What are Trackbacks?

A simple example of a Trackback is if you look at the bottom of this WordPress blog entry, near the comments section, you will see a “Trackback” link. The picture below shows you where to find the Trackback in the default Wordpress theme.

Now if you go to the GlowHost Forums and submit a post (using the advanced editor, not the quick reply) you will see a text field where you can enter in the Trackback URL

I’ve copied the Trackback URL from this blog entry into the advanced editor’s “Trackback” text field, and submited my post…..more on this below.

What did I just do?
I notified the administrator of this blog that my post on the forum is linking this blog posting, and should the administrator of this blog decide to show my Trackback, my forum post will appear as a comment on the bottom of this page. It is a handy way to add a comment to a blog article from a forum or other site that supports Trackbacks.

How does it work?
The forum will send a notification to the blog scripts, that the blog has been referenced from the remote website (AKA the Forums) It knows to notify this blog because I took the time to specify a Trackback URL in my post.

Why would I want to do this?
For a couple of reasons. One reason is to syndicate my thoughts, comments, ideas across multiple websites. Another reason is, to gain a link from this blog back to the forums. The last example would be a good tool for site owners who would like to develop some inbound links to their forums or blog.

Does this only work between forums and blogs?
No. It can work between blogs and other blogs, or from forums to other forums, and any other site or script that supports Trackbacks. The idea here was to show you how two completely different systems, can work in unison with each other.

What are Pingbacks?
Pingbacks are essentially the same concept as Trackback, except they are much simpler. In a Pingback, all that I would do in the forum post, is link to this blog post’s “Permalink” or Permanent Link. The Permalink can be found by hovering your mouse over the title of this blog entry for a second or two. You will see some alt text (or title text) that indicates that the text you are hovering over is this blog post’s Permalink.

The forums also have a Permalink option as indicated in the figure below.

As an example, I am going to link a forum post’s Permalink HERE.

What did I do?
If you look at the very bottom of the forum thread at the link immediately above, you will see a Pingback from this blog. This is a direct result of me putting that simple Permalink above, right in the content this post. No Trackback was needed. Essentially, the forum is now linking back to this blog because the blog referenced it using a simple link. The forum administrator approved the Pingback, so now it is visible at the bottom of the forum thread. It is a little bit simpler than using aTrackback because it is one less step to perform what is basically the same operation. Here is a pic of what it did to the forums. This appears at the very bottom of the thread.

What is the purpose of a Permalink?
A Permalink has several purposes. One as mentioned above, is for Pingback notifications. The other is so that you have a consistent link to a specific article of interest. For example, in many blogging softwares, if you simply copy the URL in the address bar, or bookmark it, when you return sometime in the future, the article you were trying to view may have been moved to the bottom of the page, or archived because new blog entires have been added since your last visit. The Permalink will always direct your browser to the desired article no matter how many updates have been made to the blog since your last visit. Permalink works in the same way on websites. When the link is created it will (well, it *SHOULD*) always link to the desired article.

Good Luck!
If you want to try it out, spread the word about this blog and use the Trackback link in this post on your blog, forum post, or other favorite script that supports Trackbacks.

If your software supports Pingbacks, feel free to link to the permalink found in the forum thread above.

 Well, I have had my fair share of issues with electronics in the past and generally have had excellent results in getting the problem resolved. That is not the case with Lenovo…

 I decided to do some searching to see if perhaps my battery was part of their recent Lenovo battery recall

Drat! No such luck. My battery was not covered. So I decided to call up customer service to see what could be done. I explained to them that I had purchased the computer in September of 2006 to which I was told that that was not true, and that I had actually purchased in in June of 2006. “WOW!” I thought, “Big brother is watching me, and I must really have a bad memory!”

So, I went to my favorite online retailer and looked at my order history. Sure enough, I in fact bought it on September 7th 2006. So I called customer service again to see where the discrepancy was.  They again told me reassuringly that I was crazy and had in fact made the purchase in June. To make a somewhat long story short, the question was finally asked, “Did you purchase this product from a retailer?” To which, the answer was “Yes, I did not buy it direct from Lenovo.” The subsequent reply from Lenovo was to the tune of, “Well, too bad but the warranty only extends from the date that the retailer has purchased the product.”

SAY WHAT?!?

That is correct folks, if you buy your Lenovo product from a retailer, your warranty is not worth the paper it is written on. It only extends from the date that the retailer bought the product from Lenovo. I had never heard of anything so ludicrous until today.

Later I found there is a way around this, and all one needs to do is provide a copy of the invoice from the retailer and they will supposedly honor their warranty, though, this is untested.

The Problem?
My laptop only came with a 1 year warranty. Seeing as it is October 10th 2007 (exactly one year + 1 month and 3 days since the order date) that I was no longer covered under warranty, and that even if I had my invoice, there was nothing they could do for me.

 I buy lots and LOTS of computers, have warrantied LOTS of computers and computer parts, as well as miscellaneous other electronic devices and have never been shut down on returning something that was slightly out of warranty. 33 days out of warranty and they refused to even offer any compensation of any kind. No coupons, no “Sorry about your situation,” nada.  I am also a business owner and I know the value of good customer service, even if it is at the Company’s expense and we often have to make good for something that is not directly our fault, and even sometimes outside of our Terms of Service or customer contracts. Responsible businesses know the value of happy customers and the best ones will do anything they can to keep them as customers.

Case in point:
I just returned a Sony Vaio the other day which was over a year old, and coincidentally, a Sony camera which was over 3 years old, which both were repaired free of charge, and returned in less than 2 week on each item.

The icing on the cake:
When I asked if i could send it back to them for repair, they said “It wasn’t possible” and that I would have to find a computer repair shop to repair the device, to which I promptly responded with “Thank you, you have been very helpful” and we ended the wasting each other’s time. It is sometimes hard not to scream at the person on the other end of the line, but it wasn’t her fault I suppose. I still have a hard time believing I can’t send my product to them for repair. Why would they turn down an additional revenue stream? Madness.

Summary:
I won’t be buying any Lenovo products ever again, and I hope you strongly consider their ridiculous warranty policy before you make the purchase. Remember, if you don’t keep your receipt or invoice for 365 days or longer you will be forced to use the date that your retailer purchased the product. In my case this would have taken 3 full months off of my “valuable” 1 year warranty.

What a crock. Or is it crook?
 

 Referrer spam serves one purpose, to get people to look at the referring site. This is usually done when someone sees a high-ranking referrer in their web stats, or, if a site has an automated script that lists and/or links back to whatever it thinks is a “top referrer.”

So spammers have once again decided to ruin a good thing for everyone by exploiting this automated link-back that some scripts have built-in, and have decided to artificially bloat your traffic stats in hopes that your site will link back to theirs. Not only is this annoying, but it wastes your server’s CPU resources due to extra logging and other processing associated with these idiots who cannot get legitimate traffic to their sites. It also can eat up disk space due to larger logs.

 So what can be done?
Well if you run Apache web server like most of us do you are in luck. you can block these referrers for good using our friend .htaccess.

First you need to figure out who the referrers are that you want to ban. Mine might look like this:

http://www.xtreamsurf.com/surf.php
http://www.parrotsurf.net/surf.php
http://www.advertising-surf.net/surf.php
http://www.aussieearners.com/surf.php
http://arobuhits.biz/surf.php

Please note:
For this article I have spelled “Referrer” as “Referrer.”  Somehow “Referer” (notice, only one “r”) made it into the HTTP standard even though it is spelled incorrectly. Inside of the .htaccess file you are about to create you should specify:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer

instead of the correct spelling:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referrer

You can substitute “ReferrerSpam” below with whatever you want to call it, so long as your deny from line matches what you have specified for your environmental variable.

Once you have a list of your spammers, and have taken mental notes on the above, open up your .htaccess file and add these lines: 

## Tag our known referrer spammers
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “.*.xtreamsurf.com” ReferrerSpam
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “.*.parrotsurf.net” ReferrerSpam
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “.*.advertising-surf.net” ReferrerSpam
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “.*.aussieelearners.com” ReferrerSpam
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “.*.arobuhits.biz” ReferrerSpam

## Block our known referrer spammers
order deny,allow
deny from env=ReferrerSpam

Notably, the sites above are actually known referrer spammers (at the time of this writing) so feel free to add them to your own rules.

Making sure its working properly:
 If you want to test it out put a link to your site that is doing the blocking (siteA), from another site that you might have (siteB). Next add siteB to the it to the deny rules for siteA. If you click the link to siteA from siteB you should get the 403 “Forbidden” page that Apache serves up to those that you dislike.

 That’s all there is to it. For information on mod_setenvif see the official Apache website, and maybe ask them to fix the spelling issue with “referrer” while you are there

 But there is another preconceived notion that most people inherently believe.  As consumers, we have been conditioned to look for “the best deal.” Based on what we generally know, it makes perfect sense to shop around for the lowest price.   If you can get a MammothBurger with Cheese, Fries and a Drink for $4.99, one would guess that it’s a great value over the ColossalBurger Meal Deal that can be purchased right across the street, especially when the Colossal deal costs $6.99. 

“More for less, equals better.”

This is almost always untrue in today’s web hosting industry.

 The current trend with web hosting companies is to advertise HUGE packages, usually equivalent or exceeding the limitations of an entire dedicated server, in the hopes of attracting new business.  And it seems to be working. In years past, the marketing trick was to offer things like “Unlimited Disk Space” and “Unlimited Bandwidth.”

Why “Unlimited” Failed Miserably. 
“Unlimited” sales tactics worked great for many hosts for a while, but soon, consumers got smart to what was really going on. Web hosts that were offering “Unlimited” often over-booked (oversold) their servers to hundreds of times their true capacity.  This was a time when reseller web hosting was just beginning to blossom, and many new hosting companies were just emerging.  It was now possible to own a web hosting company from the comfort of your living room, in-between class, or as a side job to earn some extra income to one’s regular day job.

 These new companies found themselves not only having to learn how to run a business, but had to compete with the established “Unlimited” players.   A great portion of these new hosting companies ended up folding due the the largely unsustainable business model.  Some of the smarter hosts actually got lucky and were able to sell off their businesses sometimes for up to 24 times monthly revenue before they headed for the hills. A great number of web hosts ended up vanishing off the face of the earth completely, with no advance notification to their customers. Site owners were left high and dry, often with no access to their site files, important databases and remotely stored images.  The hosting companies that were still online, ended up absorbing the customers that were looking for a new host, because their last one was no where to be found.  Meanwhile, these companies ended up having to maintain their “Unlimited” packages with more and more customers.  For a while anyways…

 Performance levels for shared hosting sites on unlimited hosting plans was so bad, many sites were simply unusable.  Customer accounts were being dog-piled onto any available machine.  Sites got slow. Servers crashed. Restorations of sites could take weeks (the longest I witnessed was three full weeks) to complete on a recently crashed machine due to the number of sites on the server and limited restoration technology. Ahh, the good old days of hosting.  

At one point in time, not long ago, if you saw the words “unlimited” and “web hosting” on the same page, it was a sign to run, and run fast! Lots of us who have been hosting web sites for a few years or more remember those early lessons and are already suspicious of the latest marketing ploys….

 Many web hosts have changed the marketing tricks they use now to get around the old unlimited cliche. The trend now is to offer huge plans for unbelievable prices. It is not uncommon these days to see 250 gigs of disk space and 1000 TB (yes, Terabytes!) of transfer sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.00-$10.00 USD per month.

The Birth of  Overselling
 How do they do it? They might as well just say “Unlimited” right on the package details. Today’s buzz word is called “Overselling,” and it is nothing new. If you have ever been in an airport, you know that airlines do it all the time. The difference with airlines and web hosting is, if an airline overbooks it’s flight, you are going to get a coupon, or even bumped up to first-class on your next flight. With web hosting, chances are you are going to end up paying the hosting company for the upgrade. Weird right?

If you look closely at these plans, you will notice that all hosts selling these ridiculous hosting packages have one thing in common….FINE PRINT. Not that fine print is an evil thing on its own, but the nature in which this fine print is being used it troublesome.

 The key thing to realize is you will never be able to use all the space or transfer that was sold to you.  One common fine print item (in so many words) states that: “You can only use the space for website files.”  Well what the heck does that mean exactly?  Who decides what “is”, and what “is not” website file? Your host does, and they are the sole arbiter, no ifs, ands, or buts…. So if you are thinking you will be able to store your entire MP3 collection online, think again! Got lots of pictures for a gallery? How about lots of large video files? Planning on running the next youtube for $6.00/mo? It’s not going to happen folks.

 Another good fine print item is along the lines of “You can do whatever you want, so long as you do not use too much of the server resources.” This is usually vague as to what the exact definition of “too much” is but basically its saying that if you plan on using a dynamic web site that uses scripting languages like ASP, PHP, Perl, etc., you basically do not qualify for this plan….not if you plan on using all 250 gigs of space they sold you. Rules are in place that if you use “too much CPU time” you are in violation of the Terms of Service and no longer qualify for your selected plan. The kicker here is that on an overloaded server, your scripts are going to take a bazillion times longer (sorry, I do not have scientific numbers) to execute than they would on a well maintained, and non-oversold server. Your scripts could be perfectly fine, but since you are sharing a server with so many sites all competing for the same resources, naturally, it is going to take longer to complete it’s task. So guess what? You get penalized and have to upgrade. WOW! This web hosting thing is fun!

 Once the hook is in your cheek, and you are a customer, it is generally realized that you probably do not want to go through the hassle of shopping for a new web host, transferring your site files, possible disruptions in things like email, and all the other fun that comes with changing web hosting providers.  After all, it took a long time to find this great deal right? (remember, More for less, equals better right?) Oh, and speaking of hooks… 

And Now, For The Bait and Switch…
You will shortly be offered “upgrade” options generally anywhere from two, to two hundred times the original cost of the package you thought you were buying.  Some hosts will move you to a dedicated server automatically.
 (price: $150-$500/mo)

 Can anyone say ripoff? The sad truth is this tactic works extremely well and several of the largest web hosts on the Internet today have grown to hosting empires in just a few short years using similar strategies.

 To clear up any misconceptions, this is a natural progression for almost any popular website. At some point any rapidly growing site is going to need a dedicated server because it will be a detriment to other websites on the shared hosting platform where it started. However, the problem here is that customers are being sold plans that they will never be able to use, they are not reading the fine print, and consent to letting the host decide what is, and what is not, “web site files.” the host tells them they need something larger than they do, and customers are eager to comply.

 If I bought 250 gigs of disk space, I would expect to put anything I wanted on that space. Who cares what it is? I bought it didn’t I? These days the answer is yes AND no it seems. Yes, it is plausible, but probably not possible.

Lets Pull the Numbers for a sec..
The fundamental question remains: Who can use a plan that offers 250 Gigs of space and hundreds or thousands of gigs of transfer? Basically no one!

 In order to actually use that kind of space and be within limitations of the fine print, you would need a static HTML site with virtually no scripting, no movies, no MP3s or other large files. Considering a typical web pages is about 50KB in size, and a “web hosting gigabyte” is equivalent to 1,000,000 KB, you’d have to build 20,000 web pages to use just one gigabyte of disk space! To consume all 250 gigs of space, you would be writing 5,000,000 (5 million) web pages.

 To put it into perspective, if you were to simply count out loud  (yep, people would think you were strange, I don’t suggest it) to 5 million, at the rate of 1 number per second, it would take you 83,333 minutes, which is equivalent to 1,389 hours, or roughly 59 days!!!

And that is simply counting the number out loud, assuming you never had to stop to take a breath of air, never had to pee, and ate so many MammothBurgers you never had to stop and eat.

 So before you fall for the latest web hosting marketing tricks, make sure to read the fine print. If it is important to you that you are able to actually use the space that was sold to you, (wow, that’s a novel concept!) and you do not want your web host snooping around your private files, and telling you what you can, and cannot have on the server, look for a realistic hosting package at a realistic price.

Ask your host if you can store your entire music library on their servers. If they say no, you are probably want to reconsider your hosting decision.  Ask yourself how you got to that site in the first place… Chances are you came to their site off of a series of sponsored ads, marketing machines, forum pumpers, and maybe a hosting directory or two that were either paid handsomely to put that host in the “Top 10,” or that directory was simply owned by that hosting company.

Do your research folks.  Look closely.  Ask your friends.  Consider the money back guarantee option, and read the fine print.