Design block? No problem, check out the free textures on thepixlpusher.com. Download includes 10 textures absolutely free!

I manually back up my data monthly, but recently my webhost lost all their servers. How does one recover from such a tragedy? Painstakingly slow, that’s how.  I have 4 of 5 sites back online, but was unable to recover the latest design of my portfolio site. Uploading backups take along time, and they may not be the most current data.

I for one have learned a valuable lesson, and others should back up sites frequently (especially if you made them for someone else), and never rely on a webhost as a safety net.

I get about 5-10 hits per day from a robot named

InternetSeer
with ip address: 65.36.241.79 and user agent: InternetSeer.com

This robot monitors the uptime of your website and emails you if it is down or slow. But how did it get my email? Internetseer like many other web monitoring sites receive their sites through third party sites.

I am sure they started monitoring when I signed up my site at a submit your site to 100 search engines site.

Regardless, this robot does not harm your site and removing it may cause an annoying abundance of emails telling you they cannot access your site. I tried blocking the ip address once and it came back 1 month later with a new ip address.

You can usually contact internetseer.com or any other web monitoring site and they will tell you how they obtained your site and how to unsubscribe.

I receive numerous hits by a robot that only identifies itself as

www.nachofoto.com
with ip address: 216.218.135.114

As far as I can tell this website just harvests images providing no benefit to your website or blog. Plus the robot does not have a user agent.

I blocked this ip address from accessing my site and you should do the same.

Lately I have been receiving hits by a robot named Snapbot/1.o. In my referral logs it refers to itself as

ROBOT
with ip: 38.98.19.67 and user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (SnapPreviewBot) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9

or as

SPAM
with ip: 38.98.19.68 and user agent: Snapbot/1.0 (Snap Shots, +http://www.snap.com)

If you check out snap’s website, they state that the robot is used to show thumbnails of your site to users that have their browser plug-in installed. In addition, frequent hits could also be their robot snapbot/1.o indexing your site for future thumb views.

So if you are receiving traffic from ip address range: 38.98.19.66 to 38.98.19.126 they are from snap.com and appear harmless.

I love using BBClone as a quick on the fly page counting system. BBClone is a website counter written in php and gives the user a quick summary of who is on their site and where that visitor came from.

Note:
This post will be very technical assuming the reader has a basic understanding of BBClone and the ability to edit your blog’s source code with a text editor.

For starters this is the snippet of code you will need:

<?php
define(’_BBC_PAGE_NAME’, $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’]);
define(”_BBCLONE_DIR”, “../website/bbclone/“);
define(”COUNTER”, _BBCLONE_DIR.”mark_page.php”);
if (is_readable(COUNTER)) include_once(COUNTER);
?>

There are two parts to this code that make it work with WordPress. The first is on the first line and is dark red. $_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’] will display this when a visitor hits a page:

This is the complete path to the page minus the root directory.

Note:
If you are familiar with BBClone those stats will make sense. For readers not familiar with BBClone this tells me I had a hit to my Changing Measurements Shortcut in InDesign blog post with referer digg.com and with a search query of indesign.

The green text on line two: ../website/bbclone/ is the path where bbclone will write to. This will be different depending what directory contains the bbclone files.

I have not been able to get it to work except when adding the code manually to the source code of each page in my blog.

What I did was opened the following pages in a php text editor: 404.php, archive.php, index.php, links.php, page.php, search.php, single.php and then looked for this code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I placed the snippet of code directly after the get_footer() function. When I tried to place the code in the actual footer.php file all I received was error messages, so this was the next best thing.

Good luck, leave a comment if you get stuck and I will try to help debug.

For bloggers that do not have Adobe Photoshop, this image reflection generator is a slick online application that will let you create reflected images and logos. You can enter a url or browse your computer for an image, then select how much image will show in the reflection and what color to fade into. This is a screen shot from the site:

As you can see the best part of this generator is it has a download button. Clicking the button will save the image to your computer in .jpg form.

Adding a favicon to your website can be done with an online favicon generator and one line of html code.

First, check out this site to create your favicon out of a square image or if you prefer to create it in Adobe Photoshop you will need to download a plug in from telegraphics. Remember favicons are 16×16 square images so simple images are better.

Next, save this image to the root directory of your website.

Finally, add this snippet of code to the header section of each webpage:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/ico” />

This method is pretty universal but should be checked in many popular browsers. It should also be noted that depending on some servers the favicon man not display immediately.