Joystiq declared last friday Monkey Island music day, and who am I to argue with them…
so clicky clicky to check out the youtube videos on their site or go to the SCUMM bar for mp3′s, midis and other Monkey Island goodies.
Arrrrr, them was the good times matey.
(note to self: check newsfeeds more often)
(note 2: time to play this again)
That’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot recently. At first I thought it was just our forum, but when I had a look around I see nearly all the traditional sites with forums struggling to keep the damn things alive.
Maybe it’s part of the whole 2.0 (r)evolution, as much as I hate the buzzword there’s no denying it does signify a lot of changes that have been going on over the past year. Longer really, but it’s especially in the past year that 2.0 has taken over. When I look at the sites I visit on a daily basis it’s all blogs and newssites, or newssites using a blog mechanism. I’m quite surprised seeing as my daily routine used to consist of mainly forums which I’d visit and where I’d contribute. But either they’re gone, or they’ve gone stale, or maybe I’ve just moved on. In which case I can’t help but wonder where did the sense of community go? Yes Digg can be amusing, in a 3 second attention span kind of way, and yes you can comment on Flickr and other 2.0-ish sites, but I have yet to find something that compares to a forum in terms of building a community spirit. The idea of getting to know people and looking forward to their posts and replies feels lacking from most places. Sharing your hobbies, random thoughts about common interests or even mundane happenings.
So where does that leave this place which was very much built around the idea of a forum as central heart of our community?
In case you’re one of those people still using www.x111.com you’ll now notice it automagically switches you to the non-www url. This is done because I want to ditch www, and because of a nasty side effect in search engines if you have www and non-www both working, which is the case in most shared hosting environments. Technically speaking www.x111.com and x111.com are 2 different sites as far as DNS and search engines are concerned. So both can get indexed, and as a result your PR and SERP goes down the toilet if they’re mixed.
You can get around this by using redirects, specifically the 301, which is the status code to tell the machine requesting the page that it has permanently moved to another location. You can use a .htaccess to manage the redirects but an even better way if you manage your own server is to use Apache’s httpd.conf.
The way I’ve done it is this, previously a virtual host section would look like:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/domain/www
ServerAlias www.domain.com
</VirtualHost>
Now we remove the ServerAlias and set up a new virtual host for it in which we’ll define the redirect for www.domain.com, so we’ll have 2 virtual hosts as such:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/domain/www
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.domain.com
Redirect 301 / http://domain.com/
</VirtualHost>
Save, restart Apache and you’re done, from now on all www urls will automagically be redirected to their non-www counterpart and your rankings will correct themselves as the search engine spiders crawl your site and work their magic.
When you have to jump out of the way of a car screaming through a corner at 100kph, do NOT in a reflex give the driver the finger before you’ve actually had a look at him. He may be built like a damn castle, hit the brakes and turn around to come after you, forcing you to run like hell…
Which led to a few interesting observations. I can still run like hell despite not having had any regular normal sport exercise since oh, most of you were born. It did leave me a bit wobbly on the legs afterwards, but I don’t know if that was the lack of exercise or the aftereffects of an adrenaline rush which could have flattened an elephant.
I think I prefer giving someone the finger from the comforts of my car next time… more options.
Thoughts of Imbalanced Mind