Steve Fortuna

One thing a lot of search engine marketers are always pushing for is increased visibility in the search engine result page (SERP).  Increased visibility traditionally comes from simply increasing your rank.  Or if you’re already at the top site links help a lot.

I’ve started to see results on the SERP including stars by the result.  I looked into it and quickly discovered this happens when including microformats (hReview-aggregate) on pages that display a rating from users.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

You can see this by going to page two of this search: ati radeon review or by following this link.

I’m not sure when Google start including these stars, but I’ve seen them show up quickly after adding them to your site.

You can find more details on the microformats.org site here: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-aggregate.

It’s pretty easy to implement these on your site if you’re familiar with coding.  Essentially you want to generate this output based on ratings.

<div>
<span>
<span>Item title</span>
</span>
<div>
<span id=”file_rating”>
This is where you want clickable stars where people can rate, and the rating is shown. Example:
<img src=”/images/star.png” id=”rate_1″ alt=”1.00″ /> <img src=”/images/star.png” id=”rate_2″ alt=”2.00″ /> <img src=”/images/star.png” id=”rate_3″ alt=”3.00″ /> <img src=”/images/star.png” id=”rate_4″ alt=”4.00″ /> <img src=”/images/star_half.png” id=”rate_5″ alt=”5.00″ />
</span>
</div>
<span>
<span>
Average rating here (Example 4.61)
</span>
</span> based on
<span>Total number of votes (Example 33)</span> votes.
</div>

Forgive the lack of any indentations, haven’t bothered figuring out a good way to put code in posts yet in wordpress.  Anyways, I hope this helps drive more clicks to your site.

Enjoy!

I just recently picked up fortuna.net. I had my eyes on my family name domains for a while now, and it’s great to finally be able to acquire one.

The nature of domains is that there is a limited supply for whatever demand there is – often compared to “internet real estate”.   I am very excited to finally own this domain.

I ran into a few issues lately with Debian 6 on VPS.net, neosurge.com, and pretty much any onApp platform.

These are all Xen based deployments, and the issue lies in the fact that grub can’t find your disk. This causes all apt-get upgrades to fail when dealing with the kernel or anything that works with grub.

Here is the output of apt-get upgrade that is relevant to this issue:
Setting up linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem (2.6.32-31) ...
Running depmod.
Running update-initramfs.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem
Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d.
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/xvda1.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/xvda1. Check your device.map.
run-parts: /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub exited with return code 1
Failed to process /etc/kernel/postinst.d at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem.postinst line 799, <STDIN> line 2.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
configured to not write apport reports
Errors were encountered while processing:
linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Because Xen manages your kernel on a level that is not visible to the VPS or instance you’re working in, you can just easily remove grub:

apt-get remove grub-legacy grub-common

Simple as that. Now you will be able to manage your system as you normally would, and not worry about constant errors while using apt-get.

I generally use hdparm to test the speed of disks in Linux. The command I use is:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

This quickly tests the throughput, but I thought I’d share another method which actually puts more strain on the disk.

Simply using dd you can run this command to see the write speed:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=2048

and then this command to check the read speed:

dd if=test of=/dev/null bs=1048576

What this does is write 2G of zeros to a file in the first command, and then reads that file in the second command.

Pretty basic, simple, yet useful.

One issue many web masters run into is the problem of having multiple URLs where you can access the homepage of your site.

For example, there are some sites you can access by going to: http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com, and http://www.domain.com/index.php

In a previous post I talked about either forcing www or no www for your domain. In this post I will show you how to check to see if /index.php is requested, and how to remove it.

The solution is a rather simple .htaccess rule:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Let me break down the lines for you. The first line simply turns on the RewriteEngine. Don’t include this line if RewriteEngine On is already present in your .htaccess file.

The second line checks the HTTP REQUEST for index.php. And the third line redirects the user to the domain, without the /index.php.

This is important as well. You will want to check your website to see if you link to the domain.com/index.php version of your website anywhere. If you do, you will want to change it to link to the domain.com/ version instead.

I’ve recently seen a few websites where the homepage.com is PR6, but the homepage.com/index.php is PR4. This causes Google to treat the pages as two separate pages, and can hurt you in rankings. Don’t let this happen to you!