Gabriel Harper's Blog

Once in a while you might run into a suspicious IP address accessing your website. Maybe it’s doing something funny like probing for vulnerabilities, or just spamming the heck out of your server. Being a responsible webmaster, you decide to ban the IP address from your server completely – but how? Using Apache Web server it’s easy to ban a single IP address, ban multiple IP addresses or ban an entire IP range using the .htaccess file.

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Here’s a simple trick you can use to test DNS changes on a Windows PC. You can fake or override DNS lookups by manually entering an IP address for any domain name you want. Use it to see if yoursite.com looks OK on the new server or IP address before DNS makes it around to you.

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Here’s a comprehensive, recently updated list of good Webmaster forums to check out. Currently 46 active Webmaster related forums for discussing Web design, coding, online business, development, online marketing, and other stuff that Webmasters like to discuss.

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I use a lot of different software in my job, but there are five software tools in particular that I can do nearly all of my Web development with. The best part is they are allcompletely free applications. You can download and install everything you need to be up and coding in under 30 minutes.

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Creating great products is easy if you identify a problem. Like many others I’m willing to pay for a good solution if the need is great enough. Identifying the deepest problem for your customers and developing a great solution is the recipe for a successful product.

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The Apache Web server supports URL rewriting with the mod_rewrite engine. Placing custom rules in an .htaccess file lets you do all sorts of useful things to keep your URLs tidy. One really handy thing you can do for search engines and visitors is redirecting traffic from www to non-www version of your domain (and vice versa).

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I just compared Google referrals to PageRank on 37 different Websites, and here are the results. The numbers are pretty amazing. If PageRank does mean anything, it certainly doesn’t mean good search performance…

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Exactly what is a Webmaster? This term has become quite popular for anyone slinging Websites or online ads, but does that make somebody a Webmaster? I think the term has been liberated over the years, but is still adapting and in some cases struggles to be taken seriously.

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Anyone who has ever registered a domain, named a product or business, or otherwise had to come up with a suitable, catchy name for something, knows how hard it can be to find a unique and catchy name.

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