Saturday, May 12. 2007
Update to the MSN contact grabbing script
There have been a handful of people contact me recently stating that the MSNM contact fetching script doesn't work, or works poorly, with email addresses other than @hotmail.com. Addresses ending in @hotmail.co.uk, @hotmail.fr or none hotmail addresses were hanging and not returning results.
Obviously not good so after a disappointingly long wait I was able to devote some time to fixing the problem. Last weekend I was able to put something together which I think was going to work and sent it out to a few people to beta test.
Over the past few days I've been getting back responses (thanks to all those involved!) and for the most part the responses have been positive. It still isn't 100% but it's much better. The remaining problems are a result of taking someone else's code and twisting it to suit a new purpose. I would have been far better figuring out how it did what it did and then refactoring it to meet the new aims.
The new and improved script can be downloaded from the original thread or from the MSN contact grab page in the new scripts section.
The web service has been updated to reflect the changes.
Obviously not good so after a disappointingly long wait I was able to devote some time to fixing the problem. Last weekend I was able to put something together which I think was going to work and sent it out to a few people to beta test.
Over the past few days I've been getting back responses (thanks to all those involved!) and for the most part the responses have been positive. It still isn't 100% but it's much better. The remaining problems are a result of taking someone else's code and twisting it to suit a new purpose. I would have been far better figuring out how it did what it did and then refactoring it to meet the new aims.
The new and improved script can be downloaded from the original thread or from the MSN contact grab page in the new scripts section.
The web service has been updated to reflect the changes.
Sunday, May 6. 2007
Posted by Jonathan Street
in Website Management, Website Promotion at
15:19
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Get your WWW sorted
As I write this http://staples.co.uk is reporting that it is down. There are probably quite a few people interested in shopping at one of their stores going elsewhere. If the site was actually down that would be fair enough. It isn't though. http://www.staples.co.uk works perfectly.
You quite often see 'server not found' warnings when visiting a site without www., for example my university, but to get through to the site and have it tell you the site is down is even worse. It demonstrates that whoever manages the server knows what they are doing but carelessly hasn't set things up correctly.
It doesn't matter which way round you have things but all traffic to www. should be redirected to the www free version or vice versa.
There are three main reasons why this is important:
- All your visitors actually reach your site
- No duplicate content issues in the search engines (this is assuming that both versions of the site actually work)
- Strengthens search engine positions by concentrating all incoming links on one site.
All it takes is a couple of lines in a .htaccess file if you're on an Apache server
%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
It's not difficult so please sort this out.
You quite often see 'server not found' warnings when visiting a site without www., for example my university, but to get through to the site and have it tell you the site is down is even worse. It demonstrates that whoever manages the server knows what they are doing but carelessly hasn't set things up correctly.
It doesn't matter which way round you have things but all traffic to www. should be redirected to the www free version or vice versa.
There are three main reasons why this is important:
- All your visitors actually reach your site
- No duplicate content issues in the search engines (this is assuming that both versions of the site actually work)
- Strengthens search engine positions by concentrating all incoming links on one site.
All it takes is a couple of lines in a .htaccess file if you're on an Apache server
%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
It's not difficult so please sort this out.
