Tips, tricks & tools

If you’ve been lazy (like me) and let hundreds of pending links accumulate in your PHPLD directory, here’s a simple way to delete all the pending links in one go. Start up phpMyAdmin, go to the SQL page and run this this query:
DELETE FROM PLD_LINK WHERE STATUS = 1

If you want to approve all pending links, use this instead:
UPDATE PLD_LINK SET STATUS=2 WHERE STATUS=1

I’ve been playing around with the free visitor map widget from amung.us. It takes about 15 seconds to setup, and has several reasonably nice looking themes – go here and check it out.

If you’ve recently updated your WordPress site, you might have noticed that there’s a trailing slash missing from your page urls. Pages are now domain.com/page instead of domain.com/page/. The folks at WordPress don’t seem to think this is a very big deal, but for anyone with even the slightest interest in SEO and duplicate content – then you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to fix it (at least I was). I messed around with the WordPress link-template.php file, and fixed the problem, but also created a new one while I was at it. Just as I was about to give in and learn to live without my beloved trailing slash, I found a simple plugin from Peter Claus Lamprecht that totally fixes the problem. Unless you can read German, you’ll never find the plugin on his site – but if you click here, then it’s all yours. Thanks Peter!

Do you use xml sitemaps on your website? Google, Yahoo, and MSN now all support sitemap autodiscovery via robots.txt. All you need to do is add one line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml


I recently tried to park a domain name on a cPanel addon domain – which seemed like a good idea until I found out that not only was it impossible, but it also left a rogue ‘hidden’ DNS entry somewhere in my reseller account. I eventually worked out how to do it using htaccess.

This method will 301 your empty “parked” domain, to another addon domain – so parked.com/whatever will 301 to www.domain.com/whatever.

• Create a normal addon domain using cPanel e.g domain.com, and upload your content
• Add the domain you want to park as an additional addon domain e.g parked.com
• Drop the following htaccess file in the ‘parked’ domain directory

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parked.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parked.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

InFormEnter is a great little plugin for Firefox that adds a drop down list of ‘pre-filled’ fields to help you fill in forms more quickly. It saves heaps of time when manually adding your site to directories, and it’s so intuitive to use that you can zone out completely and work zombie style.