Looking at your sites error logs generally will reveal a couple errors:

.htaccess: order not allowed here

and/or

.htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here

What you’re hitting here are collisions between your apache configuration and the directives that are in the Drupal .htaccess file.  The default site folder options for Apache are fairly restrictive.  These are the settings in the main httpd.conf, and are the default options for every site running on your server.

I wouldn’t recommend changing this setting at the global level.  It is best to make the changes in the VirtualHost configuration for the site, so only that site is affected.

The simplest method would be these settings:

<Directory “/path/to/your/webroot”>
AllowOverride All
Options FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

AllowOverride

AllowOverride tells Apache which settings a .htaccess file is allowed to change.

Druapl AllowOverride Settings:

All – This basically says, let the .htaccess file change anything.  And it’s the easiest way to get up and going.

Limit – Allows Drupal to change the Order Allow/Deny settings.

Indexes – Allows Drupal to change the “Options” to -Indexes

Options

Options sets the initial Apache options, which can then be modified by any AllowOverride settings. Ideally you can set this to what Druapl wants to begin with, then remove the other lines that are making the changes from the .htaccess file.

Drupal Options Settings:

These are the settings Drupal is actually trying to get too.

Options -Indexes

Options +FollowSymLinks

Other Related Errors

FileInfo allows the changes for ErrorDocument. Not having this option causes the error:  .htaccess: ErrorDocument not allowed here.

DirectoryIndex allows Drupal to set DirectoryIndex, the default file handler.  Not having this option causes the error: .htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here.

Not quite sure what config setting is causing this error, but it happens when the .htaccess tries to change PHP settings, which causes the error:  .htaccess: php_value not allowed here.

To test it, this post was done completely from Google Docs.

How to Set It Up

Just fire up a Google Doc and type some stuff up.

When you’re ready to publish, go to the “Share” button in the upper right area of the screen and select “Publish as web page…”.

The screen that pops up lets you share your document with other Google Docs users (the upper half) and also lets you publish to a blog (the lower half).

The settings:

If you’re using Wordpress, the API for Blogger.com and Movable Type API both work fine.  Although Google says the Movable Type API will work better, so use that.

Then just enter the login information for your blog and the path to your xmlrpc.php file.  That is usually just  http://www.myblog.com/xmlrpc.php

Google will remember the settings, so the next document you create can easily be published to your blog too.  No clue how well this would work if you were trying to manage multiple blogs with Google Docs.

Things That Worked Well:

Updating: Once you have published your post, if you want to push out the latest changes from the Doc to your blog, you have to go back and click “Republish Post” on the “Publish this Document” screen.  The process worked smooth.

Formatting:  Different formatting like bold, italics, underline, colors, links, tables and images all work.  (How images work is explained more below.)

Glitches and Weird Stuff:

So I ran into a couple things while playing with this:

Images: The Google Docs image you see at the top of this post was inserted into the my Google Doc.  Publishing the post just created a link to that image on Google Docs.  So the image isn’t actually hosted on my blog.  So what happens after you delete your doc?  I tested it, the image link was still good.  Wonder if it will always work…

Categorizing Posts: An interesting note about categories.  I guess Google Docs can automatically add your post to a category too.  It does that by using “Tags” (folders?).  I couldn’t find where to tag the document and using the same folder as a category name didn’t do anything.  So my post ended up as “Uncategorized”.  Boo.

Titles: My post didn’t get a title.  Which would seem to be a major drawback.

Updating:  I wish you could make it auto update your blog when you saved the document.

Extra Formating Code: I checked the code that Google Docs added to this post. No where near as bad as what Word would do, but it had a

around each line. The post initially displayed just fine on my blog. But after going in to add a title and a category, the process of saving the post messed up that formatting. Wordpress is notorious for not liking divs. So I had to go in and clean them all out to make everything display correctly again.

Conclusion:

So, kinda a cool feature.  If you’re way into Google Docs it might be a nice way to do occasional posts or a quick way to push a document to a blog.   But there are just to many things that don’t quite work right and pretty much kill the idea of managing your blog from Google Docs.

Luckily, jQuery is prepared to handle this!  Good’ol jQuery.

jQuery has a “noConflict” mode, that will let all the jQuery content to run without using the $.  You just state that you are running in noConflict mode in your first line, then instead of using $(function(){…}, you replace the $ with jQuery, so it looks like this: jQuery(function(){….

Here’s a full example.

<script>

jQuery.noConflict(); // Tell jQuery you are going with noConflict mode.

jQuery(function(){ // Replace the $ with jQuery
jQuery(‘div’).doStuff();
});

</script>

This will allow the other library to use the $ without conflict.

The Wordpress whitescreen of death!

The Wordpress white screen indicates that there is a problem with your current theme.  Unfortunately at this point, you can’t go change the theme to unbreak it, since the theme selector is just going to spit out PHP errors.  See the problem is, the database still has entries pointed to the “current” theme, which is either bugged, incomplete or gone.

Here are the symptoms:

• All Wordpress pages, posts, tags etc. bring up a blank white screen.
• There is no code or html output.
• The Wordpress Admin area still works. (which is a good thing).
• The Wordpress theme selector (Appearance -> Themes) page won’t load and spits out PHP errors.

What to look for:

Check to make sure your theme files are still in place.  Deleting the current themes directory, renaming the theme directory or moving the current themes directory to a new location will all cause this error.

If files were moved or deleted, the best thing to do is to just put things back where they were, switch to another theme, then do your changes or removal of the old theme.

If that’s not possible, you can go manually change the current active theme in the database.  The current template data is stored in the ‘options’ table, option_name “template”.  Just change it to the folder name of another theme.  It’s not pretty, but it works and will get you back up and running.

Here’s the “official” announcement.

Together with their families

Danielle Gugeler
&
Cory Sessions

would like to announce their marriage on
Wednesday, the 8th of July in Nauvoo, Illinois.

There will be a reception on July 7, 2009 from 6pm to 8pm
at the LDS chapel in Mt. Vernon.
380 Lincoln Highway, Mt. Vernon, Iowa 52314

There will be an open house with the new couple July 31, 2009 from 6pm to 8pm
at the LDS chapel at 965 W 2000 N, Orem, UT 84057.
This will be a barbecue, so come hungry!

Now that I have a little group of growing sites, it’s been interesting to see the results.

Some sites seem to just take off. Getting rankings and traffic is pretty easy with them. Other sites take a while before they go anywhere, then they start moving at a moderate pace. Then there seems to be sites that for all you do they just won’t go anywhere and you’re stuck with just a couple hundred visitors a month.

Internet marketing and SEO is a rather interesting thing.  You can talk about it and read about it all day long, but staying at that academic level really won’t help you learn it.  When you dive in and start building sites and driving traffic to them then you really start learning how things work.  You start to see patterns emerging and you get those “A Ha!” moments.  You find out what works and what doesn’t.

So, time to go build another site.

Today you can see a pair of glowing eyes.

If you’re a code nerd, you can go look at the .css file.  If you do you’ll see several lines are commented out.  If you piece those images back together, you get a picture of … something.  No clue what that is supposed to be.

I have a strange feeling that the image from the css has nothing to do with whatever they plan on announcing…  most likely it’s a Blizzard joke.

Update:

Well, it turns out that all this was for Diablo 3! While I have no idea how the above images are related to the Diablo games in any way… It’s still cool! Time for some hack and slash!

There are 9 of us in our office.  7 of us would prefer to have the lights off.  2 people want them on and blindingly bright.  So in true democratic fashion, the lights stay on all day as the majority are forced to capitulate to the loudly voiced demands of the minority.

Apparently in a Democracy all you have to do is yell and complain louder than anyone else and you get your way.  And that is how minority rules.

Our company had a PPC training today, which interestingly, all the SEO guys attended  (I think we are all secretly jealous cause they get instant traffic).  It was really really good.  I picked up a lot of things I didn’t know about PPC.   I have been running PPC ads on a personal project for a while now, but today showed me that I really didn’t know what I was doing.

Later Jared, one of the PPC managers, sat down with me and went though my account.  He was very polite and didn’t openly mock me, to much.  It pretty much came down to: you should delete that campaign and start over.  I was really resistant to that, until he showed me the report that tells you which keywords people are searching when they clicked on your ad.  I was shocked.   I have a ring related website and I was getting searches for rings for piercings in places you don’t want to talk about in civilized conversation.  I didn’t even know you could pierce some of these places…  *shudder*.  Anyway, it basically came down to, 2/3rds of my money was going straight out the window on keywords that had nothing to do with what I was trying to promote.  Part of that was a mysterious “Unknown” section that Google wouldn’t even tell us about that amounted to about 500 clicks.  I guess you doesn’t realize how much you don’t know until someone shows you.

So taking Jared’s advice, I promptly chucked my old campaign and started over.  We’ll see how it goes now.

Below are some of the great PPC related things I picked up today.  Enjoy.

Exact Match Keywords – [keyword keyword]

Your ad only shows up when that exact phrase is typed in.  No more, no less.

• Exact phrase only
• In that exact order

Examples: [red tennis shoes]

Your ad shows up if the search is: ‘red tennis shoes’.

But not for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’ or ‘tennis shoes red’ or anything else.

Phrase Match – “keyword keyword”

This seems to be the one that gets used most commonly.  Also use in conjunction with negative keywords.

• Plural and singular keywords are separate and distinct keywords.
• Keyword order specific

Examples: “red tennis shoes”

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’

Ad won’t show up for: ‘tennis shoes red’ (out of order), ‘red tennis shoe’ (singular)

Broad Match – keyword keyword

Your ad shows up for the entered keyword, as well as pretty much anything Google deems slightly related.

If you use this, good luck.  This is what I was using, without knowing what it would actually do to my campaign.

• Not order specific
• Not plural or singular specific
• Not order specific

Examples: red tennis shoes

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’, ‘bobs red tennis shoes’, ‘tennis shoes’, ‘red shoes’, ’shoes’, ‘red’, ’socks’ (cause they are feet related too), ‘Nike’ (cause it’s a type of shoe) etc.  The list is huge.

Ad won’t show up for: ‘Grandma’s knitting’.  Pretty much something completely unrelated.  Cause if it can find a link, it will try to put your ad there.

So yeah, it was a good day.  I learned I had been loosing money for a long time.  But on the bright side, I got to learn about the problem before launching any major projects! 

Oh, and on a side note, it snowed this morning here in Utah.  It’s frigg’in May 1st and its still snowing!  Damn this global warming!  It’s going to freeze us all to death!

I like that.   Now I need to get my code to show up like that.