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I recently set up a subdomain within a CPanel hosting account and ran into a strange problem.

After the subdomain was built, DNS propogated, FTP access and a database set up - I uploaded the latest version of the ever propular WordPress blogging software. As the installation instructions suggested, about two minutes later WordPress was up and running. Unfortunately the image overlays for the TinyMCE rich text editor were not displaying correctly; the buttons were present but the overlay that depicts a capital B for bold or an I for italics were not showing.

Knocking off the simplest things first:

• F5
• CTRL+R and CTRL+F5 to force the browser to reload all content
• Cleared browser cache
• Uploaded the wp-includes folder again, in case any of the images failed to upload successfully
• Checked that I could view the images in question manually in the browser by typing in the URL, which worked

at this point I was beginning to draw a bit of a blank as to what it might have been.

As is often the case, I left the problem alone for a little while and the solution popped into my head. To enable the friendly URL’s within WordPress, I needed to either make the .htaccess file writable or upload one with the appropriate configuration in it. As a matter of simplicity, I copied the .htaccess file from the main WordPress installation on the site and dropped it into the subdomain installation. Copy and paste, the bain of all evil.

Back in May 2006, people from MySpace were hotlinking images from my site. The cost of popularity from my anonymous MySpace friends was pushing my web hosting account well over its monthly data limits and I was forced to block their access using some simple rules in my .htaccess file.

Since I copy and pasted my .htaccess file into the subdomain (which resides in a folder under the primary account) - the settings in the parent .htaccess file were inheriting into the subdomain account. The result was that any requests from the subdomain that didn’t meet the hotlinking requirements were being blocked by Apache and mod_rewrite.

The solution of course was straight foward, remove the restrictions in the .htaccess file that I had uploaded into the subdomain and suddenly the images from the WordPress admin and TinyMCE started showing up as you’d expect.

A work collegue of mine would term this a junior error.

Google have announced a new feature for Google Analytics named Benchmarking. The Google Analytics Benchmarking service is still in its beta phase, however aims to allow analytics users to compare or benchmark their web sites against other web sites.

The benchmarking service from Google is opt-in, not default-in. If a user would like to view benchmarking data for their sites, they must first opt-in to allow Google to use their own web statistics. Of interest, opting in is on a per account basis - not per web profile. As such, if you have 50 web profiles set up within your account - opting in will share all of your web profiles data with Google.

After opting into the benchmarking service, Google proceed to anonomise the users web statistic information. What this means is that any identifiable information within the web statistics is removed and only aggregate information is held; as such it isn’t possible to spy on your competitor directly or visa versa.

At this early stage, the benchmarking data is fairly high level but provides you comparative metrics on:

• Visits
• Pageviews
• Pages/visit
• Average Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• Percentage New Visits

The usefulness and ultimately the success of the benchmarking service is reliant on how many Google Analytics users opt-in to sharing their web statistics with Google. If the greater user base don’t feel inclined to share their web statistics with Google in this manner, then the comparative nature of what they are offering is hamstrung to some degree.

Within ASP.NET, the System.Web.HttpResponse class providers a method to handle HTTP redirects, aptly named Redirect. The Redirect method has two overloads:

• Redirect (string)
• Redirect (string, bool)

The former accepts a string representation of the URI that you’d like to redirect to. The latter accepts the string URI and a boolean indicating whether you want ASP.NET to stop processing the request immediately or to continue throughout the life cycle of the request.

Unless you’re a HTTP junkie or you’ve had a specific reason to issue a permanent redirect (reorganising a web site is a prime candidate), you can be forgiven for not realising that the Redirect method issues a temporary redirect (HTTP 302). Not having needed to issue a permanent redirect through ASP.NET before, I assumed (there is that word again) that there would be additional overloads to handle both temporary (HTTP 302) and permanent (HTTP 301) redirects or optionally another method; I was wrong.

To issue a HTTP 301 permanent redirect through ASP.NET, you need to do a little bit of manual labour; don’t worry it’s only two lines of code:

• Response.Status = "301 Permanently Moved";
• Response.AppendHeader ("Location", URI);

At this point, so long as nothing else interferes with the response - the client will receive a standard run of the mill 301 HTTP permanent redirect. If you know or are worried that something following the above lines may modify the response, you can issue an optional Response.End() as the third line to make it take effect immediately.

In February, I wrote about receiving comment spam from a guy by the name of Jim Mirkalami. Since that time, there has been a lot of different people writing about the spam that they’ve received from our friend Jim; however it appears that he isn’t liking the new found attention that he is receiving.

This week, I received what would otherwise be considered a cease and desist type of comment. It surprises me that Jim would now be spamming more people telling them to stop writing about him and using his name, when it was clear that was his intention in the first place.

In any case, Jim is just going to have suck it up like everyone else online as it isn’t going to get removed from anyones site in a hurry.