Local Online Advertising Series

1. AT&T decidedly censored it’s customer base
2. 4Chan.org is made up of some of the most reckless geeks on the Internet, and they’re not afraid to flat out attack a major site or organization.  [NOTE: 4CHAN is certainly not safe for work or for kids. Do not click if you don't already know what it is...]

[NOTE: Blackhole routing, in network terms, means the ISP sent data packets destined for/from 4chan.org nowhere.  The packets would come across the AT&T network en route to it's destination and AT&T simply 'dropped' the packet, never sending it on to it's intended destination, so it's like the packet went into a black hole, never to be seen again by sending PC or destination server.]

Now I’m not a user of 4chan, never have been and never will be. I frankly hate the intellectual divide among it’s members.  It’s pretty un-debatable that there is an infinite chasm of idiocy between a few of 4chan’s most intelligent users and the far more populous douche bag user.  That being said, 4chan’s numbers alone make them pretty formidable when they get pissed off.  Last year, they gamed the Time.com site that allowed users to vote on “person of the year”.  Their pranks/hacks are usually pretty organized and it’s always a few folks at the top of the food chain who lay it out for the other idiots, resulting in sometimes brutal beatings of other websites.  Funny as these beatings usually are (yea, I enjoy it!) they also serve as a pretty big deterrent to other sites/organizations to stay the hell off 4chan’s butt.

So what really happens when a corporate goliath like AT&T decides to block an online supermax prison like 4chan?

Very quickly, 4chan’s IRC channel exploded with activity, mostly “why can’t I see the site?” type posts, and soon after, the Twitterverse (or is it Twatsphere?) became EXCEPTIONALLY busy with people posting their disdain for AT&T, condemning censorship, and throwing a few pedobear jabs out there too.

A quick visit to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=4chan showed me that there were tweets about 4chan happening almost once every 1-2 seconds.  I monitored the search for about 20 mins and I finally decided to try a little social experiment.

I went to twitter and created a new account. I wanted it to be generic, trusthworthy, and obvious as to it’s purpose.  I added the 4chan logo as my avatar, added text to my bio that read something like “Following the AT&T blockade, be sure to follow this account for all the latest news”.  I threw together twitter.com/4chan4ever.  Don’t bother going there now, I’ve since deleted it.  Why?  It was not a branded social account and it didn’t have a lot of longevity. Once this AT&T mess was over, the account would be pretty worthless as folks’ attention would be elsewhere.  It was exactly 24 hours and 15 minutes old when it was euthanized.

Thanks to Ian Fernando and DiggaLive.com, who produced Twitter Snipe, a tool that lets you target twitter users and autofollow them, I was able to start adding users in a highly automated fashion.  Look at their site to see how it works exactly, but the long and short of it is that you create a twitter account, add some keywords to it, and the tool hits search.twitter.com and adds recent people who have tweeted that keyword.

I started the tool against 2 keywords: 4chan, and AT&T. I set the tool to add 500 users of each keyword, and add users every 10 seconds.  Twitter allowed this and after approximately 20 minutes, I had 50 users and 6 followers.  Twitter uses anti-spam processes and long story short, if your following list is grossly higher than your followers list, they’re gonna call you a spammer and likely block your account.  If your followers/following ratio is closer to 1:1, or even if your followers list exceeds your following list, you should be golden and able to add users to your heart’s delight.  There is a cap and some other constraints, but you can research the different ways Twitter controls spam on your own.

So back to my follow ratio, I wanted a 1:1 ratio to avoid being seen as a spammer, but people’s autofollows were just not on.  I was sitting at 12% follow-back which sucks as they only allow you to follow 2000 on twitter unless you have sufficient followers.

How I got them to follow me.

So after the Twitter Snipe tool followed 60 or so people and I had 7 followers, I sent my first tweet: “Big news to come, follow this account for the latest. PLZ retweet” and then the floodgates opened.  I went to 16% following me after 100 people were added, 26% after 200 people were added.  By the time 9 hours had passed, I had 536 people  I was following, (auto followed via Twitter Snipe) and over 1900 people following me back. People were retweeting to their friends on a massive scale.

1900 followers in 9 hours!

By simply telling the folks I was following that 1) Something is happening, 2) They can hear about it from this account, and 3) Tell your friends, I was able to gain trust, give them something they wanted, and build a pretty targeted list of followers.

All total the account had 17 tweets before I deleted it, that’s it.  1900 followers on 17 total tweets.

Did you push any offers and how did the traffic convert?

I posted maybe 8 tweets with actual updates regarding the AT&T mess.  These were truthful, legitimate tweets.  The 9th  tweet I shot out a poll question.  I threw up a quick site using Poll Control, a nice quick and dirty poll script from a buddy on Wickedfire.  Of the 957 people who took the poll, 13 of them converted (1.36%) .  I lost about 40 followers after the poll tweet was sent out.  With email submits having a terrible scrub rate, I figure about 30 or so people actually filled in the form, but who knows.  I thought of collecting the emails myself for a spam campaign, but figured 4chan traffic is shit and didn’t want to waste the time.  In future projects like this, I will FOR SURE be collecting emails on everyone.

Then I got creative. 4chan is known for attacks, so I tweeted “We need dating accounts for an upcoming action, <dating offer link>, don’t make it spammy.”, and linked it to a dating offer.  I know dating offers convert like shit, but I knew this account wouldn’t last long so bizops were out, and since the largely male followers used 4chan, they were likely chronically single! This tweet was heavily retweeted.

At this point people were curious about the previous poll and dating offer and started to unfollow me. I was down to 1840 followers after the dating offer tweet and folks were starting to ask what was up, or just ignore my tweet completely.  The click rate on the dating offer was also a lot lower at 699 clicks and 4 conversions (0.57%).

As with all Drama Llama situations, the AT&T vs. 4Chan fight came to an anti-climactic end when AT&T unblocked the traffic. They only blocked it because of a technical issue and quite frankly, no one gives a shit anymore, so deleting the twitter account was maybe not the best thing, but whatever.

Conclusion

This little experiment was a positive success in my book.  I found an unfilled niche (Users wanted to know updates on the 4chan thing), I gave them something they wanted (Juicy details of a pending attack) and told them how to do it (Follow me for more updates).

It wasn’t until I did all 3 of those things that the mass following of my account happened.

Next project: The Jonas Brothers Are Gay

Why pick on a few teen beat coverboys?  No reason whatsoever aside from the above topic falls into the same category the AT&T vs. 4Chan topic fell under: CONTROVERSY

Here are some themes/methods I will use for future projects involving Twitter:

1. Captive audience – Do these people really care about the topic?
2. Vocal audience – Will the people who follow me interact with me and retweet my posts?
3. Branding – Can present my Twitter account as a brand, not just another jerkoff Twitter user?
4. Engagement – How do these people want to be serviced, spoken to, and listened to?
5. Marketability – Can these people be marketed to? Will they use a credit card at best, or not enter an email at worst?
6. Profitability – Can I build this account to a trusted level that people will continually click on my links and believe that I’m doing them a favor or telling them of some secret Gem of the Internet product/offer?

I’m interested to see how you view this case study. Please feel free to drop a comment below.

And that’s that.

Here is the NORMAL process for doing a Plesk migration between servers (specifically at GoDaddy): [NOTE: This process seamlessly allows you to migrate user accounts, domains, databases, files, file permissions, the whole damn thing!]

1. You backup EVERYTHING on the old server, including files and MYSQL databases.  (PHPMyAdmin is a good export tool if you don’t know how to back a database up via SSH.)
2. Go to the NEW server, click on the SERVER link on the left, and choose Migration Manager
3. Enter your OLD server’s IP address and the root password. If you do not have root access, you’ll want to get it, or at least have an account that has root level permissions.
4. Click on NEXT and follow the wizard as it takes you through the process of migrating user accounts and domains.

Now here’s where things get tricky. On a normal VPS, you’d have root access. On a Godaddy (boo) VPS, they don’t allow you to log in as root (for FTP or SSH), so you have to use “su -” (Note the ‘-’ sign) when you’re logged in as another user.

This is what typically shows up when you try to use the migration manager to transfer one Godaddy VPS to another:

Cannot send scout to the remote host

Failed to execute scout.
The return code is 1
The output on STDERR is
sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

All this error means is that the user account you entered does not have sufficient permissions on the server to do the migration.  Normally you would simply use the root account and things would be peachy, but with Godaddy, they like to make it difficult.

Here’s the solution. [NOTE: This is technical and requires you to be damn careful else you'll really hose your old system up and TRUST ME, Godaddy DOES NOT offer support for VPS accounts beyond setting them up and tearing them down. [Everything you do is on your own shoulders..]

1. Using your normal user account, (not Plesk admin, but the user account you have for the server/SSH/FTP) SSH into your server.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, download PUTTY.EXE and do the following: Enter the IP address of your server in the HOST NAME field, then make sure connection type is SSH.  Click on OPEN.  A black window should come up and you can enter your FTP username, then password, and you should be given a prompt.
2. Once you are logged into the Godaddy VPS server via SSH, you can type ‘SU -’ [no quotes] and enter your password again. This will change the prompt to say root on the left hand side.  If you use the ‘-’ it will give you access to the root PATH, which is necessary for the next step.
3. Type ‘visudo’ and hit enter. This will take you to the edit screen of the SUDO security configuration.  Find the section that has the following:  “root   ALL=(ALL)    ALL”  and below that, add your username along with the ALL entries.   “username  ALL=(ALL)   ALL”   [NOTE: To edit, move the insertion point to the space you wish to type, then start typing.   When finished, hit the colon key ":" and type W to write the file, then hit the colon key again and type 'quit'.]
4. At this point your username should have the appropriate configuration.  Go back to the NEW server’s Migration Manager and start it fresh, this time using the user account, it’s password, and it’s password again for the SUDO password.

That should take you through the entire Migration Manager wizard process and help you get your domains and client accounts transferred to the new server.

When you are finished with the migration, and if you plan on keeping the OLD server, be sure to remove the user entry from the sudo security config file using the process above.

1. Twitter: Does the user have their Bio and URL filled out.  Do I know from their biography what it is they do?  Does the bio give me a substantial reason to follow what this person has to say in 140 characters?  Is the URL spammy?  If the user doesn’t take the time to add a photo and fill out their bio and URL, I’m not going to take the time to browse through their latest tweets and discern the benefit of adding this person to my feed.
2. Twitter: Is the username easy to remember?  Nickmattern, Turbolapp, SlightlyShady, Delta, and JQuipp are all super easy to remember. They relate to the person, their brand, or their company.  3azys7r33t (easystreet) is not easy to remember and quite frankly, makes me convulse in seizures when I look at it.
3. Twitter: Does the user have 1 update, 500 followers and 500 following?  If so, it’s spam, do not follow.
4. Twitter: Is this the person, the brand, or the company.  Many entities have multiple twitter accounts.  For example, a CEO may have CEONAME while the company uses COMPANYNAME and the brand happens to be BRANDNAME.  Are you more interested in the company, person, or brand?  Cool if all 3, but consider the reason you want to hear from them in the first place else you’ll end up jamming your tweet stream with endless messages.
5. Twitter: Are all the user’s responses @someone?  Nothing worse than looking at a Twitter account and seeing 100 straight @friend1, @friend2, @friend3 tweets with no real relevance.
6. Facebook: Does the user have an appropriate profile photo? The last thing I want is clients/associates/friends of mine looking at my friends window and seeing an inappropriate or immature photo of my ‘friends’.
7. Facebook:  Does the user have Mafia Wars, Quizzes, or some other dumbass Facebook app filling their profile’s wall?  If they do, there is an EXCELLENT chance that no less than 200,000 times a day, you will be innundated with invites, status updates, and other worthless garbage from this user.  Stay clear of these folks.
8. Facebook: Does the user have more than 300 friends?  I always look for the folks and companies who bulk add everyone with industry keywords.  I hate this practice, it dilutes the quality of their offerings and exposes me to OTHER people who mass add/follow, which only wastes a ton of my time.
9. LinkedIn: Do I really know this person or are they trying to sell me something.  It’s one thing for a local merchant or fellow member of a trade association to contact me and pitch a relevant product, it’s quite another when someone is simply throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping someone, somewhere will purchase their product.
10. LinkedIn:  When someone “introduces” through another party. I always look at the accounts of both people to gauge the relevancy of having these people in my lists.

On the same note, here are the events and habits that guarantee someone will be deleted from my follow/friend lists:

1. When someone autoposts links to “online radio” urls.  blip.fm and all those, totally worthless.  Some folks Tweet EVERY SINGLE SONG they have on their online radio playlist, resulting in 50-60 tweets a day in my feed, 100% of which I won’t listen to, find any relevance in, or realize any value by clicking.
2. When someone overuses hashtags.  #I #mean #seriously #guys #do #you #really #need #to #do #that?
3. The use of racial, offensive, or tacky language.  Many people extend their tweets to other social platforms like blogs and Facebook, so when my feed comes up on one of those platforms with your “F*uck the da*m world” tweet, it doesn’t reflect well on me, nor does it help me with my site’s ranking.  God help you if your tweet gets indexed/cached on my site, you’ll never not have me silently destroying your online properties…
4. When someone you meet at a conference does nothing but ENDLESSLY post their innermost thoughts (“I woke up today with wet bedsheets, it reminded me of Spring in Nantucket as a child”) and never really posts anything worthwhile, they get the axe dropped.

I’ll add to these periodically, but the moral of the story is manage your social lists as best you can.   What do you do to control the chaos in your social circles?

The information in this article will allow you to run WordPress permalinks on Windows Server 2000, 2003, or 2008 using IIS5, IIS6, or IIS7.

Ok, first of all there is no real MOD_REWRITE setting for IIS5 or IIS6.  That’s an Apache mod and though there are some ISAPI_MOD_REWRITE projects floating around out there, most of them do NOT do the exact same thing as MOD_REWRITE does and will not function in IIS as MOD_REWRITE does in APACHE.

For programs such as WordPress that normally are designed for Apache installations, you can install the following ISAPI filter and all your Permalink problems go away.

First, what is a Permalink. A permalink is what WordPress uses to form the URL of your posts/pages into something more SEO friendly or human readable. (HINT: Get to Permalinks by logging into your WordPress Admin Panel your http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/  Click on SETTINGS, Permalinks.)

By default, a wordpress standard URL on Apache is formed as such: http://www.nickmattern.com/2008/10/06/sample-post/, In IIS, the WordPress URL uses the index.php file to display your permalinks, ex. http://shelbygirl.com/index.php/2008/10/06/sample-post/

Obviously the IIS URL doesn’t help the user remember your URL  What most users and search engines want to see is a descriptive URL.  www.domain.com/index.php?a=4423 is a LOT harder to remember than www.domain.com/AboutUs would be.

Format your Permalinks in the following manner: /%postname%/, making sure to begin each string with a /% and end each string with a %/.  If I wanted my URL to have the Year/Date/Postname, I’d format my Permalink string as such: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

Now back to why this matters for IIS.  First, Apache forms URLs without the need for index.php to be involved with the URL.  Be default, in IIS, your permalinks will use this format: http://shelbygirl.com/index.php/2008/10/06/sample-post/ (Notice the index.php) whereas Apache will simply use http://www.nickmattern.com/2008/10/06/sample-post/. Now, according to numerous Google Blogs, the index.php shouldn’t really matter, and that’s mostly correct.  The problem you’ll find is your users not being able to remember the index.php, they’ll simply see the domain.com/postname, not the domain.com/index.php/postname.

By installing the filter listed above (You’ll need to have access to the IIS manager and your PHP.ini file) you can eliminate the need for the index.php to be included in any URLs that WordPress cranks out.  Be sure to back up your PHP.ini file before you change it and while you’re at it, make a backup of your IIS Site as well.

Once the filter is installed, restart IIS and change your permalink structure accordingly, then test out your WordPress content. If it doesn’t work, go back and reread the instructions.

1. Virtualization is here to stay, end of discussion
2. Web server virtualization is just as efficient as physical hosting
3. Microsoft’s Virtual PC Virtualization is WORTHLESS. End of discussion (The Server 2008 edition rocks, more on that in another post!)
4. VMware is the industry leader, but there are a lot of other platforms on which to run your VM web hosts

Now that we have the debate topics out of the way, let’s delve into what virtualization is and what virtualization isn’t.

What Is Virtualization?

Virtualization is running multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform. 4 instances of Windows 2003 Server and 2 instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux all running on one physical server. Sound impossible? It’s not.  It’s the latest trend in datacenter consolidation.  Why buy 6 physical 4U machines when you can buy a single 4-8U machine and run each operating system independent of one another?

What Virtualization Isn’t.

Virtualization isn’t sticking an unlimited number of guest operating systems on a single machine.  You still have the constraints of finite memory, storage, and processing ability.  The more guest operating systems you bring online, the fewer resources there are to distribute.

Virtualization is also not a replacement for dedicated servers.  More on that in another post.

Keep in mind that a lot of the descriptions are from the vendor’s page.

The vendor is responsible for the accuracy of the description. I try to be very vendor neutral when giving advice. I’ll never endorse a product unless 1) I’ve used it or 2) It’s a recognized industry leader in it’s niche. I will from time to time review products like those below.

Server Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2008: Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Windows Server operating system yet, designed to power the next-generation of networks, applications, and Web services. With Windows Server 2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications, provide a highly secure network infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value within your organization. [Microsoft Corp.]

CentOS: CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS is free. [centos.org]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available in two variants for servers. A base Red Hat Enterprise Linux server is designed for small deployments while Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform is designed for mainstream customers and provides the most cost-effective, flexible, and scalable environment. Both versions are based on common core technology. Both include a comprehensive suite of open source server applications and virtualization capabilities. [Redhat.com]

Tools that connect you to your server

Putty.exe: PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. I’ll cover a specific blog post about how to use this tool sometime. You need to know some basic Linux commands, but we’ll cover that in a later post. If you’re reading this and don’t see the post, flame me and I’ll get it done…

Filezilla: Filezilla is a great FTP client (and server). FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, in short it’s the way you transfer files between computers, using the Internet. Similar to File Explorer in Windows, you can transfer files and folders from a local directory on your PC to a remote directory on a web server. [sourceforge.net]

Tools that monitor your server

IPCheck: Freeware (and commercial) tool that monitors your sites or hardware and reports service outages. Free edition give you up to 5 sensors. Have it check if a page is displaying, if a record is displaying, if an IP pings, and more. [Paessler Corp.]

Tools that your customers will want

Control Panels:

Plesk Control Panel: Parallels Plesk is a comprehensive control panel solution used by leading hosting providers worldwide for shared, virtual and dedicated hosting. The control panel is designed to simplify the management and administration of web sites. Plesk control panel automates a large number of tasks that allow service providers to reduce operating costs and resources while at the same time increasing profitability, efficiency and customer satisfaction. [Parallels Corp]

Helm Control Panel: Helm 4 is the leading windows control panel solution, empowering hosting providers to control, automate and sell virtually any product or service. Helm 4 allows service providers to keep their operational costs down and serve their customers better, resulting in efficient service, improved revenue and greater level of customer satisfaction. [www.WebHostAutomation.com]

cPanel Control Panel: cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) combine to form a fully featured web hosting control panel system. cPanel and WHM allow you to provide an interface for both your customers and your staff. [cPanel.net]

Ensim Control Panel:

Windows IIS (Internet Information Services) is the typical platform for Active Server Pages, or ASP pages. You’ll see a wide variety of file extensions hosted on IIS servers: .ASP, .ASPX, .HTM, .HTML, .PHP, etc.

Linux with Apache is the typical platform for Hypertext Preprocessor pages, or PHP pages. You’ll see the following common files running on an Apache server: .PHP, .HTM, .JSP (Java server pages), and .HTML.

Keep in mind that the operating system doesn’t always limit the type of web server software running on the server. You can certainly have a Windows operating system running the Apache webserver. You cannot however have a Linux machine running Internet Information Services (IIS). The same can be said for programming platforms such as PHP, ASP, Ruby, JSP, etc. You can run PHP pages on a Windows or Apache server easily. Servers such as Apache’s Tomcat also have their place.

There are a lot of other servers out there, but we’ll be focusing on the platforms that are popular for website owners, and those platforms are IIS and Apache.

[phpbay]PowerEdge Server, 25, “”, “”[/phpbay]

Hosting a website is almost identical to renting an apartment, here’s why:

Most website owners will start out hosting with a 3rd party as opposed to buying a server and managing the site in-house. Sites like Godaddy, 1 and 1, and many others (tens of thousands) all offer specialized hosting services for those who wish to host their websites.