Ryan McFarland

There is some new crap on the “home” page on myspace. More “cool new videos” and featured filmmaker, comedy, music and books. I don’t like any of that stuff. So use Firefox, install Greasemonkey and this script. Or if you have the script already installed just add these lines by clicking on tools, greasemonkey, manage user scripts, A re modified user homepage, edit and then save.

var b = document.getElementById("home_coolNewVideos");
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(”home_featured_filmmaker”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(”home_featured_comedy”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(”home_featured_music”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

var b = document.getElementById(”home_featured_books”);
if (b) {b.parentNode.removeChild(b);}

I try my best to keep this site up to web standards. Since i’m always tweaking it i have to check the W3C validation service every now and then to check the pages. Silktide’s Sitescore currently looks at the validator for compliance (although they promise an update to their service this month). The Share This plugin that allows readers to submit the content to bookmarking or social websites or to email your post to others is a great plugin. It does not pass validation though. Make these changes to the code of share_this.php which should be in the share-this folder of your plugins directory of your Wordpress installation. On lines 476 and 477 replace “onClick” with “onclick” and from lines 45 through 120 after every “&” put “amp;” and your page should validate. There should be 23 instances of “&” that you need to replace in version 1.4 of the plugin. Thanks to Alex King for the excellent plugin.

I’ve been using Google Webmaster tools to keep an eye on a few of my site statistics. It shows 404 errors, robots.txt problems, and other things that Google comes across that users might be hitting also. I have been using my .htaccess file to repair some of the problems. Unfortunately part of the Registerfly/Enom issues seems to have created a dynamic problem. While the site was down a placeholder page was shown and somehow Google is being directed to pages on zieak.com that do not exist as a result.

What i think is happening is that the placeholder pages for “expired” domains redirect to each other to try and increase page rank for items that consumers look for online. Eventually they point to a site that the registrar makes money off of. Fortunately zieak.com is no longer part of that network but for some reason Google is finding links to these ghost pages.

I had manually entered permanent redirect instructions on my .htaccess file like for each page that was showing as not found.

Redirect 301 /get/christening/favor/gifts/gifts.htm http://www.zieak.com

Unfortunately, my site currently has almost 100 of these www.zieak.com/get/bla/bla/bla.htm pages in the list of pages not found. Copying and pasting them in was becoming tedious. I finally found the solution to my problem in this thread about using a wildcard for a redirect in your .htaccess file. So now i can redirect Google (or any other bot or human) to my main page instead of a file not found notice.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/get/ http://www.zieak.com

It seems that all of the problems coming in are for /get/ and /buy/ directories on my site. I’ll just be sure to never structure my directories to use those folders.

I was just trying to send a message to a friend on Myspace and noticed that the person’s entire profile area was trying to redirect me to login-sm.info via google. That page is down but it probably went to a “You must be logged in to do that” page that looked like it was Myspace - luring more people into the spiral.

Looking at the source of their page it looks like their “Who I’d like to meet:” section was compromised which is floating a transparent gif over part of their page. It is a pretty brilliant way to dupe someone into clicking out of myspace and into the world of “mystery” bulletins that the victim “didn’t post” and spammy comments posted to friend’s pages.

<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;font-size:13px;
filter:alpha(opacity=01);-moz-opacity:0.01; opacity:0.01; -khtml-opacity:0.01;">
<a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.login-sm.info/">
<img src="http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/8882/thegifhb8.gif" width="1000"
height="10000" border="1"></a> </style>

If you fall victim just log in, change your password, and remove anything in your “Who I’d like to meet:” section.

I’m not militant about punctuation but i do find it annoying when people write things with lots of exclamation points. So i created a Greasemonkey script that turns anything more than two exclamation points into just one. Greasemonkey has to be installed and you need to be using Firefox in order for this to work. If you have them both already then grab my excessive exclamation points script. There is some excessive punctuation below for you to test. After you have installed the script just refresh this page and you should see the exclamation points disappear from this post’s title and the lines below.

Two exclamation points!!
Ten exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!
Five exclamation points and a number one!!!!!1
Forty Two!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve also uploaded the script to userscripts.org here.

(Thank you for all the code suggestion and corrections!)

I use Firefox almost exclusively but sometimes i use Internet Explorer. Perhaps a website simply won’t work with Firefox, maybe my Firefox add-ons are preventing a portion of the page to load (every now and then i actually want to see the ads on a page), or maybe i’m checking on a website’s compatibility with IE. Whatever the reason, ever since installing IE7 on a Dell Inspiron 9400 the images in Internet Explorer have been pixelated. The text renders smoothly but not the images. Here’s the fix.

1. Close Internet Explorer and click “Start”.
2. Select “Run” and type in “regedit” without the quotes.
3. In the left hand column click on the plus sign next to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER”.
4. Do the same for Software, Microsoft, and Internet Explorer.
5. Click on “Main” and scroll down on the right side of the window to “UseHR”.

6. Right click on “UseHR” and select “Modify” then change the “value data” to a zero instead of a one.
7. Restart IE and enjoy the non-jagged, newly smoothed web!

Before:

After:

For once, big brother has to be watching over his shoulder. On a routine checking of my AXS logs which i have configured to also track hits to my myspace profile, i noticed this hit…

Someone from the State Department visiting my myspace page? It looks like anyone from the State Department that accesses the internet gets that IP address. That address led me to their Wikipedia history which includes edits to the State Department page.

Using the same concept that Kevin used in this post i conjured up some tweaks of AXS so i can see hits to my site and my myspace profile at the same time. This will give you the visitor’s IP address, their domain, and some other information.

1 - You have to have AXS installed on your own server. Use the automated install tool - it really is easy. You need your own host - this can’t be done on your myspace page or a blogspot account. If you don’t have your own domain and host this method will not work for you.

2 - Upload an image to your site and give it a name that is distinctive and useful. Perhaps “myspace.png” or something like that.

3 - Go to your ax-admin.pl or ax-admin.cgi page on your server. Bookmark this page. On the bottom left click on “Instructions for Tagging HTML Pages” note the code needed to direct hits to your logs.

4 - Study up on the help files for AXS here.

5 - Make a code something like this:
http://www.path/to/my/ax.pl?http://www.path/to/my/myspace.png

6 - Trick myspace into accepting the link by shortening it with YATUC.

7 - Copy and paste this into your “About Me” section of your myspace profile.
<div style="background-image:url(http://yatuc.com/<strong>mycode</strong>); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center; width:1px; height:1px;"></div>

8 - View your profile a few times.

9 - Go back to your bookmarked AXS admin panel. Click on “View in Database Format” and you should see your visits listed.

10 - Hit the back button. Select some check boxes like “Browser wars” “Visitor second level domain” and “Hits by day of week” and under “filter string” enter “myspace.png” or whatever your tracking image is. Then click on “View in graphical format” in the middle of the page.

11 - Have fun with it!

Last night I found a way to screen scrape results from an AXS page and post them as text using php and a screen scraping technique. Fun!

I wrote a script for greasemonkey (well, i copied and pasted and edited one) that eliminates the “Grade my professor. New!” crap from the home portion of myspace. Get it here.