Last year I wrote about getting a new web host and domain registrar for the Engineer’s Association website. It was time for the host and one of the domain names to expire. Because I didn’t want the accounts to be locked in to my e-mail account like they had been with the previous webmaster’s personal e-mail account (causing a lot of problems with last year’s transfer), they sent the expiration notices to a Yahoo e-mail account that I created and never use. So by the time I realized what was going on, my domain at NameCheap for gdotea.org had expired for a couple of days. I went ahead and tried to renew at NameCheap and after it took my credit card information I got a message that said it had failed “for some reason”. Don’t know why. I tried a couple of more times and got error messages again, including ones that said I couldn’t renew a domain I had already put in an order to renew.
Category: Web
Back to Speedfactory
Last week I was doing an overdue update to my iPod battery pack page. Traffic has trickled off lately to 150 visits per day whereas before I moved everything to iGirder I was getting about 300. Part of the reason may have been that I hadn’t updated the pages in a while, but the page just doesn’t rank very high (I did get a payoff almost immediately when someone bought one of the new iPhone battery packs I wrote about for $50 yielding $3 in commissions). Overall revenue from AdSense and Amazon is down to about a third of what it used to be.
Treasury Direct
After my attempt to buy Savings Bonds finally succeeded, my access card arrived. First they assigned me a long account number and let me pick out a password to access the account plus they asked three personal questions (I gave them fake answers). When you log in you enter the account number but the password can only be entered by clicking an onscreen keyboard with the letters placed at random (a new level of hunt and peck). But the card adds an entirely new layer of obscurity: Some people have called it a bingo card, where they will call out A4 like in Battleship and I have to type in the appropriate letter or number on the card (in this case, the letter A). I also have to supply the serial number on the card. I think there are a limited number of types of cards because my login asks me to choose from 3 different serial numbers. Here’s my card:
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | |
| 1 | 6 | S | 7 | S | F | S | E | 2 | X | 6 |
| 2 | E | H | J | H | R | L | C | M | 6 | K |
| 3 | C | T | A | U | C | D | Y | T | W | 1 |
| 4 | A | 9 | A | 6 | H | 5 | M | Y | Y | M |
| 5 | E | L | N | W | X | 8 | D | Y | 2 | 8 |
This has to be one of the most ridiculous forms of security ever. There is no way you can memorize this so you pretty much have to take it wherever you go.
Sitemaps
I wanted the transition to the new website to go as smoothly as possible. In the past there were certain things you could do to help search engines categorize your page. There are simple things that are part of HTML like using a title tag, using header tags to identify important parts of the page, etc. But you can also add META tags. A description of the site is good, and the descriptions I used would usually show up in the search results under the title of my page. At the time it was good to include keywords, but those seem to be less important now and instead the search engines find their own keywords in the text of your page.
Looking into all of that again, I signed up for Google’s webmaster tools service (they had me verify that I owned my site by including a specially named file on my site). Google pointed me in the direction of using a special sitemap.xml file that would tell the search engines where all of my pages are located and how often they are updated. Though Google seems to have originated this, a lot of other search engines use it too. A lot of websites have an html sitemap for visitors that shows all of the pages on their site, like a Table of Contents. But this file is xml and is intended just for the search engines. A piece of it might look like this:
Redirects
One problem with changing web sites like I am doing is to make sure the search engines can still find you. The best way to do this is apparently to use an .htaccess file that will automatically re-route people (and search engine crawlers) to the new site. Another way (that apparently search engines don’t deal very well with) is to use redirect pages. I tried doing an .htaccess file at speedfactory, but it would just give me an error message. So instead I have installed a couple of redirects (with a one-second delay), but not on my main battery and dejumbler pages since those bring in the most revenue. I figure I can watch and see how long it takes Google to start referring to those files in their new location.
Also I did a global find and replace on the blog to at least get all of my past links to point to the new site. On my web pages that I am leaving at Speedfactory for now, the links to other pages point to iGirder pages instead of local versions. Maybe that way Google will see the links to iGirder and start to rank those pages.