ArghWebWorks

I’m not here to sing the death of Sendmail. Let’s just say that I’m tired of editing arcane files in order to compile even more arcane files. I’d like some closer sense of what the email server’s doing, and frankly, Sendmail and I aren’t the best of friends. We can work together, but we can’t really dance or sing.

My boss’s business hosts domains (like most do, these days), and so we have a whole bunch of pre-existing users, domains, forwards and autoresponders. We have been creating system users for each of these users, which can confuse the matter. I’ve already gotten ftp to read the database information for the users so we didn’t need shell accounts for that, and I wanted to do the same for email. Seems like a fairly simple idea; and yes, some people have walked this road before. I chose “qmail” for our system based on its speed and ease-of-configuration.

I strongly recommend the Life With Qmail site. He’s done a terrific job making it way too easy to install qmail. If you plan to incorporate qmail and mysql, however, first go through his setup. You can even patch vpopmail to use mysql. I don’t recommend patching both qmail and vpopmail; since both have hardcoded information in their configurations, it was very difficult to get them to talk to each other. I wound up receiving email ok for users in the database, but they couldn’t get their email. They could check it, but it wasn’t there. In order to keep from maintaining 3 database tables (the original hosting one, the vpopmail one and the qmail one). To simplify matters, I ripped out the qmail and started over without the mysql-patched version (but kept the mysql-patched vpopmail).

To be continued …

Try reading the web like Jon Walker: every time you come to a misspelled word in an article, stop and move on to the next thing in your queue. You’ll cut out an average of 90% of the web you read. Misspelled words connote illiteracy and a sense of ‘half assed-ness’. If you can’t be bothered to use an online spell checker, how is a client to know that you’ll take care and concern with their site?

Matt Cutts has an excellent post on the subject with an egregious example.

A client came to me with a need for a new webmail application. They were tired of constant telephone calls from their mail users, complaining of missing emails, lost connections, sending problems; they wanted to “fix” this by installing a new webmail service.

I looked at my trusty Squirrelmail and shook my head sadly. It’s dated and texty- kind of techy looking. I was looking for something a little more snazzy; maybe some DHTML, some graphics, you know, something to compare with the prettiness of gmail.

I stumbled across RoundCube and was totally blown away by their demo. Accompanying the download page was a slick,
thorough walkthrough. Ten minutes later, I was logging into their mail server with the roundcube interface. As an added touch, I installed squirrelmail into a seperate directory, to give them some other options. But I know which one I’d rather use.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been around the internet a while. And you may think that you’ve soaked up some of the wild internet search engine information. If you’re more like me, you’d be wrong. Search Engines, like Google and Yahoo, can be a little more particular; and this is a good thing.  Search Engines aren’t about people making money or manipulating the results, what really drives Google is people using their engine to find accurate and relevant results. While Search Engine Optimization is important for web-masters, these people (us) need to remember that the search engines aren’t really working for the same purposes as most webmasters.
I generally presume that with solid, interesting content, excellent linking, good meta tags, page and image descriptions, and you’d be golden. Unfortunately, that’s not all it takes with the current Search Engines. Keyword density, link popularity, page freshness, all these and more can impact the weight of your site in the engines’ results.

This tool from Sitening helps iron out a lot of the fluff from your content and HTML(link) and optimize my site for search engines. Using it, I’ve found that several sites I’ve worked on could really use a helping hand. Some of the things this tool shows might not be weighted correctly, but it’s certainly one weapon you should have in your arsenal.
Sitening SEO Analyzer

Google technologies is expected to leap into the hardware business tomorrow, following the keynote address that everyone’s talking about. We have an advanced image of the new computer. Get yours at Walmart today!