Twitter made an additional statement on the matter:

Sponsoring the ASF is not only the right thing to do, it will help us sustain our existing projects at the ASF by supporting the foundation’s infrastructure. We have a long history of contributing to Apache projects, including not only Mesos, but also Cassandra, Hadoop, Mahout, Pig and more. As Twitter grows, we look to further our commitment to the success of the ASF and other open source organizations.

Not surprisingly, Twitter also took to Twitter:

Hacker network Anonymous also chimed in to relay the news:

Apache then welcomed Twitter to its Software Foundation Sponsorship Program:

In related news, whenever I think of Apache, I think of Tommy Seebach:

Have you made the switch to NGINX? Let us know in the comments.

Many http servers utilize virtual hosting. Through virtual hosting, you can host various web properties from separate domains on one single http server utilizing, if you so desire, only one single IP address. In Apache, a virtual host looks something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin mmarr@ientry.com
  ServerName webpronews.com
  ServerAlias  www.webpronews.com
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  DocumentRoot /path/to/document/root/html

  <Directory /path/to/document/root/html>
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/webpronews_error_log
  CustomLog /var/log/httpd/webpronews_referer_log
</VirtualHost>

This VirtualHost directive tells Apache that any request coming in for the domain webpronews.com or www.webpronews.com gets passed along to the DocumentRoot of our website, in this case “/path/to/document/root/html”. Thus, www.webpronews.com/some-file.html gets sent over to /path/to/document/root/html/some-file.html and serves that file, if available. This vhost directive also tells us to allow .htaccess files to override the Apache settings on a per directory basis. Finally, we specify our log locations for all the errors and requests for this virutal host. Although not perfect for all implementations, this is a very standard and sufficient Apache virtual host configuration.

All the same above can be accomplished in NGINX, except for, unfortunately, the .htaccess support. NGINX doesn’t support .htaccess files, so any url rewrites in NGINX will have to be included in this same nginx virtual host directive. Here’s the same configuration for NGINX:

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name: webpronews.com www.webpronews.com;

   location / {
      root /path/to/document/root/html;
      index index.php;
   }

   access_log /var/log/nginx/webpronews_access_log main;
   error_log /var/log/nginx/webpronews_error_log error;
}

Personally, I find this NGINX configuration example considerably cleaner. However, since there is no PHP module for NGINX, you’ll have to add somewhere in the server block to pass all your PHP files through a proxy. NGINX provides a few examples of how to do this in the default nginx.conf file. After adding the PHP handling and any rewrites, the NGINX virtual host configuration can get pretty messy.

I’ve been in the process of migrating literally thousands of Apache virtual host configurations to NGINX, and it ain’t easy. I won’t complain if NGINX makes a tool to efficiently migrate an Apache virtual host configuration file plus any .htaccess files in the root directory of the virtual host to a single NGINX virtual host directive. Until then, I’ll simply have to continue manually migrating these configurations over in order to enjoy the benefits of NGINX.

Wave lives on to an even greater extent now, as Google is giving it to the Apache Software Foundation, which supports open-source software projects. 

"One of the best outcomes from November’s Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program," explains software engineer Alex North with the Google Wave team. "Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way."

"During the summit, it became quite clear that there is a healthy community of startups, independent developers, and industry partners enthusiastic to continue development of the Wave Federation protocols and Wave in a Box product," adds North. 

It did indeed become clear after Google’s initial announcement that it would be halting Wave development that there were quite a few saddened by the news. Many as it turned out viewed Wave as a helpful realtime collaboration tool. They should be happy with today’s news that a broader open source community will likely bring good things to Wave’s technology. 

The creator of Google Wave recently left Google to go to Facebook. Google had previously suggested that it may utilize some of the technology behind the product in other products. 

The chain of events has been quite interesting considering Google’s heightened emphasis on social and the very social nature of Wave.

Netcraft looks at the number of sites hosted on the different top servers. The following graph represents market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to October 2008:

Netcraft offers a more detailed look at the numbers of sites coming from different servers in this list. Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration compares NetCraft’s data to that of another Firm:

Now Domain Tools also tracks all the different web domain names registered on the Internet and their count puts the total number of active domains as 106 million.

This is different from the Netcraft survey as Domain Tools won’t count the sub-domains since they are all registered to the same owner (like Google’s blogspot) but may technically be a different website and hence adds to the Netcraft count.

I wonder how many of theses millions of sites are blogs. Of those, I wonder how many are still being updated. Those are some numbers that might fuel the debate about the life of blogs.

You remember Microsoft, right? Crushed Netscape and cut off their oxygen, took Kerberos into Windows NT and tweaked it so third party products couldn’t use it for authenticating to a network, fretted about the threat of Linux and plotted ways to disrupt the whole open source movement, you know, that Microsoft?

They’ve gone soft. Bill Gates has barely left the building, and Microsoft has turned into a Brie-munching, pinkie-extending, Pinot Noir-swilling parody of its former self. Heck, can you imagine the Microsoft of old failing to pummel Yahoo into submission before absorbing them into the Redmond arcology?

News out of O’Reilly Publishing’s OSCON via, would you believe it, a keynote by a Microsoft staffer cited three contributions the technology company plans to make to the open source community. Sam Ramji of Microsoft remarked about his keynote at the Port 25 blog, in noting his company’s upcoming plans.

Microsoft intends to enable support for SQL Server through a new ‘native driver for PHP’ built by the SQL Server team, and provide it in the form of a patch update for the ADOdb project. They also plan to move a host of protocols under the Open Specification Promise, and render them free from future patent claims by Microsoft.

Then Ramji offered this kicker. Microsoft will provide funding for the Apache Software Foundation; Ars Technica said this will amount to $100,000 per year, right up there with Google and Yahoo in the platinum sponsorship ring.

For those of you just joining the conversation, Apache’s httpd project developed a web server that made Microsoft’s IIS look like an inept and insecure option for years. To security-minded webmasters, IIS simply wasn’t in the discussion for a long time.

Now, Microsoft will help foot the bill that leads to improving httpd and other open source projects run by Apache. It’s a funny old world, technology.

I’m not alone in thinking about the issue so first here are a few more posts I’ve come across, more against than in favor.

• SEO Standards: Are We Really Pretending these Will Work?
• SEO Standards Signal the Maturing of Our Industry
• SEO Standards Debate is Back – But Something’s Missing…
• No Optimizer Left Behind

Again I’ll encourage you to read these posts and their associated discussions. And again I’ll ask those of you who aren’t part of the seo community to share your thoughts. I think much of the usefulness or lack of usefulness with standards will have a lot to do with how they are seen by people outside the industry.

Just Say No to Regulation

My stance on seo standards as regulation hasn’t changed at all. There are arguments for an against, but in then end seo can not be regulated in any way that makes people follow the regulations. It’s silly to even argue otherwise. Every aspect of seo overlaps with something else and if you want to regulate seo fine. I’ll call myself something else and still do the same things and tell you it’s for reasons other than seo. Try and stop me.

Licensing and certification aren’t going to make a difference to well informed clients. Clients are interested in results. Who cares if someone sanctions you as a qualified SEO if you can’t help someone make more money. Licensing and certification would more likely lead to less qualified SEOs picking up clients since the requirements to gain the credentials would likely be easier than the actual work involved.

But there is another way to look at standards that have nothing to do with regulation and I can see some potential cases where those standards could prove beneficial for some.

Standards as an Authority Guide to SEO

Yura left a comment on my last post that made me see the issue differently than I had been.

I guess we simply need a trusted place that outsiders would recognize as trustworthy and start from there.

Short and sweet, but it did make me think. Imagine a couple of scenarios. Helen has developed an interest in SEO. For whatever reason she’s interested in entering the industry (god help her), but isn’t really sure where to begin. At the moment all she’s come across are some forum and blog posts that seem to contradict each other. She knows there’s something there, but is having a hard time sorting through the chaos, infighting, and misinformation. Sound familiar?

If Helen is persistent she will sort it all out and hopefully go on to seo success. But wouldn’t it be much easier on her if there was a site that offered her a better road map from the start. Nothing necessarily advanced or giving her specific tactics, but a guide that breaks down the various steps in the seo process and points her in the right direction.

Now imagine Bill. He’s not looking to work in the industry, but he thinks seo is important for marketing his site. He’s seen all the chaos too, but has no desire to sort through it all. He just wants to know enough so that he can ask the right questions when hiring an SEO and know enough about the answers to feel like he’s not going to be ripped off.

He’s heard some bad things about the industry being snake oil peddlers and wants to understand what to look out for. Maybe he’s even been ripped off once himself. Wouldn’t a simple guide from a trusted source be all he’d need to feel better about the industry?

Think for a moment about your favorite seo ebook. I know you’ve read a few. Now imagine that was your entry point into seo. Imagine you found that book before most anything else you read about seo. Would it have made your early days in seo easier? Now picture that book or guide as making up much of an seo standards site.

How Standards Could Work

There’s no question trying to create standards is a pretty big task, especially given the opposition. Rand made an interesting statement at the end of his post weighing in on the debate:

To be honest, I’m not particularly opposed to standards and if I personally agreed with them, I’d probably be willing to join a standards organization as long as it wasn’t too costly, too time-intensive or fraught with political issues (and I genuinely fear it could be all three). The big problem I see is that no individual or organization has actually put forward even an outline of what these standards might look like.

If you do think standards are necessary I’d suggest you stop the talk about should we or shouldn’t we and simply start drafting the outline. It will be much easier to convince the naysayers if you can show them what the standards might look like.

A few thoughts:

Any standards should be educational only. Regulation won’t work and it’s best to be left out. Also stay away from any ethical talk completely. If you bring ethics into the standards you’ll have lost before you even get started.

I’ve seen the W3C mentioned a few times as a possible guide to follow. I think it’s a good candidate to take cues from, though I think it should be limited to the W3Schools. The standards should be an educational body only. The education shouldn’t hope to be comprehensive. It can’t be when seo changes so rapidly and when so little is actually known. Stick to the basics. Tell people why it’s important they spend time researching keywords and how to make websites more search friendly. Teach them that seo is not a quick fix to building a business. Yes, that’s very basic, but that’s what those outside of the industry need to hear.

Remember though, you’re not trying to tell a browser how it should deal with a nofollowed link. You’re just trying to educate someone about what a nofollow is.

Here’s an example of a section that could be included. I think most everyone would agree that knowledge of 301 redirects is important for an SEO. Create a small section explaining what they are and why they’re important. Then provide the code to set up common redirections in both Apache and IIS along with links to more detailed resources.

Another example is a section on all the tools you can use to find keywords and how to use those tools.

Perhaps a glossary of terms with a simple definition and links to further sources. Keep the definitions simple. Stay away from points of contention. You can define what a backlink is and what constitutes anchor text without causing controversy.

Get some big names to back you. This only works if the standards become the de facto authority. That won’t happen unless well known and respected names are on board. You don’t need everyone on board. Just enough to convince a good number of people in the industry to follow you. Standards won’t need 100% backing to take hold.

Understand that you can’t be all things to all people. Your target audience for the best practices guide is limited. Think of Helen and Bill above. Most practicing SEOs will already know what you’re attempting to teach. You’re not writing the standards for them.

Benefits of SEO Standards

• Educational seo standards can benefit anyone new to the industry. They can serve as a course in SEO 101 and get people started on a career path with less confusion from the start. They can similarly serve anyone looking to hire an SEO.
• Standards may generate positive press leading to greater trust by those outside the industry
• A standards body can legitimize the industry in the eyes of potential clients. Snake oil salesman don’t have standards. An industry that has standards is going to be seen as more mature and more trustworthy.
• An increased level of seo awareness is good for everyone. It’s good for SEOs and it’s good for clients. You know why search traffic is good. I do too. Why not let others in on the fun?

Potential Problems for the Standards

Ok there are benefits, but there are still potential problems.

• Who’s going to pay for this. Let’s face it setting up standards is going to cost money and time and probably a lot of stress. I’m not sure who’s up for all the work.
• Conflicts of interest. Anyone working on standards does gain a competitive advantage. The rest of us might withhold support for that reason alone. This could be overcome somewhat, by having those already at the top being the ones to set this up. They already have the advantage. Any additional advantage may not mean as much.
• There’s a similar conflict of interest for anyone cited as a resources and effort would need to be put into finding sources that stay away from community members.
• Even a few words could skew things in an ethical direction. Any standards would need to be only about the facts. If something isn’t absolutely known it needs to be expressed that way.
• Regardless of intent educational standards could eventually lead toward regulation or pseudo regulation. As standards become authority anyone working outside those standards could end up being viewed in a less than positive light. I’m not sure this doesn’t already go on anyway, though.
• The same arguments could arise as exist now in regards to search engine guidelines. Again these are already present anyway.

I’m sure there are more potential problems as well as potential benefits. The above are simply thoughts off the top of my head as I’m writing

Could SEO Standards Work?

While this post is a bit more in favor of standards than my previous posts I’d hardly call myself in favor of standards. I’m just beginning to see possibilities of how standards could work.

Regulation? No. Education? Maybe.

It would take a lot of work to build a standards body that gains acceptance, though I suspect the same has been true of most every other industry that has enacting standards along the way. Could all the positives really get done while keeping the problems at bay? I’m not sure. I can still easily see standards getting turned into a regulatory agency and easily see some using the standards solely for personal gain.

I have no idea who would want to take on the work, though I have my opinion on who could make it happen.

Much of the benefits would hinge on how people outside the industry would view the standards and I honestly don’t know how they’d be perceived. I’ll ask again that those of you who don’t call yourself SEO offer some thoughts on whether you think seo standards would be good for you. Don’t worry about how the seo community sees standards. How do you see them?

I’m still not sold on the idea, but I am listening to the sales floor. I can see how an educational set of standards could be beneficial to enough people to make it an idea worth pursuing. Again my suggestion to anyone who is already sold stop trying to convince and start outlining the standards themselves. I think there are many you could convince if you had something tangible to show them.

Even if a set of standards can’t be agreed on I have a hard time seeing how a central authority source to the basic principles of seo would be a bad thing for anyone. Worst case is it’s just one of the many guides of it’s type already in existence. Best case it’s an entry point for most people starting out in the industry.

Keep in mind too that all it would take for your guide to become the standards guide is to create one so good the rest of us have no choice but to recommend it.

Comments

    Google Provisioning Toolkit

Granted, there are other ways to add users, and Google doesn’t try to hide or ignore them.  In fact, on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Scott McMullan notes that usable methods include "CSV file upload via the control panel, programmatically using the Google Apps Provisioning API, or via commercial identity management products like Sxip Access or PingFederate."

Google’s new Toolkit is pretty fast, though, with a claimed speed of 20 account creations per second.  Also, the open source nature of the Toolkit – it "should run on any system that supports Apache, PHP, and Python, or any system that supports the VMware Player" – is bound to appeal to some people.

On that note, while it’s a sort of apples-to-a-truckload-of-oranges comparison, we can’t help but wonder what potential users will make of this development in light of the EC’s new $1.35 billion fine on Microsoft.  Universities, small portals, and SMBs – Google’s targets – might be a little quicker to embrace anything undeniably "open." 

Finally, as long as we’re discussing openness and honesty, it wasn’t just Google that worked on the Toolkit; SADA Systems played an important role, as well.

Google Selects MySQL Goodies For Open Source

Database professionals who prefer to work with MySQL may be interested in how Googlers use the open source database.

Mark Callaghan, a Google software engineer, wrote on the Google Code Blog how some of their requirements push the boundaries of MySQL.

To compensate for their needs for high availability, manageability, and other areas of the database, they have had to code some changes.

"We would love for the some of these changes to be merged with the official MySQL release," Callaghan wrote. "But until then we felt strongly that anyone should have access to them, thus we have released the changes with a GPL license for the MySQL community to use and review."

He listed the following changes available as patches to MySQL version 4. They anticipate version 5 support as coming soon:

• SemiSyncReplication – block commit on a master until at least one slave acknowledges receipt of all replication events.
• MirroredBinlogs – maintain a copy of the master’s binlog on a slave
• TransactionalReplication – make InnoDB and slave replication state consistent during crash recovery
• UserTableMonitoring – monitor and report database activity per account and table
• InnodbAsyncIo – support multiple background IO threads for InnoDB
• FastMasterPromotion – promote a slave to a master without restart

Though Callaghan refers to a GPL license, the MySQL tools Google has released are listed under the Apache 2.0 License.

As the Apache Foundation has noted, its license is not compatible with the GPL due to the inclusion of certain patent termination cases that the GPL does not have.

Not all webmasters are aware that search engines view each URL as a different page, even it has the same content or is different from the other URL by ending with a slash or if it preceeded by a www or not. To serve only one version of the page to get the deserved traffic, you’ll need to remember a couple of things about fixing URL issues.

www and non-www

The simplest matter is having both versions of a domain, the one with www and the one without (smart developers even call this URL canonicalization issue, but I believe – or hope – there has to be an easier term for this). The search engines view them as two separate sites with identical content and regard links pointing to them accordingly. Though they each get their own share of traffic, you can get more traffic by having just one version, because the links would be pointing to one site, thus boosting its search engine rankings.

To redirect a site from the non-www version to the www version, you can insert the following code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]


• Replace yoursite.com with your domain
• copy the code to your .htaccess file to your root (main) folder on your server
• refresh your page (press the “Refresh” button, F5, Ctrl+R or anything that works for you)

It’ll only work for Unix platforms with Apache and mod_rewrite enabled. If it doesn’t work after refreshing the page, make sure you do have Unix hosting and contact your support to check if they have mod_rewrite enabled. If they don’t, I’d suggest switching hosting.

Read more about using 301 (permanent) redirects with .htaccess.

URLs with and without slashes

Though it is technically easy to understand that www and non-www sites are different, how about understanding that pages with and without slashes in the end of the URL are different, too, according to the search engines. That’s why you only need to have one version of those.

If you have a WordPress blog, then a simple Permalink Redirect plugin will help. I have recently installed it on my site and it works like a charm.

For other websites, you’ll need to check your Apache version with your hosting and go to the according section of the Apache manual. Here are the links:

• Apache 1.3
• Apache 2.0
• Apache 2.2

To me, the code samples in the guide look the same. I also didn’t manage to make them work – probably due to conflicts with WordPress, or something. You can discuss the topic or ask questions about the trailing slash issue at Cre8asite Forums.

Having unique, accessible pages

Suppose you have pages with the same content on your article and you want to only have one page, but don’t want to lose the link weight or decrease the experience on your website. Then you need to 301 redirect (probably a PHP one) one page to another.

A 301 redirect (as well as .htaccess redirect) can be very helpful in solving duplicate content and broken links (if you have links pointing to a page that doesn’t exist) and is mostly the only cure to the problem.

The feeds

If you have a blog or just serve RSS feeds to your visitors, you should consider blocking them from the robots through the robots.txt file, because it’ll help filter out duplicate content from their indices (feeds have the same content as your main site, remember?).

A good start could be inserting the following code in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed/atom/
Disallow: /feed/rss/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /#comment


Alternatively, you can try using the following code to block spiders from indexing feeds for all pages:

Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$


Read more about duplicate content and feeds at The Van Blog – be sure to check the comments, too.

Note: the above code seems to work for GoogleBot only (or for other bots, supporting the * wildcard.

Let me know if you have a better solution for blocking duplicate content with robots.txt.

How to avoid duplicate content

When developing your website, you need to remember a couple of things to keep your content more unique (both to the people and the search engines):

• it is better to have less pages, but of more quality, because it’ll interest more people, attract links to the same place and drive more visitors from the search engines
• have clean URLs: no dynamic parameters, less folders (it doesn’t matter much, whether you have words in your URLs or not, though, but it helps – a tiny, weeny bitty bit)
• always write unique content, don’t copy it from others: it doesn’t give you credibility, won’t drive visitors to your site, and without a credit link it is also a theft of copyrighted material
• when you link to pages, pick one URL for a page, and use it to link to it wherever you can (for example, always link to domain.com/, instead of also linking to domain.com, domain.com/index.php)

Read more on how you can get rid of duplicate content on the Google’s Official Blog.

Keeping your site content unique, you will get more visitors from the search engines, because all your incoming link weight will be associated with a single page, thus making it more visible. Partly, correct indexing will help get your real content pages out of the supplemental index. That being said, don’t be obsessed with supplemental results. Focus on your customers.

Conclusion

By knowing how you can keep your site unique, you can easily increase your chances of getting more search engine visitors. Granted, this process is fairly easy and can be done within a day with the right education. So, you are still not looking at your site? Here’s what you should look at:

• whether your site has feeds
• whether your site has pages with same content, but different URLs
• whether accessing your non-www version gets you to the www version (or visa versa), or not – if not, check the .htaccess code above
• your .htaccess file (in the root folder)
• your robots.txt file (in the root folder as well)

Enjoy, and may Google be with you.

Comments

Some interesting observations came to the people at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure.

None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

The websites surveyed for the report: TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockphoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, and Alexaholic.

They were nearly unanimous with their choice of database backends.

MySQL owned the field, as six of seven sites said they use it. All but Alexaholic run MySQL on Linux; Alexaholic uses Microsoft SQL Server on Windows.

To get pages to their web visitors, five of the seven sites chose Apache, as have the bulk of other websites on the Internet.

Alexaholic runs IIS on Windows, while Meebo has tapped relative newcomer Lighttpd, called ‘Lighty’, for their web serving requirements.

Except for Alexaholic, the other webservers all run on Linux.

“Lighttpd tends to work really well with AJAX-based sites like ours,” said Simon Yeo, director of operations at Meebo, in the blog.

Lighttpd also boasts usage at big-time sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

PHP has a place on five of the seven sites, either on its own or in conjunction with other languages like Perl or Java.

Alexaholic’s Ron Hornbaker favored C# .NET, which is in line with his comfort zone, while Meebo primarily has C and C++ in its code.

When asked about his Microsoft favoritism, Hornbaker told Pingdom he’s familiar with the .NET platform.

“I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project,” he said.
—

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