Websites

What CSS rules work with All Email Clients

Dec 14, 2011 by Paul White

Recently one of my clients alerted me that the HTML newsletter I built for them is not displaying correctly on outlook 2010.  So with a little research I had to figure out the best way to rebuild the newsletter to ensure it displays consistently with all email clients.  If you are a developer that is used to using box model designs ( div tags ), then you might want to rethink that approach.  Here are my findings.

How to setup 301 Redirects in IIS 7 for good SEO

Nov 14, 2011 by Paul White

Everybody knows that in order to properly preserve Google Page Rank when you are moving a page on a site, you need to perform a 301 Redirect to the new page, as this tells search engines this is a permanent move, and to record it into their index.  However few people realize the additional problem of duplicate content across multiple domains.  So if you have both your domain and your www subdomain pointing at the same site, its likely that google is penalizing you for this. So in this article I show you how to properly setup a website with multiple domains using IIS 7.5 and 301 redirects for good SEO.

ABCPDF component HTML render is blank solution

Nov 7, 2011 by Paul White

Recently I had to migrate one of my clients from their VPS to my colocated box.  The Old box was windows Server 2003, and my server was Windows Server 2008 R2.  However after migrating the first of several sites, I noticed the ABCPDF component was not working properly.  Any request to generate a PDF would error with "HTML render is blank".  If you are in the same situation, then I have a fix.

Pinch to Zoom not working on some websites

Nov 6, 2011 by Paul White

Recently I was working on a new website for a client.  When I got close to completion I checked to see how it looked across various browsers ( Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera ).  All looked great, then I tried to view it on my HTC Sensation ( Android 2.3.7 ).  Normally when pulling up a website on my cell phone the browser will zoom out to fit the entire website into the width of the screen.  Then you can drag the view around and use pinch to zoom to zoom into places you want to actually read.  However on this new site I couldn't get it working.  The solution was very easy.  Click for details.

No more charging sales tax on Website Hosting in Texas

Oct 13, 2011 by Paul White

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts emailed me yesterday with a update of changes to the Texas State Tax Codes.  As I glanced down this 16 page PDF, I noticed House Bill 1841 ( Effective Immediately ) Use of Internet Hosting Does Not Create Nexus.

"This bill provides that a person whose only activity in this state is as a user of Internet hosting is not engaged in business in Texas."

This tells me that I no longer have to charge sales tax to my out of state clients who host their websites with me.  Awesome!  However don't take my word for it.  Texas Tax code is rather complex, and I plan to call tomorrow and ask the Texas Comptroller myself. 

Server Colocation and Cloud Hosting Houston and Dallas

Oct 4, 2011 by Paul White

If you need a datacenter to colocate your hardware, or if you need a really fast cloud, then I can't say enough good things about FastPCNetworks.  I have colocated my server with them for about 1 1/2 years.  The truth is you don't really know who you are hosting with until something goes wrong.  Its not how they treat you when everything is up and running. Its about how they treat you when things go down.  I have been with plenty of hosting companies.  Before I brought my server to FastPCNetworks, I had been on  Shared Hosting, VPS, dedicated, and cloud with some of the largest hosting companies in the world.  Eventually after dealing with terrible technical support, and some of the cheapest hardware, I decided that it was about time I build and colocate my own server.  At least that way when it goes down, I can fix it myself, instead of waiting for a ticket to make it to tech support days later.

Google Adsense Ad Serving disabled to your site

Aug 29, 2011 by Paul White

To generate a little revenue from your blog or website google adsense is a great option.  But when you an email from google with the subject of "Google Adsense ad serving has been disabled to your site", you suddenly find your only source of revenue gone.

This happened to me, but I was able to appeal this and get my Adsense ads turned back on.  If you find yourself in this situation and are running borderline adult websites, here are some tips that might help you.

Reasons for new Blog Layout

Aug 26, 2011 by Paul White

When I built my blog over 6 years ago, I was just looking for a way to share my thoughts as well as maybe make a little money with google adsense.  At first I was posting to my blog daily.  Of course Adsense in the beginning doesn't pay crap.  Maybe 20 cents / day.  So after a while my motivations to post daily started to run dry.  I didn't take the blog too serious until one of my articles went viral.  When you write an article that catches on and spreads rapidly through the internet, you start to think about how things on the blog could be better.  After all when 5000 people all hit your blog in one day, you start to wonder if that little optimization you have been putting off would have maybe resulted in a few extra clicks.

Trick to getting past Gmail Spam Filters

Aug 11, 2011 by Paul White

After building a CRM system for a company, we noticed that some of our marketing emails were hitting the Gmail's Spam folder.  A little Trial and Error revealed some interesting facts about how Google's Spam Filter works.

Debugging Faulting Application w3wp.exe Crashes

May 31, 2011 by Paul White

If your websites are going down, due to your application pool failing, or being automatically shut down after a few application errors, then you have a major problem on your hands.  In my case the symptom was A process serving the application pool suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service, in my system logs.  If you have each website running in its own application pool then you know which website is going down, but the errors being displayed give you no hints as to the cause.  I recently had a website that was randomly going down.  Sometimes it would go down every few days, and other times it would only crash once a month.  So I finally did some digging for the cause, and found it.  If you don't know where to start in debugging your crashed application pools, this might help.