Voici ce que je vous propose. Premièrement, j’espère qu’en tant que développeur, vous avez appris à vous servir de SVN (Subversion). Il s’agit d’un simple outil qui vous permet de garder un historique de votre travail, et vous permet de revenir à des versions précédentes si nécessaire.

Bref, l’idée ici est simple. À l’aide de la commande svn export, nous pouvons mettre à jour de façon rapide notre version en production. Bien sûr, pour pouvoir faire cela, il faut avoir un accès SSH à son serveur, ce que tout utilisateur d’un service d’hébergement partagé (shared) n’aura probablement pas. Si toutefois, vous travaillez sur un serveur dédié, alors voici ce que vous pouvez faire:

1. En local, établissez une copie de travail de votre dépôt SVN (celui-ci peut être situé n’importe où). L’idée est que votre ordinateur local soit en mesure de faire fonctionner vos scripts (PHP dans mon cas). Je travail actuellement avec une VM avec Fedora d’installé, et pour modifier les fichiers, je peux soit travailler directement de la VM, ou encore via FTP directement. Dans mon cas, je préfère travailler par FTP sur mon Macintosh avec TextMate, mais chacun ses préférences.

2. Avec une copie locale, vous êtes en mesure de faire vos modifications. Lorsque vous êtes satisfait, vous faites un svn commit de vos fichiers pour qu’ils soient enregistrés dans votre dépôt SVN.

3. À présent, vous pouvez mettre votre copie de production à jour en une seule commande, soit svn export.

Afin de me simplifier la tâche, je me suis fait un petit script qui fait svn export avec l’url nécessaire et il ne me reste donc plus qu’à simplement appeler le script pour que la mise à jour soit effectuée. Ainsi, plus besoin de jouer avec son FTP pour tout changer, quelques commandes de console et le tour est joué. Dans mon cas, une mise à jour prend environ 10-15 secondes, pour 10 Mo, ce qui est excellent (le dépôt SVN se trouve sur le serveur de production).

You can currently see the presentation of this serie at 7 Days to a Better Body. Until then, have fun browsing my network of blogs, you might discover much you didn’t know.

I should be quite more active on both of these and will try to promote them in order to get them popular as I’m sure the content already available there is gold.

This code placed in your .htaccess will give you the possibility to send any visitor coming to your-domain-here.com to www.your-domain-here.com. This has a great advantage especially with search engines because all your pages will be referenced under the same “subdomain” as if you had both, you’d get www.your-domain-here.com links and your-domain-here.com links which would count as different pages.

New submission will be checked on the fly as I don’t want to have to do this once again.

On another note, I checked my predicted PR for the directory and it’s now a PR3! Yes, I haven’t yet acquired the PR but it’s only a matter of time, and while I’m waiting, I’ll submit the directory to others directories so I can get more backlinks, which will then turn out into an higher PR.

I’ve been able to sell 9 featured links at the price of 2$ (now 2.37$ because of the paypal fees). There’s 16 left out of the 25 and I’m pretty sure they will sell out as soon as I get my PR. Then, I’ll start increasing the featured links price by doubling the initial amount each 25 links.

Ex.
25 links @ 2$
25 links @ 4$
25 links @ 8$
25 links @ 16$
25 links @ 32$
25 links @ 64$ -> Yea, it will most likely not happen.

I think that after the 100 first link I’ll keep a fixed price, maybe 15$. At that moment I should be over the 1500 submissions which be quite cool. All the money I’m earning from this will serve to pay for the servers (until I reach the amount I had to pay for domain names and server rental) then it’ll all go into my pocket. This money will be used to buy myself a new computer.

Using AJAX coding, the only one who can trigger the request to the server are the users, a bot wouldn’t be able to read any content except the one that’s appearing on the front page.

Is this going to kill my chances of getting spidered?
Actually yes. As the top navigation (the ­­Older and Newer links) are also programmed to trigger javascript, the spider cannot go anywhere. When it reads a # link, it just stays on the same page, no new content for the bot to read.

The thing though is that the spider can still view your list of latest post which are static. When they go to theses pages, nothing is in AJAX format, the links are all going to another post so it’s fine. The only impact the slider has is it removes a bit of power from your front page.

To set it up, I had to find a rss aggregator in order to get the rss feeds to show up on my page. OzPolitics WordPress plugin: aggregated blog feeds did this for me. It’s well written but I think that the way you show the rss feeds themselves is not that well designed. But anyway, I did with what I have. I wrote a small CSS code in order for the feeds to be beside each others and not all lined up, then changed the CSS code for the list so it shows squares instead of dots. Nothing complicated, it just takes time. + I had to do it on 4 blogs.

Well, I’m happy it’s done. I’ll wait for the results and see if there’s place for improvement.

For now, let’s have some fun.

I know that search engines loves when pages are well optimized and looking at my blog @ http://www.excitris.com, I saw how unoptimized it was even though it looked fine.

I went to the page source and looked at the page size: almost 40.0 KB of text. I started writing a “cloaker” script which would make smaller pages for search engine by removing the header and some navigation content which brought me to 21.5 KB of text. What a great bandwidth saving and page optimization at the same time. I’m now working on the part where it removes the comments. My test show that by removing the comments, I can go to a pagesize of 18.2 KB. Removing the ads: 16.7 KB.

The pages sure look ugly, but search engines spiders don’t care. They want the actual content, not the HTML formatting (except maybe the title, h1, h2 and such). From 40.0 KB I went to 16.7 KB, saving 58.3% in bandwidth. This will also assure me to get better ranking in search engines as the stuff their spider sees is near the top.

I’ll make the script available as soon as there aren’t anymore bugs when the page convert. So stay tuned.

I’ve been studying all day yesterday and even though there’s some stuff I still don’t understand, I feel confident enough to take the exam at 14:00 today. I “might” report later on today.

As I’ve already mentioned the lot of work that is waiting for me after this exam, I’ve realized there’s other stuff that needs to be done. I have a directory called Node Ultra where I list websites from people that submit there. I haven’t really taken the time to check each website individually to make sure the content is good or not and if it’s listed in the right category. I’ll have to do that, but before, I also need to restructure the database itself because there’s a lack of proper categories.

Then I’ll modify the PHPLD script so it gives better ranking for those who’ll reciprocal link the directory. Here’s why: by linking to my directory, it’s giving me better placement in search engines, thus giving better chances for those who reciprocated the links to get found. By the way, I’ll keep featured link first as those people pay for their place. I’ll try to improve the script so it really stand out from the rest of the directories already available (and using the same script).

When this will be done, I’ll finally be able to review each and every website submitted to my directory so far. There’s already about 400 links there so it will take me a bit of time especially if I take ~5 min per website which would make 33.3 hours of work.

As Node Ultra will keep growing, I hope it’ll gain some “respect” and also some PageRank which would help to get the number of daily submission to increase by a lot.

Here’s how the paying is working: For the moment, to give me momentum, I’ve started with a 2$ price for each featured website. When 25 websites have been registered, the price increase to 4$. Then 8$, then 16$, and then we’ll see. I might go for 32$ or 29.95 $ as everyone’s doing (haha, let’s feel we’re part of the group) and occassionally I’ll be throwing out some 5$/featured some days. But this is all if the directory keeps growing and especially if it’s getting good ranking. But I’m sure it will.

Later on today I’ll be working this out and I’ll keep you guys updated about it.

Don’t forget to grab yourself a featured link there before the price starts to increase, http://www.nodeultra.com