Did you ever wonder why WordPress out-of-the-box is not Search Engine Optimized and All in One Search Engine Optimization Plug-in is inadequate? Below is the explanation that WordPress provides:

The most common meta tags examples include:
<meta name="resource-type" content="document" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="author" content="Harriet Smith" />
<meta http-equiv="contact" content="harrietsmith@harrietsmith.us" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c)1997-2004
Harriet Smith. All Rights Reserved." />
<meta name="description" content="Story about my dog
giving birth to puppies." />
<meta name="keywords" content="stories, tales, harriet, smith,
harriet smith, storytelling, day, life, dog, birth, puppies, happy" />
Why Are Meta Tags Missing?

In the default installation, WordPress does not include meta tags such as description and keywords. Why? Well, let's look at the above tags.

The second and third tags set the language and character set for the page. This example sets the character set to be in the English language style as found in the United States, using the ASCII character set. This means that the page will probably feature spellings like "center" instead of "centre" and "humor" not "humour". It also gives information to the browser to recognize the characters as not being Chinese.

The author and contact information lists a specific person. The description tag lists a description of the post that is unique to that post. The keywords also list words found within that post. Are you seeing the pattern?

All of this is unique information. WordPress may do some magical things, but it can't read your mind. If you want to supply search engines better information that is more specific to your web pages, you have to add the meta tag data yourself.

1. The only meta tags which matter today for Google are Meta Title and Meta Description. Read more on Google Webmaster Blog.

2. Author, charset, contact, copyright, etc. meta tags could be generated dynamically from the data supplied by the user on the set-up page, if Word Press chose to give this rather simple option.

3. <meta http-equiv="contact" content="harrietsmith@harrietsmith.us" /> This meta is a perfect example of how to appear in the database of the spambots.

4. <meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c)1997-2004
Harriet Smith. All Rights Reserved." />This meta should be part of either meta description or dynamically generated as I mentioned on No. 2.

Example by Google of good meta description:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages">

5. On the last note, you will not find author, contact, charset in meta data for this page as I removed them along with the rest of about a dozen of DC Core Meta tags. Only meta title and meta description do matter according to Google. And they have to be unique for a page, not a copy of the entry. Read more on Google Snippets and what makes a good meta description.

This January will be Apple's last presentation at the Macworld and CEO Steve Jobs will not appear. Industry events like Macworld Expo have been losing their luster inside Apple for some time.

This is not a company that spends much time hanging out with its peers in the personal computing and mobile phone industries; Apple is often conspicuously absent at the types of panel discussions and press events that draw other companies on a regular basis.

Apple's newest legion of fans--teenagers and young professionals--are not going to wander around San Francisco's Moscone Center in January soaking up the scene when they can simply wait for the products to appear online or at the nearest Apple Store, or follow the coverage on their favorite blog.

Those customers can be reached through a combination of relentless television and Internet advertising and word-of-mouth campaigns, which Apple doesn't even have to engineer itself thanks to the legions of Mac bloggers and news coverage.

"There's one leg shorter than the other ones; you can fix it with a few packets of sugar."

"It's very, very low so there's only your head at the table."

These are a couple of my favorites. Check out the rest of the catalog of chairs from the Secrets of Efficient Meeting Collection.

Gibson Research Corporation writes on Ultra High Security Password Generator:

Since there is no "output from the previous encryption" to be used during the encryption of the first block, the switch shown in the diagram above is used to supply a 128-bit "Initialization Vector" (which is just 128-bits of secret random data) for the XOR-mixing of the first counter value. Thus, the first encryption is performed on a mixture of the 128-bit counter and the "Initialization Vector" value, and subsequent encryptions are performed on the mixture of the incrementing counter and the previous encrypted result.

 The result of the combination of the 256-bit Rijndael/AES secret key, the unknowable (therefore secret) present value of the 128-bit monotonically incrementing counter, and the 128-bit secret Initialization Vector (IV) is 512-bits of secret data providing extremely high security for the generation of this page's "perfect passwords". No one is going to figure out what passwords you have just received.

Make sure to write the generated password down.

"Wolfram Research has released the seventh version of Mathematica, and it does a lot more than symbolic algebra. New features include Secure Website and Network Connectivity, Statistical Model Analysis and Built-in Image Processing and Analysis:

• Modern extensible platform for image processing.
• Efficient implementations of all standard image processing algorithms. »
• Image data can be processed using hundreds of built-in Mathematica functions. »
• Efficient top-level representation of images, abstracted from data representation. »
• Images in visual form can be used directly as input, and included in programs.
• General image cropping, padding, resizing, rotating, etc. »
• Streamlined image adjustment, sharpening, blurring, etc. »
• Collection of special image and photographic effects, with arbitrary extensibility. »
• Color conversion, separation, quantization; multiple color models. »
• Efficient linear and nonlinear filters for spatial and frequency-domain processing. »
• General image filtering and convolution with arbitrary neighborhoods and functions. »
• Image arithmetic and general image compositing. »
• Complete set of multichannel morphological image processing primitives. »
• Built-in morphological component detection, Euler characteristic, etc. »
• Partitioning into arrays of images, and reassembly from arrays. »
• Support for up to 64-bit depth per channel, and arbitrary numbers of channels. »
• Automatic support for optimized image storage, including channel interleaving. »
• Support for color and alpha channel in all applicable operations.
• Full integration of images into Mathematica interface construction system.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a security vulnerability of dynamic Web pages generated from information supplied to the web server and replayed as part of the response to the browser. In an XSS attack, a malicious user can create a specially crafted link to inject unwanted executable script or code (usually JavaScript) into a Web site. When an unsuspecting victim clicks the link, the malicious piece of JavaScript can then send the victims’ cookie away to a CGI script.

A full security review usually involves more than just seeking out XSS vulnerabilities; it also involves overall threat modeling, testing for overflows, information disclosure, error handling, SQL injection, authentication, and authorization bugs.

The most important part of finding a vulnerability is not whether you found it. It’s whether or not you really know what’s happening. With XSS, just look at the HTML output and find where your input made it in. Is it in an HREF tag? An IFRAME tag? Is it in a CLSID? An IMG SRC? How about the PARAM NAME of some Flash content?

If you understand exactly what the input is doing, you’ll be able to adjust your test to identify a problem. That means you may need to stick in an extra closing bracket > to escape out of a tag, or add a double quote to close an element inside a tag. Or you may need to URL or HTML encode your characters, such as by turning a double quote into %22 or ".

Test a number of variations to identify parameters that accept and display scriptable code.

Read more on Microsoft Tech Net.

In order to change the administrator, known in Unix as "root", password you will need a copy of Mac OS X Install disk. If you don't have the original disk, buy another one or call Apple (1-800-SOS-APPL) and ask for a replacement boot disk.

Once you have an install disk, double click on the Install Mac OS icon and you'll get a window with a restart button. Click on it, and your Mac will restart and go to the installation process.

You don't need to install the OS again! Click through windows until you get the regular set of choices on the menu bar. One of those menus is Utilities and one of the choices on that menu is Reset Password.

Change your password and choose Quit from the Installer.

Next time you start your computer you know your admin password.

Note: your admin password is only of limited security because anyone with an OS install disk can restart and reset your root password without knowing your existing password.

How to reset Mac OS X Admin Root password by using sudo command

About Proxify Anonymous Surfing

A web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the web privately and securely. The Proxify widget provides easy access to the Proxify service, directly from your Dashboard.

Proxify hides your IP address and our encrypted connection prevents monitoring of your network traffic. Once using Proxify, you can surf normally and forget that it is there, protecting you.

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later

The Economist reports that Dr Kelling's controversial "broken windows theory" of social behavior is correct.

A PLACE that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal.

Read more on how Broken Windows theory applies to social behavior online.

In this video interview, long-time online community expert Randy Farmer talks about the broken windows theory and its application to online spaces. He talks about building an online community culture, moderation, quality of service and trolls.

Forgetting the root password on Mac can feel like a disaster but you can easily recover it using a sudo command if you have the password to an administrator's account on the system.

Open a terminal window and type:

sudo passwd root

You will be prompted for your password (the password to the administrator's account). After that you will be prompted for the new root password twice.

The sudo command is a great tool to control who can do what on a system. In this scenario the sudo command allows you after authentication with the user password to run a command as if you were root. The command passwd root is the command to change the password for the root user.

Update 01/16/08 How to reset lost root password by switching to single-user mode (Command-S) known as command line interface in Unix. (Suggested in user comments.)

Reed more on how to change your lost root password with an Install Disk.

The latest update* to Moxietype Content Management System is the custom Meta Description field for every entry. Meta Description will not be posted on your page but included as Meta Description tag on the Source Page for every individual URL of your content.

If the meta description is place, and the term(s) searched are within the description, then the meta description will appear in the snippet. If there is no meta description tags, then the text around the terms within the body of the content will be displayed in the snippet.

If there are meta tags (including the description) and the key term is not in the description, the text around the key term within the contant pf the page will be displayed in the snippet.

However, keep in mind that if the key term isn't within the content, just having it in the meta tag will not improve you search engine ranking. You must have it in your meta description tag, and within the content of the site in order to show up in the SERP.

Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information -- price, age, manufacturer -- scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Meta descriptions can bring all this data together.

Not as desirable:

[domain name redacted] : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré"

• There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn't work well as a snippet on our search results page:

• The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.

• Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).

• None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?

• The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page -- who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet -- is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.

Much nicer:
Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"

What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.

Source: Google Webmaster Blog

*System 5.1 and later.

When trying to protect your privacy, the last thing you want is for a search engine to collect data on what is your search history behavior. That's called profiling.

Below is an abstract for the United States Patent Application 20050222989 "Results based personalization of advertisements in a search engine" filed by Google

Personalized advertisements are provided to a user using a search engine to obtain documents relevant to a search query. The advertisements are personalized in response to a search profile that is derived from personalized search results. The search results are personalized based on a user profile of the user providing the query. The user profile describes interests of the user, and can be derived from a variety of sources, including prior search queries, prior search results, expressed interests, demographic, geographic, psychographic, and activity information.

Most extensions and tools commonly used to prevent data profiling by search engines work by concealing information from outsiders. TrackMeNot takes the opposite approach and actually sends out a bunch of information for the search engines to process. It sends mostly false information, which means your real search activities remain hidden from view and search engines won't glean any useful data from your visit.

TrackMeNot 0.5.32
Works with Firefox: 1.5 – 3.0.*
Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173

Description: Protects users against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines.

Update 12/21/08: Firefox Refusal of the "RichResults" to obey the "Clear Private Data" command and how to disable RichResults feature.

While at this time there is no way to make the Location bar behave exactly like in Firefox 2 there are several experimental add-ons which received good marks from the users. (Experimental add-ons may be alpha, beta or pre-production in quality, performance and features. Caution should be used when installing experimental add-ons, as some of them have not been tested by an editor and may harm your computer configuration.)

Clear Private Data... (Add-Ons) 0.2.2

This extension utilizes the "Clear Private Data..." feature that is part of Firefox version 1.5 and above. It makes this feature a lot more accessible via right-click context menu and an optional toolbar button.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1280

Hide Unvisited 3

Hide pages (bookmarks) that you haven't visited from showing in the AwesomeBar. This is for users that don't want to see any bookmarks showing up unless they've used the bookmark since deleting certain pages/sites or clearing the history.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429

Old Location Bar

If you like the look of Firefox 2 Location Bar. You will not be able to completely back to the Old Location Bar but there a few features listed: URL Bar displays the old way; Go Button is always present, only matches what you type, doesn't guess; and URL Bar turns Yellow when visiting a "Secure" page.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/763

Our latest updates include customized Meta Description field for each entry as well as an automatically generated Meta Title, both of which will help to maximize Search Engine Optimization for our sites.*

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

Read more at the Official Google Webmaster Blog on good use of meta data:

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

Meta tags and Web Search Results

Tag Galaxy is worth a spin.Once you get past the fiery star with (conceptually related) orbiting planets, the globe itself presents a surprisingly addictive interface for photo discovery.

Most knowledgeable webmasters find the idea of moving the site from one platform to another, from one domain to another, or both as a rather scary process. The reasons are rather simple.

First of all, setting up Redirect 301 or other blanket redirect from one domain to another is hardly going to work for all visitors. Run a simple Google search on the terms link:yoursite.com and see how many external pages are linked to your site. Well, you have to contact all of them and ask them to change the old link.

Second, open Google Webmaster account and see how many pages from your site are indexed in the Google Search Engine. Yes, you have to set up an individual redirect 301 for each one of those pages. Same goes for images. Those redirects can easily run into thousands individual redirects for a dynamic site.

If you still feel that you absolutely positively must move your site to a new platform and have a few hundred of hours of disposable manpower to do so properly, read a few recommendations from Google. Making a site is a rather simple process in comparison with retaining the precious Search Engine presence and ranking.

Without much thought nor hesitation I would recommend to everybody to block IPs in the range of 222.208.0.0 - 222.215.255.255, and 125.64.0.0 - 125.71.255.255 which belongs to CHINANET Sichuan province network — the homebase of some of the world's most dedicated and prolific spammers. They actually enter it manually.

No wonder unemployment is so low in China.

Lately, all I have been hearing about is how Word Press is "free." Now, the way I do math, anything that takes over ten hours to set-up and still doesn't function without a consultant and/or IT specialist has a cost associated with it, the cost of loss time, lowered productivity and no blog at the end of the day. For the last two weeks at my office we have been struggling to set-up a simple blog using WordPress.org that I have come to call the "buteverybodyusesit" software. I understand that developers and programmers love it because it is "free" and allows them to exploit gullible users in search of "free" software.

But I think there is some confusion regarding the defintion of free, which Word Press itself notes:

About the GPL

The GNU General Public License, or GPL, is an open source license. Open source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code - it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or "Free Software", means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn't refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as "Free as in speech vs. free as in beer." The GPL is free as in speech.

codex.wordpress.org/License

So, while I am all for free beer and free speech I am also for the clear distinction between the two meanings of free.

Here are a few observations on the conflict between w3.org standards and some XML feed validators, RSS Feed Readers or News Aggregators as most people know them, which mushroomed in the recent years. Some of the elements of your document will still not be able to be read properly.

Below is an explanation about what Relative URL is and why it is used in your HTML document according to [RFC1808]:

This document describes the syntax and semantics for "relative"Uniform Resource Locators (relative URLs): a compact representation of the location of a resource relative to an absolute base URL. It is a companion to RFC 1738, "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)" [2], which specifies the syntax and semantics of absolute URLs.

A common use for Uniform Resource Locators is to embed them within a document (referred to as the "base" document) for the purpose of identifying other Internet-accessible resources. For example, in hypertext documents, URLs can be used as the identifiers for hypertext link destinations.

Absolute URLs contain a great deal of information which may already be known from the context of the base document's retrieval, including the scheme, network location, and parts of the URL path. In situations where the base URL is well-defined and known, it is useful to be able to embed a URL reference which inherits that contex rather than re-specifying it within each instance. Relative URLs can also be used within data-entry dialogs to decrease the number of characters necessary to describe a location.

Contrary to the established practice of World Wide Web Consortium on the use of Realtive URLs, some XML readers are unable to publish the images embeded via this method.

Some RSS elements are allowed to contain HTML, including links and images. However, if these links use relative URLs to point to resources, users of some news aggregators will not be able to click on them. And your images use the relative URLs, the images may not appear (since the news aggregator will be looking for the images locally on the user's hard drive, rather than on your web site).

How one should act in this situation? If you know that the content that you publish will be viewed via RSS Readers, either hot link the images to their original sites, or use a separate server to upload your images to and provide a full URL to your images versus a Realative. For example [url=http://yourdomain/images/picture.jpg]http://yourdomain/images/picture.jpg[/url] versus /images/picture.jpg.

Updated for Firefox 3.0 "Clear Private Data 0.2.2." Firefox Add-On.

Description: This extension utilizes the "Clear Private Data..." feature that is part of Firefox version 1.5 and above. It makes this feature a lot more accessible via right-click context menu and an optional toolbar button.

Update 12/18/08: How to Clear Private Data by changing the default of RichResults feature in Firefox 3.

Saved Passwords: When entering a password on a web page for something such as your email login, Firefox will usually ask if you would like for the password to be remembered.

If you choose for the password to be remembered, it will be stored by the browser and then prepopulated the next time you visit that web page.

Download History: Firefox’s Download Manager keeps a record of every file that you download through the browser.

Cookies: A cookie is a simple text file that is placed on your hard drive when you visit certain web sites. Each cookie is used to tell a web server when you return to its web page. Cookies themselves can't contain any spyware or malware. They can't access your hard drive or compromise the security. Cookies can be helpful in remembering certain settings that you have on a web site. It is necessary to use cookies to establish the particular Web session when you log in into your internet account, being it New York Times on-line edition, this software, bank, etc. Those cookies are called session cookies. Another kind of cookie is a persistent cookie which helps the site to remember your user preferences, such as Amazon.com, HomeDepot.com or Target.com. If you block all cookies, those sites simply will not work.

Cache: Firefox uses its cache to store images, pages, and URLs of recently visited web pages. By using the cache, the browser can load these pages must faster on subsequent visits to the site by loading the images, etc. locally from the cache rather than from the web server itself.

Authenticated Sessions: You may have logged into a site and noticed that when you returned later you were still logged in. This is because Firefox saved your authenticated session.

Now that you understand the meaning behind each menu item, check those that you wish to be erased and be sure that any items you wish to keep intact are unchecked. Once you are ready, click Clear Private Data Now and all of the item types that you selected will be cleared out.

You may have also noticed a choice at the bottom of the dialog entitled “Ask me before clearing private data”. This box is checked by default. Had the box not been checked, your private data would have automatically been cleared when you selected Clear Private Data from the Tools menu or hit the Ctrl+Shift+Delete keyboard shortcut.

In this case, there is another method you must use if you wish to modify your “Clear Private Data” settings.

Read about the Alternate Way To Change ‘Clear Private Data’ Settings in detail below or follow easy steps:

First, click on Tools in your Firefox menu located at the top of your browser. When the drop-down menu appears, scroll down and click on the Options choice.

You will now see the Options menu overlaying your main browser window. Click the Settings button, located on the bottom right hand side of the dialog directly above the Help button.

You will now see a “Clear Private Data” dialog box, similar to the one displayed in Step 3 of this tutorial. There is one added menu item in this dialog, however, entitled “Clear private data when closing Firefox”. When this option is checked, your private data will be cleared each and every time you exit the Firefox application.

To clear the important private data after every browser session follow these easy steps:

1. Click on Tools
2. Then click on Options
3. Go to the Privacy Tab
4. Then at the bottom of the window click on Settings
5. Then check the box beside “Clear Private data when FireFox Closes”
6. Make sure saved passwords and cookies are unchecked
7. Click on OK

Now your private data will be cleared each and every time you exit the Firefox application. In case you want to delete certain saved passwords follow these steps:

1. Click on Tools
2. Then click on Options
3. Go to the Privacy Tab
4. Password Tab
5. View Saved Passwords
6. Click on the Password you want to remove
7. Click on Remove