BuyHTTP Corporate Blog

We at BuyHTTP would like to wish everyone a happy 2007 and start the year with a new tip for your Joomla or Mambo site.

When uninstalling components it’s not at all unusual for them to leave their database tables behind. Many do this to help with upgrading, making it a simple uninstall/reinstall situation. But if you are completely uninstalling a component, make sure to check the database using phpMyAdmin as see if the tables have been removed as well.

Have to thank friesengeist of the Joomla core team for this very nice tip for your Joomla or Mambo site.

There has been a lot of discussion lately on further securing your Joomla or Mambo installations and what can be done. We do everything possible at the server level but there are a few things that can done in your individual site to help ensure a hackless Joomla or Mambo existence.

This tip explains how to move your configuration.php file outside of your webroot as well as making it unwritable by the server. That makes it nearly impossible for someone to corrupt or gain access to the information in the file.

Read more »

In the world of dynamic sites there is often a lot of worry about duplicate content penalties since so many different URLs can point to the same exact page. We have good news to help quell those worries.

At the recent SES (Search Engine Strategies) in Chicago, Vanessa Fox of Google stated in an interview with WebProNews that there really are no duplicate content penalties for pages within your site. She even went as far as to specifically address dynamic sites and their content.

It is an extremely informative interview and great insight into some Google processes. She also goes over Google Sitemaps and how they can help your site get spidered faster.

To view the interview in it’s entirety visit  http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/

Search engines like Google see http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com as two completely different sites and that can lead to duplicate content penalties and lower rankings. What can be done to correct this issue? Amazingly it is just a few lines of code in your .htaccess file.

On BuyHTTP.com we use the following code:

RewriteEngine On
## SEO REWRITE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.buyhttp\.com
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buyhttp.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Let’s go through that line-by-line to examine what’s happening.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.buyhttp\.com

This line says if the host URL doesn’t start with www.buyhttp.com execute the following code. It is important to have the \ before each .

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$

This line says if the request isn’t made on port 443 (used for SSL or https://) execute the following code

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.buyhttp.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is the meat of the rule. It tells the server to take all of the URL after the .com/ and put it after http://www.buyhttp.com and do it as a 301 (permanently moved) redirect.

The overall rules state that if a request comes in without the www. and it’s not over a secure connection rewrite it to contain the www.

If you are adding this to an existing .htaccess file for a system like Mambo or Joomla with SEF URLs the placement is very important. It must be after RewriteEngine On in your existing file and before the core SEF rewrite rules. You will also want to make sure you only have one instance of RewriteEngine On in the file.

Taking a few minutes to implement these few lines of code will not only help with your search engine rankings but will also result in uniform URLs throughout your site.

We recently finished moving myMail to keep up with increased usage and interest and it got me thinking. We have been getting a lot of questions recently about it, and many are along the lines of “How is myMail different than (insert name of Joomla/Mambo newsletter component here)”?

The core features are all the same: you can collect email addresses; you can create templates for your newsletters; they follow CAN-SPAM rules for opt-in and opt-out; they send emails. That’s about where the features of most newsletter components stop. In addition to that myMail features: Read more »

Welcome to the brand new BuyHTTP Internet Services blog. We will be using this, along with our monthly newletter, to keep users up to date with the goings-on of the company. We encourage readers to join and post comments as we actively use feedback to improve our service offerings.

In this blog you will get more in depth looks at some of the services we offer, gain some insight into how the company is run, learn about our possible future plans, and read great tips for running your site.

Thank you for taking the time to read.