Richard Lee Thomason

After two or three months of trying out a couple VPS hosts, I think I've finally found the ones I'm going to stick with. The first is LiquidWeb (www.liquidweb.com), which costs $60 a month for a Cpanel / Linux VPS account. I placed a handful of sites on my LiquidWeb account and they have all seen very good uptime and server response times. The second is where I actually host this personal website, which is PowerVPS (www.powervps.com) for $44 a month. They give me plenty of room for this site along with a small number of other personal websites that I own. The uptime and server response times on PowerVPS are just as good as Liquid Web, and the account has very similar features. In my opinion, both of these hosts are a great choice for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. I'll be sticking with both until they give me a reason not too.

Posted by Rick at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparantly, using "display: block" will do it. BCF (www.bankcardfinder.com) was already not ranking in Google for other reasons, but during my recent redesign I recreated the site using CSS only. No tables (almost). Part of the process to do that involved using "display: block" on link tags with the intent being that the entire area around the link tag is clickable, not just the text. And then last month or so, Googlebot completely stops crawling BCF. The only pages it still has indexed are very old ones that don't exist anymore.

It seems that, in the past, Black SEO's have used "display: block" to hide links in some manner. My understanding of the technique is that if you use "display: block" without defining height or other properties, your .css file trips a filter:

#sidenav a {display: block}

In Google's eyes, that's the equivalent of using "display: none" or "display: hidden". So, the White Hat SEO folks at Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com) who brought it to my attention have suggested I remove that from BCF's styles.css file, as well as changing the technique of using negative pixels to adjust background images on rollover (all that was intended there was to give list items a different rollover state). Nothing on BCF uses hidden text or links or anything else (I made sure of that), but certain types of CSS code have been so muddied up by Black Hat SEO's that you just have to avoid them entirely nowadays, or else you'll look like a hider.

I wasn't trying to wear any hat except for my old backwards brown baseball cap, (*frowns*). Looks like I'm going to have to avoid even more CSS techniques because Google dislikes us Brown Hats, :(

Posted by Rick at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another site that has recently fallen on hard times is Dynamic 101 (www.dynamic101.com). This is a niche site focused on dynamic forms of web hosting (primarily the big two, PHP and ASP, and the little two, Coldfusion and JSP). The post "Big Daddy" world of Google SERPs was a harsh one for poor old D101. It used to have numberous top ten rankings, but now only has two terms in the top 10.

Of course, each "downturn" for any website is an opportunity to redo some things that have needed redoin' for a long time, and to try other things which are new. So, while I'm not going to give this site a facelift (it looks fine), I'm going to test out using the Dreamweaver / Contribute combo to enable a couple of wannabe webmasters from Florida (pwned) with the ability to work on D101 with me. Details can be found under Dynamic 101.

Posted by Rick at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently, the topic of screen resolution came up again while building a website. For the past two or three years, I've followed the philosophy of designing for 800x600, since such a large portion of the Internet audience still used that resolution. But it seems time may be a changin'. This month's stats for screen resolution at TheCounter.com show that there are just as many people in 1280x1024 as there in 800x600 (about 17% each). At 56% usage, 1024x768 is the default, which I've known for awhile.

I've never given much consideration to people viewing in 1280x1024. Most of my sites are fixed width for 800x600, and they look fine in 1024x768, but it is probably time to give the poor small resolution folks less of a say in how I design my websites. I don't want to completely piss 'em off with fixed width sites at 1024x768, but sites that adjust in size are much more difficult to build (and still look nice). Since I already want to test out some new CSS for this site, I'm going to play around with a new design and see if I can't come up with something that is viewable in 800x600, optimized for ideal viewing in 1024x768, and yet stretches to fill up a screen set at 1280x1024.

*cracks knuckles*

This might take a while. Poor 800x600 is going the way of 640x480.

Posted by Rick at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was in California last month learning search engine optimization from Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com). Although it's all great info and well worth it to take his class . . . now I have so much work to do, lol. Every site I own needs lots of content and re-optimizing on every single landing page they have. Plus, there's lots of back-end things to check and re-configure, IP addresses to move around, things like that. *sigh* One site at a time. I'm even going to redo this personal site some to try out some new things I've learned CSS-wise.

Posted by Rick at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)