I have been enjoying using the latest version of Wordpress but i am getting seriously pissed off with the fact that every time i try and upload an image i am presented with some red text that tells me “HTTP Error”.

As you can see that text is really not very helpful, so its hard to find out exactly what the issue with Wordpress is. Now i have been searching the net for the answers and the most common answer is to insert this code into your .htaccess.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

However, if like me you tried this and it didn’t work, your problem might be something a lot more strange.

[JUMP TO SOLUTION WITHOUT READING MY FINDINGS]

I got onto my hosts because i thought it might be something a bit more serious on the web server, when George (the web host guy) tried to upload an image he managed to do it ok without any sort of problem, i thought it was a bit weird so asked what OS and browser he was using and it turns out it was XP and IE.

I finished off the chat and booted my MacBook into XP mode, opened up IE and sure enough i could upload an image into Wordpress, how fucking weird? Well next i opened Firefox in XP and tried to do it… worked again.

So i booted back into OSX and tried it from Firefox… didn’t work, so i opened up Safari.. didn’t work, i even asked the Evil Green Donkey and some others in my office to try it from their Macs… didn’t work.

For what ever reason which i really can’t get my head around, it seems that this is an issue that is specifically with Flash on the mac, it doesn’t even seem browser related. And i have tried this on over 6 different installs of Wordpress on multiple hosting accounts.

I reinstalled flash for the mac and tried every possible solution to this problem which are listed on the wordpress blog and on another site i found and still no joy. The ONLY way i can upload images to any of my blogs using OSX is to disable the flash image uploader by using the no-flash-uploader plugin, this reverts it back to the html version. To use, simply put that file into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and then activate it through the plugins section of your admin area.

Now i can have images again, but i do hope that someone finds the issue and fixes it, in the mean time enjoy a picture that proves that none of this is an issue with my hosting and that images work fine once the flash uploader has been disabled. Now all i need to do is install the above mentioned plugin on all of my sites :o(

As usual, please leave a comment if you have experienced this issue.

From the Google blog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

—

So does this mean we will start to see a whole load of flash sites in our search results? I doubt it since even though flash sites look nice, many don’t actually have all that great textual content for the end user.

Still, good work by Google.

Then the speed dial extension is to blame!

I don’t really want to write this because i love speed dial so much, but i have to admit that it is really starting to piss me off. Every single time i write something in a text area i lose focus.

It means that every time i am writing away, the cursor will disappear out of the text area and i am just sat there typing blankly. It seems that whenever speed dial does a refresh in the background this will happen.

The only way round it is to disable speed dial. I have contacted the developers so i hope this will be solved soon. I just wanted to post this in case anyone out there searching about the issue didn’t know how to solve it.

I lost focus 4 times whilst writing this, GRRRRR!

… ‘cuz i certainly didn’t!

Today when i logged onto Facebook i saw a little message telling me that one of my friends had changed their phone number and that it had been added to my phonebook. Phonebook you say? Call me slow but i didn’t realise that i had a phonebook on Facebook.

Not that i really understand why people post their phone number on Facebook (unless they have a VERY stringent friends-accepting policy), but it turns out that if one of your friends does then it will be automatically added to your Facebook phonebook (say that fast and drunk) in a handy dandy alphabetical list.

I didn’t realise this page existed, but then again to be honest i don’t personally find that all the settings in Facebook are where they should be. It can sometimes take me an age to tweak a setting.

Anyway you can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/mobile/?phonebook=&ref=nf and below is a screenshot…

Obviously all the phone numbers are the same and made up so weirdo’s don’t start calling them.

I have decided to get off my slightly fat ass and start going to the gym, we have a fitness first which is situated right between my house and the tube station i use so there is no excuse for me not going to the gym since i will have to walk past it.

So whilst i was eating my nice healthy potato for lunch i decided to check out the fitness first website by typing in fitnessfirst.co.uk into Firefox 3’s awesomebar and hitting enter, to my surprise i got an error back saying the site could not be found. A quick edit of the URL to add www at the start then gave me access to the site.

As i stated in my other post about LondonElects not 301′ing their site, i cannot believe that a company the size of fitness first cant hirer a developer who realises this issue, i wonder how many visitors they are losing a month because people just type in the url and think the site is down.

Perhaps they will give me free membership for pointing it out? Yeah right.

Super quick post…

My friend Sean who runs Joules clothing sent me a link to this site today, its an absolute gold mine of resources for web designers and developers.

Check it out for yourself and be very impressed

http://www.forwebdesigners.com/

I recently got the chance to speak on Whiteboard Friday over at SEOmoz, it was a quick session whereby a few SEO’s just give up a couple of tricks that the general population may not be aware of, i chose to talk about cookie stuffing.

Cookie stuffing is not new and has been blogged about a few times so i am not pretending to have actually come up with the method. I wanted to talk about it because i have been doing it slightly different using .htaccess and i have also been getting some really good results.

Basically, Cookie stuffing is a method in which you place cookies on users computers without them nessecerally knowing about it. It can be used on your affiliate sites to auto drop a cookie without the user actually clicking through your banner and converting on the retailers site. This allows you to get a much better conversion rate for visitors of your site because even if they hit your page, bounce, and then goto the retailers page at a later date (within the cookie length) you still get the sale.

It can also be used off site, whereby you would drop a cookie for a large affiliate site (such as ebay or amazon) by simply having a reference to your image. You can use this trick anywhere which allows you to use image code.

So here are the steps to do it…

1) Create a directory on your server with an inconspicuous name such as /stats
2) In that directory create a .htaccess file with the following code…
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule yourfakeimage.jpg http://www.cookiedroppingurl.com [R,L]
3) Place the /stats/yourfakeimage.jpg code in the footer of your site and then when the browser requests the image the .htaccess will return them the url which drops the cookie, this is all done in the background so unless someone is specifically looking out for it then you should get away with doing it

Obviously, you can use /stats/yourfakeimage.jpg in any other site that allows you to reference an image, aslong as the site doesnt cache the image locally on their server then you will be able to serve up as many cookies as you like.

There has been a lot of debate about whether using this method on external sites is classed as stealing and Esrun wrote a great article on cookie dropping.

I just want to add that you should be careful doing this, obviously if your affiliate see’s that you are generating a 100% clickthrough rate then they are going to start asking questions and can even ban you from the program.

Edit: Reader El Bueno has come up with a method for doing this on Windows IIS, you can see his solution in his comment

I was waiting for a while to see if this would happen and now it seems it has indeed. A few days ago Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz wrote a blog post recapping the in’s and out’s of SMX Advanced 2008. In the second paragraph she mentions that i visted the SEOMoz office and also links to Ayima.com using the link text Dean Chew.

Now Ayima.com ranks 2nd for Dean Chew, even though there is no mention of my name on the site, the Ayima site doesn’t link to this blog, and i dont link to the Ayima site. The only relationship between Dean Chew and Ayima.com is from Rebecca’s post.

Wikipedia describes a Google Bomb as…

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

Now, i was under the impression that Google had really tried to stamp out the process of Google Bombing, and obviously whilst this particular case isn’t bombing (as Rebecca was simply linking to a site she knew i had a relationship with) it does indicate that with smaller volume terms such as Dean Chew the process may still work.

Here is a screen shot of the results

Now i wonder that since i have mentioned my own name in this post so many times, if i will now have the 2nd position indent for Dean Chew? Only time will tell.

I will ask Rebecca to change the link to point to this blog and keep note of how long it takes for the Ayima result to drop off so if you a reading this like a week after its posted, the results are probably not the same.

Real quick post, but yesterday I got a lively email from Google telling me that my adsense account had been banned because of click fraud. The strange thing is that i have adsense code on only one site and that site has been down for at least two weeks.

I used the please-be-nice-and-let-me-back-on-adsense form and tried to explain that something must be amiss because I havent had any code up on the site for ages. However Google wouldn’t budge and reminded me of this…

My account was disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can rejoin the programme? Can I open a new account?

We understand your concern about the actions taken against your account. Please know that our actions are the result of careful investigation by our team of dedicated specialists, taking into account the interests of our advertisers, publishers and users. Though you may be disappointed with our decision, we are unable to reinstate your account.

Please also note that publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed any further participation in AdSense. For this reason, these publishers may not open new accounts.

Lastly, please bear in mind that Google does reserve the right to disable an account for any reason, including invalid click activity from any source.

So just remember, even though Google is this really cool company that helps us find what we need on a daily basis, they are also a bunch of bastards who can close down your account without actually giving you any real reason why!

A couple of days ago some strange things were going on with the Digg algorithm which meant that stories managed to hit the front page with only one or two Diggs.

Now today whilst browsing i noticed that 3 stories had managed to hit the front page with 0 or 1 comments. Usually a story gets a good 10 or so comments with a decent amount of Diggs to hit the front page.

I did have a screenshot right here but wordpress fucked up and overwrote it

Since the last little mishap we have been told that Digg have been playing around with the algo, should we now expect that new stories will have a longer life to make it to the front page and a less amount of comments?