This doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me because I knew that Webmail.us has been a Rackspace client for a long time. I have to commend Rackspace on picking up a fine company… Source: Web Host Industry News | Web Host Rackspace Buys Webmail.us
October 1, 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Managed hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting (rackspace.com) announced on Monday it has acquired email hosting provider Webmail.us (webmail.us). The companies will work together to focus on providing a comprehensive mail platform and related services to companies of all sizes.
I learned a cool trick today while working on an upgrade to a clients real estate solution. I was looking for a way to dynamically link out to a Google Map for each property my client had listed in their database. I ran across a post that Jane at Xlinesoft had responded to a user with that demonstrated how to do this and gave it a shot and it worked. Since I was already capturing “address”, “city”, “state”, and “zip” when the client entered a new listing into their system I just went into the Visual Editor of PHPRunner and selected the Custom Format option and input an expression using those fields.
It seems to be working well, you can go to: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com/projects/powersite_real_estate_demo/property_view.php?editid1=1 and click on the “View Google Map to Property” link to preview this in action. If you want to go and read Jane’s post, click here…
I created a Real Estate solution for a client a while back in php and it has worked well for them but once the site launched we noticed that it wasn’t getting crawled by the search engines as well as we would have liked for it to so I did a little research. I knew that typically data called in from a database dynamically presented a problem when it came to getting the best SEO performance.
I asked a few developers this past year at HostingCon about this and they suggested I look into Mod Rewrite in apache and see if that wouldn’t help out. I checked it out and so far the results have been phenomenal for the client. Here’s what I did in case any of you run into a smilar situation. I first created an .htaccess file to redirect to a “home page”, in this case it’s called index2.php. Next I did a rewrite for the dynamically generated pages. The .htaccess file looks like this:
Options +FollowSymLinksRewriteEngine OnRewriteRule ^index2.php prime-listings/index_view.php?editid1=1RewriteRule ^prime-listings/lakefront_homes.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Lakefront+Homes&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/lakefront_lots.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Lakefront+Lots&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/lakeview_homes.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Lakeview+Homes&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/lakeview_lots.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Lakeview+Lots&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/river_properties.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=River&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/residential_properties.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Residential&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/residential_lots.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Residential+Lots&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=RewriteRule ^prime-listings/commercial_properties.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Commercial&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=typeRewriteRule ^prime-listings/farm_land.php prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=acreage&SearchOption=Contains&SearchField=
So now for example, instead of using http://www.greersferryrealestatecenter.com/prime-listings/prime_listings_list.php?a=search&value=1&SearchFor=Residential&SearchOption=Equals&SearchField=type as a link, I just use this: http://www.greersferryrealestatecenter.com/prime-listings/residential_properties.php. This is apparently more favorable to the search engines.
When I first got into this business I naturally had to do a whole lot of learning, most of which I was able to do on my own but I did find a few places on the web that were very helpful. One of the first forum communities that I got involved in was Thomas Brunt’s Outfront Community. I met a lot of helpful people there, a few of these people I have contracted work out to and have had long-standing business relationships with through the years. If you are a developer and sometimes bump your head on things or maybe you are a newbie and just want to bounce some issues you are having off some people who won’t beat you up because you are new I would recommend this forum. I have been absent for a while just because I have been busy on projects for clients but as of late I have returned and try to stay read up at least one afternoon a week or so. Link to OutFront Webmaster Forum
Granted Webalizer has lost favor since products like Urchin (now Google Analytics) have become available, but it has been around a long time and can still provide some useful information. Especially to a client who just wants to know what their most popular pages are, where their traffic comes from, or how many hits / pageviews they have had. Explaining Webalizer to a client can however take all day long if you aren’t careful. I wish I had a dollar for every minute I had spent doing just that though. There is a good website though that we use now as an explanation of Webalizer, it is: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html.
I just found out today that SWSoft (our current Control Panel and Virtualization Software Vendor) has purchased Ensim (our previous Control Panel Vendor). I was a little surprised with this news because there weren’t a lot of rumors this year at HostingCon about this possibly happening, maybe there were and I just didn’t hear them.
When we first started offering Managed Hosting at Pleth we utilized the Ensim Control Panel and really liked it but when relocating our servers to the Planet we decided to just go with what they supported, which at the time was only Plesk. After having used Plesk for a few years I don’t think I would entertain going back to Ensim though, even with Sergey and the SWSoft team taking the software over, Plesk is just that good in my opinion.
It is my understanding that the intention of SWSoft at this time is to keep both Control Panel providers as seperate entities, of course that could change down the road, but the primary goal I hear is that they are wanting to push their Open Fusion Initiative out to existing ISV’s.
