Cursed damnation. The problem is caused I think by the ActiveState installation for XML::SAX. So you’ll need to uninstall it from the using ppm tool. I had to uninstall in this order:
- XML-SAX-Writer
- XML-Filter-BufferText
- XML-SAX-Simple
- XML-SAX-Machines
- XML-SAX
Then try to install in that order using the cpan shell:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
But that didn’t work on my machines, so you could download the packages from CPAN and drag the files over to your c:\perl\site\lib folders or reinstall over PPM and forget about the error… if you can’t find the needed packages from your default set up then look into installing them from another server.
Not much help to my own problems, am I?! 
I was researching MSN’s contextual copy equivalent of Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s Overture (or I guess GoTo.com or whatever, you get the point). I stumbled across this great page of crapness. Possibly a useful page on the most basic of SEO ever, but full of half mistakes like:
Try not to embed links in Java - Some web crawlers may minimally analyze Java, but in all likelihood they will not find your pages if they are only accessible via Java.
Now, do they actually mean Java? Or are they making the mistake that thousands of arguments have now been based upon with the confusion over Javascript and Java since Netscape were retarded enough to called Javascript and not Actionscript. The idiots.
Then there’s this great section…
Avoid using techniques that e-mail spammers use:
• Don’t indulge in “keyword stuffing” - Don’t overload the number of keywords on a page or in meta tags.
• Eliminate duplicate copies - Don’t create duplicate copies of your content and place them on multiple hosts.
• Don’t cloak content - Don’t in any way show different content to our crawler than you do to a user.
• Don’t use hidden text - Truthful metatags are an exception to this.
• Don’t contribute to “link farms” - Our recommendation is to only link to those pages that are relevant.
E-mail spammers do those?!? NO THEY DON’T. Not one of them. Quite the opposite in some cases like keyword stuffing.
And deary, deary me. You don’t contribute to a link farm by linking to the damn thing now do you?
Do you think MSN got a $5 cheesy content writer to do that page?
Hmm, will it be called Adcentre in Europe I wonder? Anyways…
Technorati Tags: MSN, Adsense, Javascript, Java, Netscape, Actionscript, link farm, Adcenter
I don’t know why I feel the need to write this down, but I was having a slow brain day and needed to actually sit and think about using string references within a perl subroutine!
my $string = "STRINGY";
print "Before: $string\n";
modify_string(\$string);
print "After: $string\n";
sub modify_string
{
my ($string_ref) = @_;
my $length = length($$string_ref);
$$string_ref .= "-$length";
}
This tries to demonstrate two things. Firstly using the string reference (i.e. into the length command and secondly modifying the string itself (appending a dash and the length of the string to it). Don’t worry about the “-$length” bit — it’s not trying to do anything cleverer than append to the string…
Technorati Tags: string reference, perl
There are many times when it would be useful to host a sub-domain of your main site on another server or hosting company altogether. Maybe your sub-domain has outgrown the main site and you want to host it elsewhere for a better deal, maybe you’ve got some ultra cheap static file hosting for serving up images and videos elsewhere or maybe you have a company that allows you to have an affiliate store or something like that and they allow you to use your own domain. …except that you want to create a sub-domain of your main site to ensure consistency, customer trust and to retain your branding.
Whatever your need, the solution is simple, but requires you to have access to your DNS records for your domain. These will usually be found at your hosting company. If you use cpanel/whm, then this is fine - if you have access to the actual files themselves then this is good too.
Continue Reading »
Technorati Tags: sub-domain, DNS, cpanel, whm
A page on one of my sites has dropped down and down the search engine results and I couldn’t see why. The results replacing it seemed okay (bar one blatent traffic equalizer page) so I can’t really complain because people on Google are getting the answers to their search.
Then, for some reason I plugged the URL into CopyScape only to find that someone had copy and pasted my page into Yahoo bloody answers as if they’re clever and answering someone’s question. This is a level six user there! Well, once I’ve worked out my rights I’ll deal with Yahoo. But this appeared in Yahoo answers right about the time this page took a dive in the SERPs - coincidence, maybe - but damn annoying that someone can copy your hard work off as their own. To my detriment.
I bet Yahoo and Google answers and other similar sites are rife with other people’s work passed off as their own and I bet they don’t actually care.
Oh yeah, this Yahoo page with my work on does appear higher in the search engine that my own page - and I can almost understand why, it’s answering the question in lots of ways so does benefit the end user. But that’s no excuse to rip off others!
The page was set up to answer the question:
Why do dogs eat grass?
Well, for now I’ve rewritten the offending page (oh and corrected the spelling and grammar that Yahoo have been lumbered with ) so I’ll see how it goes.
Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo answers, SERP, dogs