MainorArchivePage tag in Blogger

The tag in blogger will cause text within that tag to only show on your home page or archive pages. (For sites published to your own hosting via ftp). We have tweaked some of our blogs to show a permalink link. The problem was that if someone follows a permalink back to your blog, the text withing the MainorArchivePage tag will not show.

If you had ads within this tag, then they will not show on permalinked pages. In some cases, this can negatively impact your revenue.

If you simply move the ending MainorArchivePage tag to just below the beginning MainorArchivePage tag, then everything in your main sidebar will show on all pages, not just main or archive pages.

The tag can be useful in cutting down the size of the sidebar when you have a number of ads, links and other info in your sidebar. With the tag, you can shorten the sidebar for pages such as permalink pages that will naturally be much shorter than a main or archive page.

A tip on the Initial setup of Blogger using FTP

You can publish your blogger blog using FTP so that the files reside on your server. There are a number of reasons you might want to do this including adding more spider food to your site.

I was getting a little frustrated with setting up a new blog. We were using the same exact hosting we were using for another blog that was working perfectly. All of the settings on the blogger publish page were identical as well as the way we set up the FTP accounts. However, when we would try to view the blog, we were getting a 'page not found' error.

The answer was incredibly simple. All you need to do is publish one post. If you don't publish at least one post, no blog index file is created...

Changing hosting for an FTP based Blogger Blog

We decided to change hosting companies. One of the sites we were migrating had an FTP based blogger blog (ie. blogger was hosted on our site).

There isn't a whole lot of information about how to do this, but it turned out to be fairly simple.

1. Before you change the DNS away from the old host, make sure you have backed up the site and make a seperate backup of the blog folder on your old host. (you might also want to back up your access logs while you are at it). This can usually be done by FTP'ing into your old host.
2. Set things up on your new host. i.e. create the necessary ftp accounts, create the folder on the new host for the blog etc. Also take note of the server paths such as /var/www/yoursite where your site lives on the server or VPS.
3. If you have a high traffic blog, you probably want to post a notice in the header that you will be doing maintenance over a specific time period. DNS propagation can take anywhere from 15 minutes to almost 24 hours or more. You might also want to turn off comments temporarily so that you don't end up with comments going to the old host (and oblivion) during the DNS propagation period.
4. If your new host allows you to pre-publish prior to propagation, then you can publish the blog folder to the new host via FTP. NOTE - We aren't totally sure if this is necessary or if blogger would re-create all of the postings. It appears that you need to copy all of the files in the blog folder and sub folders to the new host. We didn't test it without ftp'ing the downloaded blog folder contents.
5. When you are ready, go to your registrar and point the domain to the DNS of your new host. You will need to keep an eye on when the DNS propagates for you. Running tracert www.yoursite.com from a command prompt will tell you when you are pointing to the new host and eliminate the issue of caching in your browser.
6. If you could not publish the blog folder prior to propagation, then ftp it to the appropriate folder on the new host now.
7. Go into the publish settings and set the parameters to match the new host's requirements.
8. You will need to republish your blog.
9. Test your blog to make sure that all of the recent posts are available along with comments. If you temporarily turned comments off, you might want to re-enable them at this point as well as taking any 'down for maintenance' messages off the blog.

We'll be migrating a few other sites where the blogs are hosted on our space so we'll fill in a few details. Your mileage may vary with this so please be sure to back up your site and blog thoroughly.

Dell offering XP again

It appears that Dell is once again offering XP to purchasers of new Dell Systems.

The problems with Vista are

• It demands a lot from the hardware (ie upgrades to Vista might be risky). Performance on a new machine might be lower than you expected.
• A lot of older software will not run on Vista. This hits smaller businesses hard in that they often run at least one or two unique applications. I still see business running dos based Foxpro applications for their enterprise management.

According to the techdirt article, Dell is now steering people away from Vista (although that has not been confirmed.)

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070705/123212.shtml

Earthlink wireless bye, Spring Broadband hello

The earthlink wireless was still down. I'm not sure what the problem really was but the constant downtime and resulting support calls was getting tiring.

I wandered over to our local friendly RadioShack. They had a Sierra Aircard for about $80 after rebate. The nice thing was that they had a special on the unlimited broadband service for about $60/month with a 2 year contract with Sprint. The cheaper, limited plan only offered 40 MB per month.

With all of the software bloat today, it appeared prudent to take the $60 plan. That is $40 more a month than I was paying. However, I will now have a lot more flexibility with my laptop. Also, it could pay for itself on trips. The average hotel charges about $10 per day for broadband internet. If you 'bring your own" cellular, you can avoid that charge. Sprint's coverage map shows that the coverage is extremely good. However, if you visit an out of the way location, you might not have service.

The card itself is USB based. If your USB slots are vertical, you should use the 'docking station'. So far, the card has been working great. Supposedly, if you are in an area where the data service is unavailable, the card will try to use the voice systems it finds.

We'll post more updates on this as we put it through it's paces. So far though, so good.

Earthlink Wireless - AAAArrrrrghhhh!!!

I've had earthlink wireless with a Sierra aircard for my laptop for a couple of years. About 2 years ago I went through tech support hell when the card would not work. Finally I got to someone in corporate and they got it working.

Well, it's now deja vue all over again.. I was on the road about a month ago and was getting a 'the remote computer did not respond' when trying to connect. I spent about 45 minutes with their tech support and had to call back the next day. Supposedly Verizon had 'unprovisioned' the card. A couple hours later, it was working.

About a week ago, I was on the road again and got the same error. Called tech support, and after 45 minutes, they said Verizon had unprovisioned it and they would fix it.

Well, here we are again.. "The remote computer did not respond".. I'm 20 minutes into this call and the issue is still not resolved.

I really wish I'd saved the corporate troubleshooting contact info. For the amount of billable hours I'm losing, I should probably just switch to the $75/month plan from verizon... (I'm past the 2 year contract stage).

I guess the moral of the story is that, if you purchase an aircard for occasional use while travelling, make sure you test it occassionally especially prior to travel..