One will be color coded while another is monochromatic, etc.

So, then I asked a colleague for recommendations and he said to try PSPad and Notepad++. But after downloading these, I quickly found that neither supported SFTP so they were no good for me. I was hoping to find something like Bluefish for Windows, but there was just nothing out there.

Finally, I downloaded a copy of WinSCP and figured out how to configure it to work with Homesite as an external editor. I guess I should have just done that to begin with and saved myself all this effort. Bottom line is, 10 years later, I continue to use the same editor I started with. Funny how some things never change.

First, I’ll admit I’m trying to move up a couple easy spots in the search engine listings. I often wish it were still the 1990’s, those glory days when you could just make cool content and not worry about promoting it, back before all these SEO gurus wrecked the internet. Sorry, I got off on a bit of a tangent there… What I was trying to say is that, I’m coming to the realization that promotion is almost as important as the actual generation of content these days. If I want to generate the type of advertising revenue I’m looking for from my Network, I’m going to have to start doing a better job of getting the word about the sites out.

The second reason was just pure logistics. This was the last site I transferred over to my new server and, because it is so database dependent, I would have had to take it offline for at least a couple hours while waiting for a DNS transfer to propagate. By setting up a new domain on the new box instead, I was able to transfer everything over with less than a half hour of downtime by doing simple .htaccess redirects.

Finally, the new name is intended to refocus the site and return it to its roots. Whereas East Coast Runners was a somewhat ambiguous name, there is no doubt as to what Best Running Log is all about. I’m going to stay more focused on simply being a great running log and not get so carried away with side projects (which have a tendency to half-develop and then stagnate).

That’s about all I have to say about that. Go give the site a whirl and let me know what you think.

Don’t go too cheap. When I first signed up with 1&1 hosting, I was a sophomore in high school and was on a very limited budget. As such 1&1’s shared hosting package was a great solution. But, as I became more and more serious about my web presence and eventually came to have a full blown web development business, the slow servers, constant downtime, and limited database storage space were issues that I could no longer deal with. I had been researching different hosts for a long while and finally bought the bullet, so to speak, and moved almost everything from 1&1 over to Mosso in January. Which brings me to my second point…

Don’t go too expensive either. The $100/month base price for Mosso’s cloud hosting was a big jump from what I was paying before, but I figured that it would be money well spent if it gave me the type of dependability and scalability that I was looking for. But, after I moved, I found that my compute cycles (their way of calculating server usage) was adding up very quickly and that, by the time I achieved the traffic I was looking for, I would be paying well over the $100/month. With a little handy math, I came to realize that I would need roughly 125,000 monthly unique page views to break even (figuring with a $0.80 eCPM, which is typical to the sites I run), but by the time I hit that I would have well exceeded the compute cycle allotment. So, there was really no way of me ever making a profit while running on the cloud computing environment. And so, even though I was in love with the idea of cloud computing, I realized that it was unfeasible for me to remain there.

Like Goldilocks, you have to find the host that is just right. For me, that was Dreamhost. I went with one of their virtual server packages which gives me a ton of flexibility and all the cool goodies that I’m looking for. Plus, they have managed servers there so when I do grow to the type of traffic I want someday, I’ll be able to switch over easily (they actually copy all the files for you). Sure, it’s not as cool of a solution as the instant scalability of the cloud, but it makes a lot mores sense for a small business like my own.

I’m almost done with moving everything now and will hopefully be able to get back to all the projects that have been left on the back burner very soon. Check back soon for news on those.

How to register a sole proprietorship in Manhattan (New York County):

• Choose your business name. It has to be composed of real words or your name (You can’t just make up some cool sounding word.)
• Hop on the subway and head down to 60 Centre Street.
• Buy a DBA form from the coffee shop right inside the front door ($2). Don’t fill it out yet.
• Go to the County Clerk’s office in Room 109B in the basement.
• Go up to the counter and check with the clerk to see if the name you want is acceptable. If it is, fill out the form, pay them $120 (cash, money order, or credit card) and they’ll give you two notarized copies of the certificate.
• That’s it. You’re official now. Congratulations.

1. Open up a phpinfo() page and make sure that you have the IMAP extensions installed. If you don’t, here are the instructions on how to get them.
2. Copy our PHP IMAP Connection Tester onto your server and configure it with your account information.
3. That’s it. I told you that was easy!

A note: I ran into the following error today: “Certificate failure for mail.example.com: Server name does not match certificate.” It took me a while to find the solution but finally came up with this — add /novalidate-cert after the port number. So, for example, if you’re using our tester, set $mail_port = 143/novalidate-cert; Hope that helps!

If you have any other tips, help the world out and share them below!

The Image Upload Form has everything you need to create a simple HTML form allowing users to upload their own JPEG images. After it verifies that the image is valid, it saves it and generates a thumbnail using the PHP GD library of image functions. The code is clean, so it’s pretty easy to manipulate it to suit your needs (other file formats, different resizing, etc.)

The Cron Job Tester is the result of an epic battle I had with the server hosting one of my client’s sites. I couldn’t figure out why these cron jobs weren’t running and so constructed this little tester to simply log an entry in a text file every minute. From there, I was eventually able to find out that the host’s “Easy Cron” function was overwriting my crontab file. Arrrgh…

Finally, I posted the PHP code to Copy All the Rows in a MySQL Table to another, identical MySQL table. You can, of course, do this easily in phpMyAdmin, but I needed to have the function automated for this particular project. Hopefully you can get some use out of it too.

The biggest change (other than swapping out logos, etc.) that I made in the switch was to separate the site into 4 categories: Company, Network, Blog, and Code:

• Company - This was the entire site before. It consists of the stuff you’d expect to see from a web development company: a portfolio, information about us, a sales pitch, etc. This is where I want to attract new development clients and also to provide a resource area (with invoices and such) for my current clients.
• Network - Right now, this section simply lists and links to the various sites that Ink Plant maintains as a publisher. In the future, I want to build this out to include more information for potential advertisers on the Network.
• Blog - You’re looking at it. I’m going to try very hard to keep posting up here regularly. I’d love to use this to start discussions regarding interesting aspects of the web development business.
• Code - This is going to be a repository of code snippets that I’ve put together. I definitely have some work to do there still because there aren’t enough code chunks to be useful yet and the design looks kinda lame. But, that’s probably going to be a project for later…

Well, I hope you like the new site. If you have any comments/suggestions, send them my way. Have a good night everyone.

One of the bigger tasks on the list is switching all the Lantenengo Industries stuff over to Ink Plant (I’m going to be officially changing my business name in the near future for branding reasons). Tonight, I got a decent-sized chunk of that switch taken care of: I closed down my old blog (redirecting it to here, of course) and pulled out the code snippets that I had published there, creating the new Code section of this site.

I also published a new code snippet that generates the PHP to display a MySQL table automatically. I’ve probably written this out by hand a couple hundred times, so it’ll be nice to finally have this little shortcut. Hopefully some of you will benefit from it too. Enjoy!

My network is admitedly a small fish in this big Internet pond, so I don’t typically have a lot of advertising dollars available to throw around. In fact, I’ve never really spent anything advertising for it before a few weeks ago when Visa was nice enough to give me a $100 credit on Facebook Ads. (I have done a fair amount of AdWords management for my clients in the past though, so I understood how the whole CPC system was setup.) I decided to spend the whole thing on my running site and chose the keywords running, run, and marathons as the targets of my campaign. After playing around a bit the first couple days, I settled on $0.21 as my default bid per click and set a $10 a day limit (No, I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a small experiment). So, 11 days and $100.58 later, I had generated 472 clicks from 509,441 impressions.

Of course, not all 472 of those clicks turned into registered users on my site. There was a fairly high immediate bounce rate of 49% (which I’ve heard is common when using Facebook Ads). And, of those that remained, only 36 (15%) went through the registration process and became registered runners on the site. (Note: That 15% number seems low to me. I’m brainstorming ways of improving it. Maybe quicker registration? More appealing style? But, that’s a topic for another post…) So, I ended up paying $2.79 to acquire each new runner.

Now, registered runners average 44.8 page views each month. All my advertising revenue on East Coast Runners is currently coming from AdSense, so I can easily find that my Page eCPM (the average revenue from each 1,000 impressions) is $1.44. So, in theory, to pay back the $2.79, I’d have to wait for the runner to visit 1,937 pages. At 44.8 pages a month, that’s over 43 months away. According to this simple calculation, it would take three-and-a-half years to break a profit.

Of course, there are other things to take into account: runners from the original ad campaign might share the site with a friend (+), or they might stop using the site before their required 3.5 years (-). Also, the 92% of visitors who didn’t become runners generated advertising revenue of their own (+). But these are all tough (impossible) to calculate exactly, so for the sake of argument, I’m just going to assume that they balance out to zero.

To conclude, my little experiment found that CPC advertising for a site similar to mine is not worth it unless you’re willing to deal with a really long wait before seeing your money back. Maybe that’s what WebMD and Ask are banking on — the fact that the investment will come back far down the road. But, they certainly have different conversions, return rates, eCPMs, etc. so it’s tough to say for sure.