Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

SEO: Best day and time to write new articles and tweet to get more blog reads – Social Network Timing

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

what-is-best-time-to-write-articles-to-increase-your-blog-traffic

I'm trying to regularly blog – as this gives me a roadmap what I'm into and how I spent my time. When have free time,  I blog almost daily except on weekends (as in weekends I'm trying to stay away from computers). So if you want to attract more readers to your blog the interesting question arises
 

What time is best to hit publish on your posts?

writing-in-the-mogning-on-the-internet-timing-morning-is-best-for-your-posts
Now there are different angles from where you can extract conclusions on best timing to blog post.One major thing to consider always when posting is that highest percentage of users read blogs in the morning with their morning coffee. Here are some more facts on when web content is more red:

  • 70% of users say they read blogs in the morning
  • More men read blogs at night than woman
  • Mondays are the highest traffic days for avarage blogs
  • 11 a.m. is normally the highest traffic hour for blogs
  • Usually most comments are put on Saturdays
  • Blogs with more than one post a day has higher chance of inbound links and usually get more unique visitors

As my blog is more technical oriented most of my visitors are men and therefore posting my blogs at night doesn't interfere much with my readers.
However, I've noticed that for me personally posting in time interval from 13:00 to 17:00 influence positively the amount of unique visitors the blog gets.

According to research done by Social Fresh – Thursday is the best day to publish an article if you want to get more Social SharesBest-Day-to-Blog-to-get-more-shares-in-social-networks

As a rule of thumb Thursday wins 10% more shares than all other days. In fact, 31% of the top 100 social share days in 2011 fell on Thursday.
My logical explanation on this phenomenon is that people tend to be more and more bored from their work and try to entertain more and more as the week progresses.

To get more attention on what I'm writting I use a bit of social networking but I prefer using only a micro blogging social networking.  I use Twitter to share what I'm into. When I write a new article on my blog I tweet its title with a link to my article, because this drives people attention to what I have to say.

In overall I am skeptical about social siting like Facebook and MySpace because it has negative impact on how people use their time and especially negative on youngsters Other reason why I don't like Friends Networks is because sharing what you have to say on sites like FB, Google+ or "The Russian Facebook" –  Vkontekte VK.com are not respecting privacy of your data.

 

You write free fresh content for their website for free and you get nothing!

 

Moreover by daily posting latest buzz you read / watched on Facebook etc. or simply saying what's happening with you, where you're situated now etc., you slowly get addicted to posting – yes for good or bad people tend to be maniacal).

By placing all of your pesronal or impersonal stuff online, you're making these sites better index their sites into Google / Yahoo / Yandex search engines and therefore making them profitable and high ranked websites on the internet and giving out your personal time for Facebook profit? + you loose control over your data (your data is not physically on your side but situated on some remote server, somewhere on the internet).
 

Best avarage time to post on Tweet Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin

best-time-and-day-to-write-new-articles-schedule-content-at-the-right-time-on-social-media-to-get-high-trafficrank

So What is Best Day timing to Post, Pin or Tweet?

Below is an infographic I fond on this blog (visual data is originalcompiled by SurePayRoll) and showing visualized results from some extensive research on the topic.

best-time-to-post-and-tweet-blog-articles-social-media-infographic


Here is most important facts this infographic reveals:


The avarage best time to post tweet and pin your new articles is about 15:00 h
 

  • Best timing to post on Twitter is on Mondays to Thursdays from 13:00 to 15:00 h
  • Best timing to post on facebook is between 13:00 and 16:00 h
  • For Linkedin it is best to place your publish between Tuesdays to Thursdays


Peak times on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin

  • Peak times for use of Facebook is on Wednesdays about 15:00 h
  • Peak times for use of Twitter is from Monday to Thursdays from 9:00  to 15:00 h
  • Linkedin Peak time is from 17:00 to 18:00 h
  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads


Worst time (when users will probably not view your content) on FB, Twitter and Linkedin

  • Weekends before 08:00  and after 20:00 h
  • Everyday after 20:00 and Fridays after 15:00 noon
  • Mondays and Fridays from 22:00 to 06:00 morning

Facts about Google+
 

  • Google+ is the fastest growing demographic social network for people aged 45 to 54
  • Best time to share your posts on Google+ is from 09:00 to 10:00 in the morning
  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads
     

Images generate more traffic and engagement

  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads


I'm aware as every research above info on best time to tweet and post is just a generalization and according to field of information posted suggested time could be different from optiomal time for individual writer, however as a general direction, info is very useful and it gives you some idea.
Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends according to Dan Zarrella’s research. Tweets posted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday had higher CTR (Click Through Rate) than those posted in the rest of the week.

tweet-on-the-weekends-is-better-for-high-click-through-rate

Other best day to tweet other than weekends is mid-week time Wednesday.
Whether your site or blog is using retweet to generate more traffic to website best time to retweet is said to be around 5 pm. CTR is higher

Linux: Compress website images for better responsiveness with Trimage Graphical tool

Tuesday, March 10th, 2020

trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot0

If you run a Website or a Blog with images sooner or later you will end up with in looking for better ways to optimize the SEO of the website. I had a small discussion today with a friend of mine Mitko Ivanov who is working as SEO consultant expert,  we had a small discussion on the good practice of optimizing website pictures to reduce the website opening time. Ingeral part of Website responsiveness is the time the Browser needs to fetch all the page Images. Thus if your site is with multiple images, like this blog here, picture comperssion is definitely something that could make miracles in how website visualize for end user and increase rank in Search Engines. The easiest way to compress images of an amateur website of course is to use external picture compression service such as tinypng.com, this requires no knowledge at any computer technology and you can do it easy, but the problem is it shares your image to the remote website used for conversion and I personally think this is not the best idea.
For WordPress website owners of course there is plenty of plugins such as eWWW Image Optimizer that does realtime reduce of size of picture by chunking out the unnecessery bits.
Alternative to especially for people who have a little bit of technical knowledge is is to use some command line tool as optipng together with some kind of shell for loopfor details see my previous article Optimize PNG images by compressing on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD server to Improve Website overall Performance.
But for Many of Webmaster site owners this solution takes too much time as well many people just don't have even basic command line knowledge / are kinda of scared from the console but need to do image compression in a simple GUI way for those the good news are there is  Graphical cross-platform tool for losslessly optimizing PNG and JPG files for web. Trimage.
To use it it even unexperienced non enthusiast could simply roll out a new Virtual Machine on top of some VM Host machine such as Virtual Box and roll out some kind of Linux distribution via a graphical installer which is mega easy well guided and takes 15-20 minutes time.

Once machine is set-up either the Graphical Distribution tool for page management or via apt you can fetch Trimage. It is now existing in most Linux distributions so, to install it on any deb based distribution Debian / Mint / Ubuntu etc. do the usual:

# apt-get install –yes trimage


trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot1

Once you have it, just move the pictures you want to compress for losslessly optimizing from your website to your Computer with Linux. Trimage GUI on the background will run commands optipng, pngcrush, advpng or jpegoptim, imageoptim and depending on the filetype remove the unnecessery file data that are appended by the program with which image was produced Gimp / Photoshop / Camera software etc. All image files are losslessy compressed on the highest available compression levels, and EXIF and other metadata is removed so you just have to recopy ( upload ) the optimized images back to the website.

trimage-compress-reduce-lossless-encoding-of-pictures-for-seo-linux-screenshot2

That's all folks Enjoy ! 🙂

 

How to reduce blog and other SPAM on Elgg by adding meta name rel=”nofollow, akismet and robots.txt

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

elgg-data-logo
As I'm playing with Elgg – free social network these days, I've been stuck with my newly established elgg based social network gets high amounts of spam via the elgg blog on http://mockateacher.com – my MockATeacher – Student Share Files network

I've researched on how I can reduce the amounts of spam the site gets and I've found few ways for that, let me elaborate on that:

First I've been reading for a while about izap,izap-ecommerce, izap-videos, however my experience with my tests with this ones were not good, thus i won't recommend this plugins to any elgg administrator.
Further on I've installed the elgg Akismet plugin which by the way is very easy to install (just place and unzip the plugin in elgg based website's mod/ directory ).

A quick elgg Akismet configuration is also necessary in order to config go to:

Administration -> Tool Administration -> Akismet [Settings]

All necessary to place in the Akismet [Settings] field is just an akismet, key. I personally have placed my old Akismet obtained key for my wordpress blog installation and therefore I skipped the long and time wasting process of issuing a new API key for Akismet.
Nevertheless if you don't have an Akismet API key already you will have to go Akismet.com and sign up for a new user and a key.
After installing the akismet.

Moving on with the available anti-spam plugins for elgg, I've the antispammer-for-elgg plugin. The installation went smoothly, however I needed a special API key for the plugin which I couldn't issue.
There were some instructions on how to obtain the antispammer-for-elgg API Key in order to start using the plugin by registering first to some forum called stopforumspam.com but even though I've registed in the forum and followed the instructions the forum seems not to allow me to login and therefore I couldn't issue myself an API Key 🙁
The problem is not described on Elgg's website and I do suppose many other elgg enthusiasts have been stucked into the same can't issue antispammer-for-elgg API key problem !

Next I've stubmled upon some very nice suggestions on how to decrease the amount of spam by equipping the elgg based website installation with the following robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /pg/admin/
Disallow: /account/forgotten_password.php
Disallow: /_css
Disallow: /_graphics
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /engine
Disallow: /languages
Disallow: /service
Disallow: /settings
Disallow: /simplecache
Disallow: /vendors

The file needs to be placed in the main directory root of the elgg installation and will instruct:

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask Jeeves and Yandex crawlers not to crawl and index the above list of directories.

I've also red online some interesting suggestions to use the &ltmeta robots rel="nofollow> in order to instruct GoogleBot and the rest of the search engine crawlers not to follow the spam links which appear on spammer user blogs and video links.

To implement the rel="nofollow meta in my elgg installation I used the elgg plugin called Metatag_Manager
Metatag manager is ultra easy to install and is installed via the regular elgg installation procedure by placing and unarchiving in mod/ dir
The plugin is lacking a good documentation as with many of the Elgg plugins so it took me a while until I realize how can I Set it up
Thanksfully finally I found that the Metatag Manager plugin configuration is located in:

Administration -> Site Administration

On the Site Administration page you will notice the Robots and Author empty fields.

Now to instruct elgg to show <meta content="nofollow" rel="nofollow"> to all your elgg based website pages (including the user blogs simply fill in the Robots field:

Robots

nofollow

Press the save button and you're done the rel="nofollow" will appear on every elgg generated page and hopefully your social network search engines pagerank will hop up.

I have to say that by so far Elgg is missing a serious anti-spam protection support and the developers should work in that direction to make this awesome project a bit more usable.
I've also noticed there is also a commercial (paid) plugin for Elgg called PluginLotto which appears to be a promising one but since it costs money and I can't afford the fee I have no observations on it.
It would be nice if somebody could share if it's an usable one and it worths the money.

Placing Google Adsense Ads to wordpress (Integrate adsense to your wordpress blog)

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

I’m experimenting with Google Adsense recently. It’s not such a big deal.
You’re granted a special javascript code from google that is responsible for showing
up ads to your webpage. I was curious how to integrate this in my wordpress blog.
And looked for a plugin to do the job for me. First I tried:

WordPress Advertising Manager
The plugin looked quite promising I tried it right away just to realize it’s not working, e.g. not
showing ads at all! I found a forum post online, 4 months old of a guy who complaint about the same problem.
Therefore I decided to completely abandon my attempts with WordPress Advertising Manager
I tried another one called:

WordPress Easy Adsense
Luckily this plugin worked like a charm all I did was downloading the plugin placing it in
wp-content/plugins/ as usual and unzipping the archive.
Then I had to simply go and configure the plugin from
Settings -> Easy AdSense
and paste there my Google Adsense code. After that all worked like a charm.
Big thanks to the creater of this wonderful plugin make sure you check his Unreal Blog

StatusNet – Start your own hosted microblogging twitter like social network on Debian GNU / Linux

Monday, July 14th, 2014

build-your-own-microblogging-service-like-twitter-on-debian-linux-Status.net-logo
I like experimenting with free and open source projects providing social networking capabilities like twitter and facebook. Historically I have run my own social network with Elgg – Open Source Social Network Engine. I had a very positive impression from Elgg as a social engine as, there are plenty of plugins and one can use Elgg to run free alternative to very basic equivalent of facebook, problem with Elgg I had however is if is not all the time monitored it quickly fills up with spam and besides that I found it to be still buggy and not easy to update.
The other social network free software I heard of isBuddyPress which I recently installed with Multisite (MuSite) enabled.

Since BuddyPress is WordPress based and it supports all the nice wordpress plugins, my impression is social networking based on wordpress behaves much more stable and since there is Akismet for WordPress, the amount of spammer registrations is much lower than with Elgg.

Recently I started blogging much more actively and I realized everyday I learn and read too much interesting articles and I don't log them anywhere and thought I need a way besides twitter to keep flashy notes of what I'm doing reading, learning in a short notes. I don't want to use Twitter on purpose, because I don't want to improve twitter's site SEO with adding my own stuff on their website but I want to keep my notes on my own local hosted server.

As I didn't wanted to loose time with Complexity of Elgg anymore and wanted to try to something new and I know the open source microblogging social network (Twitter Equivalent) – identi.ca runs StatusNet – Free and Open Source Social software. StatusNet is well known under the motto of "Decentralized Twitter"

screenshot-status-net-microblogging-twitter-like-free-software-network

I took the time to grab it and install it to my home brew machine www.pc-freak.net. If you haven't seen StatusNet so far – you can check out demo of my installation here – registration is not freely opened because, i don't want spammers to break in, however if you want to give a try drop me a mail or comment below and I will open access for you ..

There is no native statusnet package for Debian Linux (as I'm running Debian) so to install it, I've grabbed statusnet.

To install StatusNet, everything was pretty straight forward and literally following instructionsf rom INSTALL file, i.e.:

# status.example.com maps to /var/www/status/
cd /var/www/status/
wget http://status.net/statusnet-0.9.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf statusnet-0.9.6.tar.gz --strip-components=1
rm statusnet-0.9.6.tar.gz
cd ..
chgrp www-data status/
chmod g+w status/
cd status/
chmod a+w avatar/ background/ file/

mysqladmin -u "root" -p "sql-root-password" create statusnet
mysql -u root -p
GRANT ALL on statusnet.* TO 'statusnetuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'statusnet-secret-password';

To Change default behaviour of URls to be more SEO friendly and not to show .php in URL (e.g. add so called fancy URLs – described in INSTALL):

cp htaccess.sample .htaccess


Then had to configure a VirtualHost under a subdomain http://statusnet.yourdomain.com/install.php or you can alternatively install and access it in browser via http://your-domain.com/status/install.php

An important note to open here is you have to set the URLs via which status.net will be accessed further before proceeding with the install, if you will be using HTTPS here is time to configure it and test it before proceeding with install …  Just be warned that if you don't set the URLs properly now and try to modify them further you will get a lot of issues hard to solve which will cost you a lot of time and nervee ..

If you want to enable twitter bridging in Statusnet you will need to get Twitter consumer and secret keys, to get that you have to create new application on https://dev.twitter.com/apps afterwards you will be taken to a page containing Consumer Key & Consumer Secret string.
StatusNet installation will auto generate config.php, you can further edit it manually with text editor. Content of my current statusnet config.php is here.

Most important options to change are:

$config['daemon']['user'] = 'www-data';
$config['daemon']['group'] = 'www-data';

www-data is user with which Apache is running by default on Debian Linux.

$config['site']['profile'] = 'private';

By default Status.Net will be set to run as private – e.g. it will be fitted for priv. use – messages posted will not publicly be visible. Here the possible options to choose between are:

$config['site']['profile'] = 'private';
$config['site']['profile'] = 'community';
$config['site']['profile'] = 'singleuser';
$config['site']['profile'] = 'public';

singleuser is pretty self explanatory, setting public option will open registration for any user on the internet – probably your network will quickly be filled with spam – so beware with this option. community will make statusnet publicly visible but, registration will only possible via use creation / invitation to join the network from admin.

vi /var/www/status/config.php
$config['site']['fancy'] = true;

Then to enable twitter to statusnet bridge add to config.php

vi /var/www/status/config.php

addPlugin('TwitterBridge');
$config['twitter']['enabled'] = true;
$config['twitterimport']['enabled'] = true;
$config['avatar']['path'] = '/avatar';
$config['twitter']['consumer_key'] = 'XXXXXXXX';
$config['twitter']['consumer_secret'] = 'XXXXXXXX';
# disable sharing location by default
$config['location']['sharedefault'] = 'false';

Notice, I decided to disable statusnet sharedefault folder, because i don't have a lot of free space to provide to users. If you want to let users be allowed to share files (you the space for that), you might want to set a maximum quote of uploaded files (to prevent your webserver from being DoSed – for example by too many huge uploads), here is some reasonable settings:
 

$config['attachments']['file_quota'] = 7000000;
$config['attachments']['thumb_width'] = 400;
$config['attachments']['thumb_height'] = 300;

 

If you want to get the best out of performance of your new statusnet microblogging service, after each modification of config.php be sure to run:

 

php scripts/checkschema.php

Running checkschema.php is also useful, to check whether adding new plugins to check whether plugin will not throw an error.

Here is some extra useful config.php plugins to enable:
 

addPlugin('Gravatar', array());
#addPlugin('Textile');
addPlugin('InfiniteScroll');
addPlugin('Realtime');
addPlugin('Blog');
addPlugin('SiteNoticeInSidebar');
addPlugin('WikiHashtags');
addPlugin('SubMirror');
addPlugin('LinkPreview');
addPlugin('Blacklist');


If you expect to have quickly growing base of users it is recommended to also check out whether your MySQL is tuned with mysqltuner and optimize it for performance

Another useful think you would like to do is to increased the number of Statusnet avatars in the 'following' – 'followers' – 'groups' sections on my profile page by editing

lib/groupminilist.php

and

lib/profileminilist.php

line 36 in both files.
To get the full list of possible variables that can be set in config.php run in terminal:

 php scripts/setconfig.php -a

If you happen to encounter some oddities and issues with StatusNet after installation, this is most likely to some PHP hardering on compile time or some PHP.ini functions disabled for security or some missing component to install which is described as a prerequirement in statusnet INSTALL file

to debug the issues enable statusnet logging by adding in config.php

$config['site']['logdebug'] = true;
$config['site']['logfile'] = '/var/log/statusnet.log';

By default logs produced will be quite verbose and there will be plenty of information you will probably not need and will lead to a lot of "noise", to get around this, there is the LogFilter Plugin for some reasonable logging use in config.php:

addPlugin('LogFilter', array( 'priority' => array(LOG_ERR => true,
LOG_INFO => true,
LOG_DEBUG => false),
'regex' => array('/About to push/i' => false,
'/twitter/i' => false,
'/Successfully handled item/i' => false)
));

If you want tokeep log of statusnet it is a good idea to rorate logs periodically to keep them from growing too big, to do this create in /etc/logrotate.d new files /etc/logrotate.d/statusnet with following content:

/var/log/statusnet/*.log {
daily
missingok
rotate 7
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
create 770 www-data www-data
sharedscripts
postrotate
/path/to/statusnet/scripts/stopdaemons.sh > /dev/null
/path/to/statusnet/scripts/startdaemons.sh > /dev/null
endscript
}

You will probably want to to add new Links, next to StatusNet main navigation links for logged in users, this is possible by adding new line to

lib/primarynav.php

and

lib/secondarynav.php

You will have to add a PHP context like:

 $this->action->menuItem('https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/',
                              _m('MENU','Pc-Freak.Net Blog'),
                              _('A pC Freak Blog'),
                              false,
                              'nav_pcfreak');

Once you're done with installation, make sure you change permissions or move install.php from /var/www/status, otherwise someone might overwrite your config.php and mess your installation …

chmod 000 /var/www/status/install.php There is plenty of other things to do with StatusNet (Support for communication with Jabber XMPP protocol, notification via SMS etc. There are also some plugins to add more statusnet functionality.


Enjoy micro blogging ! 🙂

Improve Websites SEO: Optimize images to Increase website loading performance on Linux server – Image Compress tools

Friday, December 5th, 2014

Optimize-website-images-pictures-to-Increase-website-loading-performance-on-Linux-server_Image_Compress_tools-Improve-Websites_SEO
Part of our daily life as Web hosting system adminstrators is to constantly strive to better utilize our Linux / Windows hosting servers hardware.
Therefore it is our constant task to look for new better ways to optimize our Apache Sites and Webservers in order to return served application content light fast to keep the Boss and customers happy 🙂

There are things to tune up for better server performance and better CPU / memory utilization on both server Application server side as well as the website programming code backend, html and pictures / images

Thus it is critically important to not only keep the Webserver / PHP engine optimized but keep hosted sites  stored images and source code clean and efficient.

We as admins usually couldn't directly interfere with clearning the source code and often we have to host a crappy written sites with picture upload forms with un-optimized Image files that was  produced on old Photo Cameras, "Ancient" Mobile Mobiles, Win XP MS Paint, various versions Photoshop, Gimp etc.).

It is a well known fact that a big part from a Website User Experience is how fast the user loads a page, thus if HTML / CSS loaded images loads slow has a negative impact on user look & feel about website

Therefore by optimizing the size of hosted sites Images, you Save Network bandwidth and in some cases when Large Gallery sites HDD disk space.

On Linux, there are already a many command line tools to inspect and optimize (compress) the size of PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNM, Tiff Images, most famous ones are:

  • optipng – PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.
  • jpegoptim –   lossless JPEG optimization (based on optimizing the Huffman tables) and "lossy" optimization based on setting a maximum quality factor.
  • pngcrush – Recommended tool to use by Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo Yslow Developer)
  • jpegtran – Recommended to use by Google 
  • gifsicle –  command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations. 

It is hence useful to first run manually availale Linux image optimization tools (to get an idea what they do) and later automate them to run as scripts to optimize server stored images size and make pictures load faster on websites and thus improve End Users Experience and speed up Image content delivery to GoogleBot / YahooBot / Bing Crawlers which will make Search Engines to position server hosted sites better (more SEO Friendly).

 

  • How much percents of  space (Mega / Gigabytes ) Pictures compress can save you?

If you run it on 500MB image directory, you can probably save about 20 to 50MB of size, so don't expect extraordinary file reduce, however 5% to 10% reduce in size is not bad too. If you host 100 sites each with half gigas of data this would mean saving of 5GB of data and some 5GB from backups 🙂 At extraordinary cases you can expect 20% to 30% of storage reduce. For even better image compression you can try out GIMP's – Save for Web option.
 

  • Installing jpegtran, optpng, jpegoptim, pngcrush gifsicle on Debian / Ubuntu (deb based) Linux
     

apt-get install –yes libjpeg-progs optipng jpegoptim pngcrush gifsicle

 

  • Installing  jpegtran, optpng, jpegoptim, pngcrush, gifsicle on Fedora / CentOS / RHEL (RPM based distros)
     

yum -y install pngcrush libjpeg-turbo-utils opt-jpg opt-png opt-gif


gifsicle is not availale by default on Redhacks 🙂 but there is a RPM package for fedora from http://pkgs.repoforge.org/gifsicle/

 

Some examples of running image compression on GNU / Linux

  • optipng and jpegoptim optimize for all files in directory
     

cd /home/sites/

find . -iname '*.png' -print0 | xargs -0 optipng -o7 -preserve
find . -iname '*.jpg' -print0 |
 xargs -0 jpegoptim –max=90 –strip-all –preserve –totals


In jpegoptim command, the option –strip-all will strip any metadata including Exif data from images. For websites JPEG metadata is usually not needed, so usually its ok to strip them.

Above jpegoptim example will decrease slightly JPEG image quality to 90%. quality level of 90 is still high enough and website visitors are unlikely to spot any visible quality reduction / defects in the image.

 

  • pngcrush all files in a directory example
     

cd /home/sites/

for png in `find $IMG_DIR -iname "*.png"`; do
    echo "crushing $png …"
        pngcrush -rem alla -reduce -brute "$png" temp.png

 

    # preserve original on error
    if [ $? = 0 ]; then
        mv -f temp.png $png
        else
        rm temp.png
        fi
done

  • Run jpegtran on sites directory
     

find /home/sites -name "*.jpg" -type f -exec jpegtran -copy none -optimize -outfile {} {} ;

 

  • Set a script to compress / reduce size of Sites Images


Here is a basic optimize_images.sh which I used earlier before and was reducing the overall images size just 5 to 10%, then I found the much improved version of optimize images shell script  (useful to  clear up EXIF picture data / And Comments from JPG / PNG files). The script execution could take very long time on large image directories and thus could cause a high HDD disk I/O, however if ran once a week at night time its not such a big deal. 

To set it to run on your server as a cronjob:
 

cd /usr/sbin/
wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/bshscr/optimize_images2.sh
crontab -u root -e 


Sample cron job to run once a month on 10th and 27th in 3 o'clock AM:
 

 00 3 10,27 * * /usr/sbin/optimize_images2.sh 2>&1 >/dev/null


Also if you need to further optimize million of tiny sized PNG files Yahoo Smush.it service could be helpful. For compression maniacs its worthy to check out also TinyPNG Service (however be awre that this service compresses files with significant quality loss) making picture quality visibly deteriorated.

Besides optimizing server stored Pictures, here are some other stuff that helps in increasing server utilization / lower webpages loading time.

Starting up with the installation (when site is to use Apache + PHP) for its backend, the first thing to on the freshlyinstalled Linux server is to implement the following list of Apache common Timeout variables that help better scale the webserver for the CMS-es hosted, enable Webserver caching with (mod_deflate), enable eAccelerator tune PHP common php variable etc.

Other thing  I sometimes use to speed-up performance of Apache child responce time up to 20-30  is to Include into Virtualhost / httpd.conf Apache configuration any htacces mod_rewrite rules.

On too heavily loaded sites On-line stores / Large Company website portals with more than 60 000 – 100 000 unique IP visitors a day it is useful tip to disable completely Apache logging in access.log / error.log.

Often when old architecture websites are moved from older Linux OS version to a newer one with newer versions of Apache / PHP often sites are working without major code rework, but use many functions which are already obsolete and thus many WARNING messages crap is logged into php_error.log / error.log. Thus to save disk space and decrease hard disk I/O operations it is good to Disable PHP Notices and Warnings messages
 

How to fix / Resolve WordPress Blog /comments/feed/ redirect loop

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

I have recently figured out that accessing https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/comments/feed/ would end up in a Redirect Loop I’m using feedburner to manage my blog feeds so I assume this redirect loop is probably caused by the use of feedburner

Since this kind of redirect loop is definitely not professional and has a negative influence on search engine indexing (the SEO), I have playeda bit until I finally found a way to resolve the /comments/feed/ redirect loop.
In order to resolve the redirect loop issue it appeared to be really easy.

To fix the issue Navigate to:

Tools -> Redirection

Therein add a Source URL to redirect to a Target URL:
For instance:

Source URL: https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/comments/feed/

Target URL: https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/feed/

Press the Add Redirection button to confirm the redirection.
That’s all your problems with feeds redirect loop while the /comments/feed/ url is accessed should be resolved.

Redirect http URL folder to https e.g. redirect (http:// to https://) with mod_rewrite – redirect port 80 to port 443 Rewrite rule

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

There is a quick way to achieve a a full url redirect from a normal unencrypted HTTP request to a SSL crypted HTTPS

This is achieved through mod_rewrite using the RedirectMatch directive.

For instance let’s say we’d like to redirect https://www.pc-freak.net/blog to https://www.pc-freak.net/blog.
We simply put in our .htacess file the following rule:

Redirect permanent /blog https://www.cadiabank.com/login

Of course this rule assumes that the current working directory where the .htacess file is stored is the main domain directory e.g. / .
However this kind of redirect is a way inflexible so for more complex redirect, you might want to take a look at mod rewrite’s RedirectMatch directive.

For instance if you inted to redirect all urls (https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/something/asdf/etc.) which as you see includes the string blog/somestring/asdf/etc. to (https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/something/asdf/etc then you might use some htaccess RedirectMatch rule like:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/(.*)$ https://www.pc-freak.net.net$1
or
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/(.*)$ https://www.pc-freak.net.net/$1

Hopefully your redirect from the http protocol to https protocol with mod_rewrite rule should be completed.
Also consider that the Redirect directive which by the way is an Apache directive should be faster to process requests, so everywhere you can I recommend using instead of RedirectMatch which calls the external Apache mod_rewrite and will probably be times slower.

Color Trick Microsoft and Google use to keep their users loyal and happy unwalfully

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Color mind influence has been longly researched. It is researched and there are some findingings on how we people react on colors. This researches are not much known and most of them are not put on the internet (??) One model claiming to have explained how colors influence is called HBDIHerrmann Brain Dominance Instruments.

In the picture beginning of this post, I have presented a quick "Personal Profile" of HBDI on how one think in order to determine in "which colors" one tends to think more ___

In short HBDI model claims to explain how people think in another model.
My personal view of it is it is like most science nowdays more based on faith than on a clearly conducted scientific research and facts. We know pretty well many people tried to explain how brain operates and many people give models to explain it however none of the models could grasp in completeness the complexity of human brain. Hence Businessman people who use this model in their daily life and they push it to us has put the model in action not that they know it is working but rather they believe it does .., Saying this few words as introduction I will contninue onwards to explain you about HBDI as in the business world it is considered as a "Strategic Asset" for a company success. Hence the use of richest companies of the model has a serious impact on us the common people and unknowing (uninformed) computer users.

Some of the companies who integrated the HBDI to their models we all know are of course not strangely Microsoft and Google
;;;

Below I present you a picture showing the HBDI The Whole Brain Model |||

HBDI The whole brain model

Next I show you Microsoft Windows OS worldly "infamous" flag |||

Microsoft Windows OS Flag

You can see for yourself the basic color from HBDI WHOLE brain model are integrated in the Microsoft flag, only the order of colors present and the color gamma is different;;;;

The basic colors in HBDI model to explain how human brain works is separated in 4 segments as you can see from above screenshot. There are a number of tests one can do to determine what is his exact HBDI profile, and in abstract terms in which kind of colors he prefers to think.

There are a whole "army" of people involved into this sect like philosophy (I call it philosophy as surely every model that tries to explain everything is doomed to fail it is the nature in which God created the universe so complex and he put us be part of it and not controllers of it that any Universal model trying to explain it has never succeeded so far. The HBDI has some fruits for the only reason it is believed to work well by the people with money.

As you see in the colors HBDI claims there are 4 segments corresponding to four basic colors

  • BLUE
  • YELLOW
  • GREEN
  • RED

Each of the colors is an indicator on how the person tends to think the BLUE people as HBDI practicioners (believers) calls them are —

Analytical, Fact Based, Logal, Quantitative

The YELLOW oriented people are claimed to be —

Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesizing

The GREEN ones in model terms are interested in —

Organizing, Sequentiality, Planning, Detailizing facts

Finally the RED Ones are said to be —

Interpersonal, Feeling based, Kinesthetic, Emotional

Now as you can understand this model though it looks like promising is based on a philosophy which rejects the existing of spirit realm God Angels or good or evil. It claims everything we're are or we want to be can be achieved following the HBDI to develop your own brain.

This model as every human made model however does reject the fact that besides internal factors and brains we're put into external environment most of which we cannot control and therefore even if we try our best to have certain goals and complete them the external uncontrolled facts can be a reason to stop us to complete our goals.

Now back to my point, that Google, Microsoft and probably many other products and physical goods are heavily using the HBDI color scheme ;;;
Here is the Google Inc. Logo the color trait of HBDI is there:

Google Search Engine Logo and HBDI 4 colors embedded

For those doubting that Google Inc. and Microsoft Inc. are along the false believers of HBDI color scheme brain ideology I present below the Logo of Google Web Browser =- Google Chrome

Google Web Chrome Browser Logo 4 colors HBDI microsoft flag

It is evident 4 colors used as a main ones in the HBDI tool are present in Google Chrome just like in Microsoft Windows logo flag, the only difference is in the order of colors.
Also it is interesting the name Chrome that Google Chrome took is most likely taken from Aldous Huxley's – Brave New World (A book depicting a short future highly conditioned society) , the book story line goes around a society programmed to do the things they do.

I assume it is very likely that Google's founders Sergey Brin or some of their subordinate working for Google are very much into the idea of conditioning people just like in the book and this is most likely the reason they choose the Chrome as a title for Google's browser ,,,

The 4 Colors from HBDI yellow, green, blue, red are embedded also in the google .ico file (the little icon showing in browser URL bar), below is a screenshot of a tab where google is opened showing the .ico image:

Google Icon 4 colors Linux Debian Epiphany Browser tab screenshot

Do you remember the good old Windows XP start button, have you noticed the Windows flag embedded in it, if not let me show you;;;

Microsoft Windows XP Start Button and HBDI 4 colors scheme

But wait the Windows flag placed on the left bottom of Ms Windows-es is not only on XP it is also on Windows 3.11 cover, Winblows 98, Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 2007 and actually all the M$ operating systems ever produced since the very early days M$ become a top OS producer :::

Windows 3.11 Operating system logo flag

Microsoft Windows 95 4 colors flag and blue sky

Here is also the 4 colored (a bit like Nazi like looking) flag on M$ Win-doze 7 |||

MS Windows 7 start Menu m$ windows well known flag

Also the Microsoft Flag is positioned on the bottom left screen on purpose. It is well known fact that most of the world (except Arabic) are used to read the text from Left to Right

, therefore it is natural for our eyesight to look for the text on the left side. I just wonder why they placed the START on the bottom and not on top. It is natural we read text and books from the most top to the most bottom ,,,.,

Even Apple Computers nowdays Macs has most likely used the HBDI as the main 4 colors and some gamma from rainbow colors are present on their Classical Apple Computer logo

Old Apple Computer/s logo colors of rainbow 4 hbdi colors are there

Makes me wonder if Jobs employed the HBDI model in his company. Well what is the reason for people loving so much this rainbow colors combination. If we think for a second outside of HBDI's brainwashing ideology for what each color would stand for. Well it is simple is comes from our young years most of the people between age 2 and 50 years has been more or less exposed to the so colorful Kids Cartoons, which are all so colorfully painted. Since our very early age we've placed in us a love for colorfulness outlook (well again not all of us for example I prefer less colors, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like the heavy colors we see in almost everywhere around us).

The problem with this 4 colors use on purpose and all this unnatural color placing everywhere is that it is unnatural and not in good synergy with our surrounding natural environment. Therefore I personally think using a colorful color paintings on everywhere in both computer programs and the physical world plays us a bad joke and is one of the reasons so many people are on the virge to get crazy nowdays and many have already had already cracked out.

It is my firm believe more and more people should be educated on the harm of HBDI and the fact that, we're forced to 'live it' unwilfully every day by using even as "simple things" as computers and daily technology or buying food in the super market ,,,