If you've done any slightly-complex theming, and actually have people viewing your site, you know that many people still use old versions of Microsoft's ie browser.  

As you can see, ie7, ie6, and firefox each have about 30% of the visits to one of my sites for May 2008.  Since I use firefox and chrome for my basic site building and testing, they always display properly.  But because two thirds of my users are using problematic browsers (ie6 and ie7) I need to do testing of my pages whenever I do any display changes.

My recommendations for the week: Name.com serves my domains well.  Pacificrack.com delivers on dedicated servers.

On the way out of my favorite list is pair.com (high prices, low disk space quotas, and no support for mod deflate in shared hosting) -- though pair.com is reliable at least.

I killed one yum process as it was doing an install, and my punishment was quick and severe: yum from that point forward just hang on most commands, doing nothing.  After consulting a variety of internet sites and forums, etc, trying out their solutions, here's what I did that worked (thanks http://www.linux-archive.org/centos/33529-yum-hangs-when-reading-local-rpmdb.html):

cd /var/lib/rpm

rm *__*   [3 db files]

rpm --rebuilddb

Testing:

yum list available

Yesterday I wrote an intial entry about setting up a dedicated server at Pacificrack.com.  Today we'll continue with further DNS and apache configuration.

DNS configuration

The simple answer with DNS configuration is to allow the registrar to provide it.  Whether that's godaddy, name.com, etc, the registrar has several options for how to host your names.  You'll have to learn a little about the configuration interface to your registrar - if you follow my example, you won't be changing the name of the DNS servers, but rather changing the IP address only, but keeping the DNS server hosted by your registrar.

I've been with pair.com for almost a year now, and overall it's not been a bad webhost: good support and reliability.  However, I decided for a variety of reasons to make a switch to a dedicated server elsewhere:

I like to disable adsense in my development environment.  This has one definite benefit (I don't erroneously click on an adsense ad, thereby marking my adsense account as a potential click fraud perpetrator) and one possible benefit (I believe that sites with higher click-through rates get served higher-CPC ads by google).

Since on one site I am using smarty php templates, I had to add a few lines of code to my main index.php file:

$smarty->assign('phpservername', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) ;

(that should be set just before the call to $smarty->display() )

In one website I am developing, I want to have a huge background canvas that does not repeat - but I don't want scrollbars and also want all my text content to behave as a normal fixed layout in 960px, without meandering around on a background.  The background is going to ultimately blend in visually with additional elements I add later to the foreground, so it has to be fixed.  I spent a few days considering whether this could be done with straight html/css, but I wasn't able to come up with a solution.  One last thing - I wanted the center 960px background above the fold to load first, to give the viewer something to look at immediately while the rest of the page elements download.

I think I remember reading Matt Cutts or someone else from google stating maybe 6 months back that Page Rank and/or SERP results don't take into account the attention users give to pages directly (by tracking user activity), but only indirectly (by making links to appreciated pages).  The argument was that it was too easy to create pseudo-software-solutions that could fake user visits.  I just tried to find a reference to that but I failed.

I recently set up a clicksor account, because I wanted to be able to compare google adsense revenue with a competitor.  This was my first time with clicksor.  I submitted the site through the standard review process, and I clearly indicate in the "get my javascript embed code" check list that I did not want any of their in-text features or pop-up features - just the banner.  Unfortunately, as soon as I installed the banner code, my site was also peppered with intext-links.  I did a quick search, and noticed that I wasn't the only one who came across the problem.  Here's another example of clicksor gone wrong.

If you're interested to vegetate in front of the monitor for an hour and get a little perspective on Drupal today and going forward, check out this presentation from the Boston Drupalcon this past March 2009.   The speaker, Dries,  is the top guy in Drupal, just as Linus is the top guy for Linux.  As you can see, Dries has a great ability to be understand the technical and personal aspects of the collaborative project.  Thanks to his leadership and the contributions of thousands of others, Drupal is a robust content management system that a small or large business or individual can use to create a vibrant and reliable internet site.