Archive for March 2009

Modify RankChecker Firefox Add-On for Multiple Users

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 by Joyce Johnston

RankChecker is a handy Firefox add-on from SEOBook.com that allows you easily to track search engine results for a particular domain. It rescues you from the wearisome task of entering keywords into a search engine and paging through the results until you find your website. RankChecker also allows you to save results, called presets, to a sqlite database in your Firefox profile.

As a web developer, however, I work with a team of developers and with dozens of websites whose search engine results we want to track and share. To make it easier to do that, I modified RankChecker to allow us to save presets to files stored with clients’ website files on our development server rather than to our individual Firefox profiles. I also modified RankChecker’s scheduled tasks to run presets from each of the databases and, instead of overwriting the preset when the task is run, saving the new data to a new preset. That allows us to keep an historical record of our websites’ keyword performances in search engine results.

Posted in Firefox Extensions, SEO | 4 Comments »

Tracking down malicious code on a linux box

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 by tburns

This blog site uses a WordPress theme called Blue Zinfandel developed by a guy named Brian Gardner. When I first launched it, I spent several days looking for something I liked and found and downloaded this from – I have no idea where…

Yesterday I discovered malicious code had been inserted into the header.php file. I should have been more careful… but I wasn’t, and I had to spend a few hours tracking down the offending code and cleaning it up. Here’s what happened:

First, the environment: I run this site on a virtualized Fedora box anchored to Xen and hosted by linode.com. I built a customized iptables script to filter traffic and can select incoming and outgoing traffic through a series of 1s and 0s and a quick redeploy. For example, I have a list of variables that can be assigned for client function and a list that can be assigned for server function.
Read more »

Posted in Linux | 4 Comments »

CME/UC500: IP phones, dual-line, and call waiting

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 by tburns

Most of the 7900 series Cisco IP phones can be configured for dual-line capability. The most notable exceptions are the 7936/7 series conference phones and the 7921 series wireless phones that are both considered single-line. In this case, dual-line function allows an incoming call to display on an IP phone when that phone is off-hook or otherwise already in use. This is not to be confused with a telco-enabled call-waiting feature that may be installed on an analog, CO line. For information on how to use that feature, reference this, earlier post.

There may be reasons why you wouldn’t want a phone to display more than one active/alerting call at a time. If, for example, you have a call center or other type of hunt group function, you may not want additional calls to be coming in to a hunt group member when that person/phone is already engaged.
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Posted in VoIP | No Comments »

There’s more than one way to Multibox

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 by admin

PhatFusion’s Mootools Multibox is often used for slide shows. It is typically set up with an <a> tag surrounding an image thumbnail, something like this:

<a id="mb1" class="mb" title="Image Title 1 (jpg)" href="/images/my-bigger-image.jpg">
  <img border="0" alt="" src="my-thumbnail.jpg" />
</a>

The href attribute of the <a> tag determines what appears in the multibox when it opens. In the case of a slideshow, it’s an image. You click the thumbnail and the box opens, displaying the larger view of the image. But there are lots of other ways to use Multibox. Here are two alternatives.

Posted in Mootools | 15 Comments »