Gabriel Harper’s Blog

Google’s homepage is looking fairly normal lately with the classic logo, but Google is now displaying a short message about Doodle 4 Google which reads “Over 16,000 children drew doodles for Google’s homepage. Vote for the one that will appear here.” So now it’s our turn to decide what shows up on Google’s homepage! Not only that but make some kid’s day (erm… week? month? life?) by getting their sketch displayed on Google.com.

Any good Google homepage post would be incomplete without a nice boring screenshot!

Jelsoft just released vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold on April 29th, right alongside the new vBulletin price changes. Good timing on their behalf, because now there is even more motivation to upgrade those licenses and buy some new ones! Starting immediately vBulletin license owners will be able to access vBulletin 3.7.0 from the member’s area.

Some of the main features introduced in vBulletin 3.7.0 are search cloud and tag cloud, viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits, extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions, thread prefixes, reciprocal friendships between forum users, public visitor messaging on profile pages with conversation feature, user picture galleries with user comment facility, extended member profile pages, customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities, user-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options, inline editing of custom user profile fields, lightbox viewer for attached images, inline spam management and prevention, thread tagging, notices system for navigation bar, multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A, user change history and social bookmarking integration.

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Jelsoft just announced a bunch of changes in their pricing scheme. They must have read my blog about whether vBSEO is worth the money and decided they could charge more! While not a huge increase, it’s enough to make me shake my head as I now run several vBulletin forums. That’s the nature of business though, and hopefully Jelsoft will continue to improve their software and make use of all that extra cash.

So here is the breakdown on the new pricing, effective June 2nd, 2008. Owned vBulletin licenses are now $180. Leased licenses are now $100. Bulk order prices will remain the same. Leased licensed renewal will be $100. Owned license renewal will be $40 if purchased before expiration or within 60 days after expiration, and $60 after that.

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I’m taking the plunge with vBSEO on Fury-Tech Forums. $149 for vBSEO is almost twice as expensive as a leased vBulletin license, so like many vBulletin owners I’m tentative to say the least. To make things worse, they want $117 to remove vBSEO branding from your forum. On the bright side of things, I should have a reliable SEO solution for vBulletin - where Jelsoft is really lacking in my opinion.

Most of the people who have purchased and use vBSEO seem to have really positive things to say. Now that I’ve gone through the process of ordering, installing and configuring my first reaction is: WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS! Seriously, I have never filled out so many damn form fields, clicked so many links, and jumped through so many hoops just to order and install a relatively small PHP app. If there’s one thing vBSEO doesn’t seem shy about, it’s harvesting my personal info during the order and download process. After you get through ordering the script, the install and setup really isn’t that bad.

So, now it’s up and running and some 20,000 posts are back online. I will update with progress but in the meantime - what do you think about the high price tag on vBSEO?

Ready to spice up your Google homepage with some great art? Today we are greeted with Google’s latest homepage promoting iGoogle Artist Themes. Today’s Google logo sports art work by Jeff Koons as an example of the possibilities using iGoogle Artist Themes. Below the logo reads “What happens when great art mixes with your homepage?” iGoogle Artist Themes. And where would be without a nice screenshot to show off the new iGoogle Artist homepage?

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It has been quite a while since I was forced to shut down Fury-Tech Forums due to SPAM and lack of moderation. Many know Fury-Tech as a mix of heated debates over hardware and even more heated debates over politics and religion. Often leading to personal injury or harm or death or suffocation. (The previous statement is untrue in most countries). But needless to say, many victims fell to the wrath that is Fury-Tech.

Which is why it brings me great joy to announce once again that Fury-Tech Forums is back in with a much needed upgrade. Aesthetically speaking we have a little more to do. But the software itself is a major improvement over the SPAM honeypot that was phpBB. So get your arse to the new tech forums and tell me what you think.

More fun in the Webmaster world of updates. Jelsoft today announced vBulletin 3.6.10, including various backported bugfixes from 3.7.0 but primarily to fix a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) in vBulletin 3.6.9.

According to Jelsoft “The vulnerability potentially allows an administrator to be lured to a third party site that could submit a form on their behalf and without their knowledge, with the potential to damage the forum of which the targeted person is an administrator. Actions performed within the Admin Control Panel are NOT vulnerable to this attack vector and are unaffected by the CSRF vulnerability. ”

The number of changes in files and templates makes a full update required to fix the CSRF, and Jelsoft strongly urges all users running versions of vBulletin prior to 3.6.10 to upgrade immediately.

Even if you don’t celebrate Earth Day, Google does. And you’re sure to be enticed by a completely free screenshot of them doing it! We already celebrated Earth Hour with Google, so let’s move on to bigger and better things with Earth Day!

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I just read about the new version of Cpanel / WHM that is supposed to use much less memory on Virtual Private Servers (VPS). Aside from the obvious benefit of freeing up resources and improving performance and capacity, cPanel also points out the benefits of being more eco-friendly than standard cPanel releases. I’m not sure how efficiently cPanel VPS Optimized translates into less energy consumption, but I’ll just take their word for it. This is exciting news for me, because I run many domains hosted on multiple VPS with cPanel/WHM.

cPanel is boasting up to 60% less memory usage in cPanel VPS Optimized than previous standard versions, which was more than enough to catch my eye. Memory footprint is extrmely important in a VPS environment, where resources are usually limited and usage isn’t always predictable.

cpanel.net shares some details of VPS Optimized for us, including a sample benchmark which I will summarize here:

Platform: OpenVZ - Total VPS Memory: 512MB

Baseline cPanel/WHM Memory Usage:

Total: 500, Used: 252, Free: 248

Baseline VPS Optimized Memory Usage:

Total: 500, Used: 94, Free: 405

Where do these figures come from? Who knows.

As of the time of this release, cPanel VPS Optimized is only available in cPanel EDGE releases, but I’ll be anxiously awaiting the first stable release. In the meantime I’ll be keeping an eye on VPS Optimized for more info.

I’d love to hear a response from anybody using or thinking of using the new release.

Google has a tradition of doing zany things to their logo and Web site for holidays and other important events. Today Google greets us with a shockingly dark page and states “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn…”. Google provides a little more detail, going on to say this is “… a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour“.

I know I could do a lot more to save energy, and actually have a terrible habit of leaving things running for days. Nearly a year ago I started replacing all of my light bulbs with super efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. I have actually noticed an impact on my power bill, which is just another great advantage of saving energy aside from the environmental benefits.

But all ritualistic light flashing aside, what are you doing to reduce your energy consumption? What do you hope to do in the next year?