My Server Time is WAY off

November 12th, 2009 § 0

Well, it was this morning.  I didn’t realize it until I went to schedule a blog post for 12 hours later and it published immediately. I was concerned and actually went to blame WordPress first (I’m really not sure why).  However, when I was looking at the time preferences in the General settings area of the site I noticed something really strange.  My timezone was correct, but the date WP was showing was way off. This meant that my CentOs5 server’s time was way off.

I did a little research and found an article called “Setting the time of your system“.  They gave me some good solutions on how to fix the issue, after reading it I was ready to go.  I tried a couple things in the order they said and found myself a little confused. So naturally, I started trying things till they worked.  This is not always the best solution, but I figured I could deal with a timing issue if I messed it up worse than it was.

For my CentOs 5 server I did the following, which actually worked and set the time perfectly.

First, I checked the date the server had, which turned out to be way off.

  1. # date
  2. Thu Nov 12 23:56:41 MST 2009

Then I looked to see if ntpd (the automatic time adjustment service) was running, it was.

  1. # service ntpd status
  2. ntpd (pid 12019) is running…

I tried ntpdate to reset the time on the server, but it complained about the socket being in use.

  1. # ntpdate 129.6.15.28
  2. 12 Nov 23:57:28 ntpdate[12045]: the NTP socket is in use, exiting

My solution was to stop ntpd and then run ntpdate again, which worked!

  1. # service ntpd stop
  2. Shutting down ntpd:                                        [  OK  ]
  3.  
  4. # ntpdate 129.6.15.28
  5. 12 Nov 07:25:10 ntpdate[12063]: step time server 129.6.15.28 offset -59562.023808 sec

A simple restart of the ntpd service and the time was correct!

  1. # service ntpd start
  2. Starting ntpd:                                             [  OK  ]
  3.  
  4. # date
  5. Thu Nov 12 07:25:20 MST 2009

So, the solution was to do the following steps:

  1. # service ntpd stop
  2. # ntpdate 129.6.15.28
  3. # service ntpd start
  4. #date

I added “date” on the end, because you want to verify that the time actually did reset. Best of Luck!

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How to use Bit.ly to your advantage

November 12th, 2009 § 0

Bit.ly starts with a simple idea, shorten URLs.  You pass a URL to them, then they give you a randomly generated short URL.

Bit.ly is a very useful tool for shortening your URLs for Twitter or easy sharing with clients and co-workers.  The Twitter community has embraced Bit.ly as top dog in the URL shortening world.  There is great competition for them, so the hope is that we will see some real innovation in the shortening and tracking of URLs.

There are more features aside from URL shortening that Bit.ly provides, some of which you may be missing out on.

Track Your Click Throughs

Whenever you add a URL to Bit.ly, it is immediately added to their database of URLs.  After the first person clicks your link, Bit.ly’s tracking kicks in.  They will count every click on your URLs. They also will provide you with the cumulative total of clicks from every user who has shortened and shared the URL you are looking at.

bit.ly, a simple url shortener-1

Find recently used links quickly

I often will post a link, then go looking for it well after it is buried in my Twitter stream.  Bit.ly serves a great purpose by letting you quickly scan through pages of your most recently used links. Not only that, but they allow you to rename the links in the lists, so you can find them easier!

Get an idea how much traffic your competition is getting

Since you can submit any URL you want through your bit.ly account, this means that if you see your competition submit a URL through bit.ly you can track it too!  All you have to do is get the URL that you are redirected to by bit.ly and shorten it with your account.  Immediately, it should show up in your account with the number of clicks that the full-size URL has received.

API

Bit.ly allows you to push and pull information with their API. This is invaluable to applications like Twindicate and Tweetdeck, who need to provide the shortest URLs possible when writing Twitter Posts.

I could not write this list without sending out some good vibes by requesting some features. What Bit.ly needs:

Quick Search

I would love to have a search mode.  There would be a search box, where you could type anything and Bit.ly would search through your data and return matches based on URL and title.  This would make finding links even easier and inspect links further back in time.

Better Link Title Special Character Scrubbing

Nearly every time I submit a blog article through Bit.ly and see it in the list it looks like this:

bit.ly, a simple url shortener-2Most Recently clicked view

Man, this would be living!  If you could see which links were most recently clicked, it would be easier to find out if a link of yours is doing well even after it is buried by more recently added links.  What would you do if you were the last to find out that some link you posted actually went viral?  What would your clients do if they found out through some chain email instead of from you?

Aggregated Mine/Theirs stats

This feature would probable be just for me to use for bragging, but having the stat of “lifetime clickthroughs” on my account would be pretty cool.  This way I could see how much or how little I actually contribute to the Social Community through my links.  Since nearly all of the links I send out are Bit.ly links, it would be a pretty good gauge.

Ninja Side feature idea: You could create a game based on the sharing of Bit.ly links and who else shared the link.

API Feature: Pull more than one link’s info at a time

I really very much want to more fully integrate Bit.ly into one of my projects.  Being able to pull a mass amount of data instead of one at a time, would make what I want to do possible.

It would be sweet to be able to get all the links for a specific user.  But, if I could just send in 15 URLS in one request and get data returned for all of them at once, that would make my day.

Are you using Bit.ly yet?  Why not?

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Installing WordPress Mu on a Dreamhost Server

November 12th, 2009 § 0

I really wanted to use WordPress Mu for Focus Of The Week, which is a site where I give people blogs and they post on their topic once a week.

WordPress Mu is a multi user platform for WordPress where you can manage multiple blogs from the same administrative area.  It is a great tool for managing multiple blogs, and on DreamHost it would be perfect!  However, they do not have a way for you to do dynamic DNS unless you are paying extra for DreamHost PS, so there is a little extra work that goes into setting it up.

So how do we do this? Follow these steps and you are on your way:

First, make sure your domain is propagated to your DreamHost server. Second, you need to make sure that WordPress Mu is on the server and installed. You can do this pretty easy with the installation instructions and a little elbow grease if you haven’t done it before. It should not take you longer than 20 minutes, if it does you might want to phone a friend.

Now that Mu is set up, you may have noticed the Blogs administration area under “Site Admin”:

Dashboard ‹ Twitter User of The Week — WordPressAdd a blog to the next page by filling out this form:

WordPress MU › Admin › Blogs ‹ Twitter User of The Week — WordPress

Once that is in the system, you will notice if you go to that domain that you cannot see the blog.  You still need to set up your DreamHost DNS to know about the domain.  The easiest way to do this is through the DreamHost Panel, NOT AT YOUR REGISTRAR.  The reason is simple, DreamHost already has the DNS for your main domain, so all requests are going to them, even for subdomains. Also, when you set up the subdomain with them it will propagate so much faster than with your registrar.

You do this through the DreamHost Domain Manager:

DreamHost Web Panel > Domain _ Manage DomainsOnce you submit the domain, you just have to wait a little while. Sometimes it is really fast and sometimes it takes up to a couple hours. What I do is just check the URL in my browser every half hour to an hour.

You can now host a WordPress Mu site on DreamHost!

If you need hosting for a blog site, DreamHost is a pretty good way to do it.  For a single blog, they have One-Click-Installs which makes installing regular WordPress a breeze.  To get a huge discount, $50 off any normal hosting fees you can use Promo Code: PROJECTLAUNCHER

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I am not a designer

November 9th, 2009 § 0

I like to think that I know where my weaknesses lay.  When I start working with someone one of the first things I try to make perfectly clear is that I am not a designer.  I like to be straight forward and let people know before that assumption is made and I have to explain that my client needs to find someone else halfway through a project.

What is the difference between a designer and a developer?  A designer makes the site pretty and does User Interaction modifications.  A developer is someone who builds the functional parts of the site.  This is like the difference between a painter and the guys who frame, plumb and wire up your house.

I have met a few people so far who are truly capable of doing both design and development, but most are WAY better at one than the other.  I say, stick with the thing you are best at and bring someone else in who is best at the part you fall short on.  I would much rather make sure that the product I am working on comes out as best as it can instead of falling short because I try to take on something that I am not that good at.

I know some high quality designers who, when I need them, I can bring them into a project to provide a top quality product for you.  I want to guarantee that our business interaction is the best you have had among the developers you have worked with.  There are just too many people out there claiming they do the same work as  I do.  I will not only tell you about the quality you will get, I show you throughout the entire business interaction we have.

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Using the Twitter API with Zend Part 2: Logging in a User and Updating Status

October 27th, 2009 § 0

Take This Idea: Public Event Calendar

October 27th, 2009 § 2

Crush It!

October 25th, 2009 § 0

I have been working my ass off, frustrating my friends, frustrating my wife (who does understand and support me 100%), and pushing myself to the limits with some of my projects.  I work hard because I love what I do and feel that the work that I put in will be worth all the time spent and frustrations created.  The thing I have the hardest time with is that NONE of my sites really make good money.  Yeah, I am admitting that.  None of my sites make enough money that I could survive solely on the money that the site provides.  No, I will not tell you what they do make so please do not ask.

What I can tell you though, is that I recently just finished a book called Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk. The book basically says, “If you are passionate about what you are doing and really believe in what you are doing, then chill”. This is not necessarily the intended message of the book, but I did get this from what Gary is saying.

I believe that the intended message of the book is, “If you are passionate and follow through with your passion, you will Crush It”.  I have been in-line with this mantra for a while, but it is tough to keep going when things are not where I was hoping they would be at this point.

So, I am taking to hear the original message. I am going to spend my time making my products good, talking about them, sharing them and “crushing it” by letting people know who I am.  By doing this I bolster my “personal brand” (another big mantra of the book) and direct people to the projects I am working on as a result.  One more thing I am going to do is provide more content for you the reader both here and on my personal blog.

For more information about the book, you can get it pretty cheap via amazon:

As you can probably tell by my declaration of course redirection, I highly suggest this book. If you have a passion and want to know more about how to turn that into a profit or you want to know how to take what you already have to the next level or you just to find out that you are already on your way to Crushing It, read this book.

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A Tale As Old As Time

September 30th, 2009 § 0

So, I have this friend… This is the way many people start their stories when they are really talking about themselves, but this time it is not the case.  This story is about a friend of mine, we will call him John.

John runs a website which is a store front and information source for a niche market that didn’t realize they were a niche until John’s website.  It is a cool idea for sure.  John is not a developer.  He runs the company and handles all of the marketing and content that goes on.

When John wanted some new features on his site he came to me and we talked.  I informed him that as his site was in .net I was not able to do any programming but I could definitely be a consultant on whatever project he was getting done for his company.  John then went out and asked for programmers that new .net and who could handle a project of the size he wanted.

I referred my friend Jason Rowland, who accepted John’s RFP (Request For Proposal) and came back to him with a fully fleshed out proposal.  Jason’s proposal came in higher than John expected and the timeline was longer than the other proposal that came in.

Sam sent in the other proposal.  His proposal was a more manageable number, something closer to what John was hoping the cost would be for this feature and as I mentioned before, he said he could get it done on a shorter timeline.

Well, you know as well as I do that I would not be writing this story down and sharing it if something didn’t go wrong.

John went with Sam, which made sense at the time because he was cheaper and the feature would be done sooner. After the delivery date that Sam had come and gone,  and after the money Sam had asked for did the same, John was worried.  I had been talking to John throughout this project, even consulting the developer on one of the features and how to handle it so that it was optimal for SEO, and it didn’t get the site de-listed.  I noticed that the developer was a little lost, he was trying things that were misinformed and seemed out of place for a developer of the caliber that was needed for this project.

In the middle of all this, someone noticed that the website was hacked into and there were prescription drug links all over in the source of the pages and told John.  John asked Jason to look into it, because Sam was so bogged down with the other project.  Again, Jason sent him a proposal of what would be needed. On top of that, Jason noticed a huge security leak in the site that would allow future issues if they didn’t cause the original issue itself.  Jason told me about what was going on, because he knew I was friends with John and had been consulting with him along the way.  I immediately sent John an email showing him the security issue and how his current developer was the cause of it.

John got Jason on the phone, asked him to figure out how much it would cost to fix all the problems and put Jason in touch with Sam. Sam admitted to Jason that he “left a security vulnerability issue on the site because he figured he’d ‘clean it up on the next go-round’”.  John was PISSED, and understandably so.  He hired Jason to fix the issues on the site.

As of last night, the repairs have cost John $1000 and things are only partially fixed.

What is the lesson here?

When you ask for proposals and you receive them, please do not look at the number at the bottom.  Look at the proposal itself, judge the developer on the amount of time and effort he puts into the proposal.  This is a good indication of how dedicated he is to his profession and providing a quality product for you.

When Jason did his proposal, he came in considerably higher than Sam.  Up front, this is scary to anyone asking for proposals because they KNOW how much money they will HAVE to shell out and there is no guarantee that the product will work or be finished on time.

John has spent more on the project than Sam proposed and more than what Jason originally proposed.  Jason will fix the problems, but no one can work for free so it is going to take some money to fix the glitch (READ: to fix Sam’s crappy job).

This is a tale as old as time, because this happens with any contract work.  People will consistently worry about the bottom line and not pay attention to the warning signs.  Please learn from John so that you do not make this mistake yourself.

The last time I talked to John his comments to me were:

You and Jason are my go-to developers from now on

Thank God you recommended Jason to us

I just wanna say that you and Jason are good at what you do because you convey trust and that you know what the hell you are doing.

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Do you know how to save money?

September 29th, 2009 § 0

If you can answer yes to the question above then you are perfect for HowWeSave.com.  How We Save was built to help people share their ideas and resources for saving money in tough and not so tough economic times.

If you want to share your thoughts and ideas all you have to do is sign up and start posting.  Each post that you add to How We Save will be approved by one of our admins and then live on the site.  You will be given credit for every post on the site.  If you produce consistent quality posts, you can be asked to become one of our normal columnists which comes with extra privileges.

Ideas? Suggestions? Please contact us through this post or How We Save.

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Name my Application contest winner is…

September 27th, 2009 § 1

Keith Barineau, @barineau, gave one of the first name suggestions for my application with Twindicate.com.  After much deliberation and many opinions and suggestions, this was the most voted on name.

So, I will be paying Keith $100 as promised and will be sharing more information about Keith soon.

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