Some times the simple solutions, make the biggest difference to a user experience….

Colorful Tabs | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. An essential.

UPDATE: It seems that the Colorful Tabs authors homepage is down, as a result I appear to be getting hits from google and comments about features. I’d like to stress that I have nothing to do with the development of Colorful Tabs and you have my apologies if my post appeared that way. You have stumbled across a post from my firefox recommendations category where by I post links to firefox add-ons I like have installed and recommend to my friends.

UPDATE: This theme has been updated, please see the new post, thanks.

I’m thinking about hosting a forum for some friends to use, so I thought I’d take a look at bbpress; I look after phpbb for my better half, and find the patching & modding a bit of a pain, the stuff photomatt does never lets me down, so I thought I’d take a look at his attempt at a forum.

For “regular” forum users I think they may find the interface a bit of a shock, but that doesn’t bother me, there are some features missing, but the community have been putting plugins together to plug the gap (poor, poor pun, sorry !).

The main thing I noticed was a lack of theme repository and EDIT: Theme & Plugin Repo here at http://proforums.palmansworld.com, I really hate green with an absolute passion, so although the default theme is slick, I couldn’t stand looking at the green ! Anyway, since this could be a service on my work in progress, I wanted it to match the k2 theme I’m using, I found there wasn’t one available to download, so to cut a long post short….

Download k2 for bbpress here

It’s a work in progress, there’s a demo available here sorry demo closed., I don’t think it’s a bad 1st crack !

EDIT: I’ve added a screenshot since the demo site will probably change is down.

Recently I decided to re-organise my bookmarks toolbar, and added links to my nagios and cacti installations. I noticed that the favicons where missing.

For cacti, there’s a how to, but I found it a little over kill – I didn’t need step 2 , as my catci install is an rpm from dag, and I didn’t bother with step 4, as it worked without it, but hey ymmv!

Nagios was simpler, depending on how you installed nagios, will effect file permission , owners, directories etc. Again, I’ve got another dag rpm, so for me I logged in as root,

cd /usr/share/nagios/
wget http://www.nagios.org/images/favicon.ico

then edit index.html. just before </head> , insert

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/nagios/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

refresh your browser (delete the cache if necessary), and job done !

An absolute must for anyone who uses a google service, best enhancement is adding https to things like, docs, gmail & calendar !

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience — Firefox Extension
CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

I noticed the other day, that the google rank for linickx.com has dropped from a respectable 4, to a pitiful 0 !

The reason for the drop is obvious, November & December have been busy real work months for me, and I’ve not been able to post much online.. no art, no php, no comments, nothing ! Now photomatt has recently blogged about the disconnect between productive good techies and people who have time to blog, so I won’t go into it here; I will just say that I agree, and I think my blog reflects that. What I didn’t realise about my google rank is that the age of your links contributes to your overall PR. So although all those other links to linickx.com still exist on the web they’re getting older so they must not count as much; of course this is speculation, google keep to themselves how their ranking is made up, but it’s the only thing that’s changed.

Anyway to get back on the map I thought I’d better take a look at these SEO posts I’ve been seeing about the place (which I guess this is yet another of ! )

1st step – site maps !
Now I already had a sitemap, powered by Arne Brachhold’s wordpress plug in , but it doesn’t hurt to check it’s working every now & again; to do this I logged into google sitemaps and checked out the reports, basically it’ll tell you if there have been any errors, remembers errors mean google can’t view the page properly, which in turn effects it’s PR. I had a couple (4) of “404 Not founds”, so I went through my posts and fixed them.

Validate your pages !
Search engines can’t see your site, they can only read the html code, and if that’s wrong, then so will the index and PR be. I’d gotten out of the habit of checking pages, you’ll notice at the bottom of my theme is a link to say this site is valid, it’s really important that after posting you click this to make sure it works; if it doesn’t, well all is lost before you start.

Page & Post titles
All the articles talk about setting your page titles correctly, I’d noticed ages ago that anaylitics showed the same title for stuff but I’d never gotten round to looking at it. It turns out I’d made a “school boy error” on my custom theme, and the <title> tag within my html didn’t grab the post title from wordpress – DOH ! It was eaily fixed by adding <?php the_title(); ?> into header.php. If you didn’t write your theme there is a plugin that can do it for you…. sadly neither of these fix the titles for my custom scripts, so I guess I’ll have to stick that back on the to-do list !

Meta Tags
“Back in the day” meta tags where the way serach engines classified your site, but abuse of the keywords tag, by repeating words to improve PR, means that they’re not as important as they used to be. Today though, I’m on the search engine offensive apart from spam I’m willing to try anything. This wordpress plugin does the job for you. The advantage of using the plugin, rather than setting them in my theme, means that the description can be dynamially added based on the post, rather than having the same description for all pages, the more words that people search for that hit me, the better !

Related Posts
Search engines need a way to weave through your site, in the past I’ve relied on my web site map (not the same as sitemap.xml) to do the job, but it appears that this is not enough, so I went for the related entries wordpress plugin, the good thing about the latest version is that the formatting can be done within the wordpress admin interface. (The reason this is good, as it means minimal changes to my theme php, which is when problems occur.)

Share This !
At the beginning of what is becoming a marathon post, I talked about my PR being related to incoming links (i.e. links to linickx.com). In the past I’ve just had a small “Bookmark Page” link on each post, this link would then submit the page to del.icio.us for people to share, well alex king has written a share this plugin to expand the idea, but for any service. I like the idea alot, now all I need to do is to find a way to submit my posts to all the services automagically.

Nothing to do with SEO
The final change I’ve made was to install a snap plugin, now this will have no effect on my PR, but it is quite cool, what it does is add a little floating window preview any external links, allowing readers to take a glimpse of what they’re clicking on before they actually click. To be honest, I’ve not yest decided if this is a good thing or annoying, but would be cool is if it could be plugged into mcafee site advisor so that users could see if it’s a safe link before clicking it.

Fingers crossed this will have an impact, but one thing is for sure, it won’t hurt !

• LinuxToons
  LinuxToons – Linux in main-stream cartoons
  (tags: comics linux)

I think it’s safe to say, if you can’t get something to work then the manual is rubbish or the user is stupid, with setting up snmp v3 on linux, the user is me, so the fault is probably lies there.

SNMPv3 moves away from the community string idea from older version, and into a username & password combo. The correct tool for creating users is snmpusm, but no matter how many times I read the man page I can’t work it out. I get that you copy a user from the initial user, but how do you create the initial user ? If I try on my box I just get an “snmp timeout” error.

I found a work around for my stupidity, on redhat based boxes (RHEL, CENTOS, WHEL, FEDORA) there is a development package to do the job, so to to get the snmp v3 encrypted goodness going run,

yum install net-snmp-utils net-snmp-devel

Yum will pick up the dependencies you need. Now as root, run (make sure snmpd is stopped first)

/usr/bin/net-snmp-config --create-snmpv3-user -a PASSWORD MYUSERNAME

You’ll get the following output…

adding the following line to /var/net-snmp/snmpd.conf:
   createUser MYUSERNAME MD5 "PASSWORD" DES
adding the following line to /usr/share/snmp/snmpd.conf:
   rwuser MYUSERNAME

Before testing make sure that UDP 161 is permitted through iptables, and restart snmpd

/etc/init.d/snmpd start

now from another box, you can test, snmpwalk is the command, if it works your screen will fill up with loads of interesting snmp stuff, if it fails you’ll get an error. Timeout usually means UDP 161 is blocked or they can’t ping each other, and you’ll get authentication failure messages if there is a problem with your snmp accounts.

snmpwalk -v 3 -a md5 -A PASSWORD -x des -X PASSWORD -u MYUSERNAME IP.ADD.RE.SS

good luck !

I practiced a new x-mas change freeze idea this year, shut down un-important systems.

The idea is simple, systems are at “risk” if you don’t update them, if you update them then they change, if they change they can fail, if they fail you’ve got work to do

I didn’t fancy doing any extra work over x-mas this year so I decided to shut down any system that didn’t neeeeeeed to be online, i.e. the box that monitors this site (nagios) and the box that backs up this server (boxbackup); the up shot was this, linickx.com was the only server online, everything else was safe, if linickx.com had a problem I could restore from my backup, and so I didn’t have to worry about any updates, log in reports, etc etc with my boxes, which meant my inbox was quieter, and so was my christmas !

I don’t think this is an reasonable approach for a business as some systems have to stay online over the christmas period but a lesson can be learnt, the chances of something go wrong will decrease if less is running, and this will also give the opportunity for mangers to review what is needed , and approach the all important cost saving initiative:)

Anyway, now that every-thing’s back online I’d like to wish my readers a happy new year !

• Box Backup
  (tags: backup)

• Nicks Google Public Notebook
  added to del.icio.us so that I can find this page from other peoples browsers
  (tags: google notebook)
• CipherDyne
  (tags: linux security)