This is why I'm not a "webmaster"

In an effort to help my girlfriends website generate a bit of traffic  – and some business for her ? – I’ve spent a bit of time (probably a little too much for a holidaying techie, but it’s a “love job”) trying to get my head around more indepth search engine optimisation and Google Analytics / Webmaster tools in particular.

In summary I still think a lot of it is voodoo ? .

Generating the sitemap etc. is easy, as is submitting it (except Yahoo, too many hoops, FIXME) but the resulting information can be just a tad opaque – bounce rates for example (mine seems high at over 70%, maybe because of the package downloads) plus GoogleBot’s view of my site seems rather different to mine (or what awstats tell me about visitors) – I suspect the poor old META tag doesn’t get the importance it did in times past, and this old curmudgeon is still in the tech-bubble era regarding search visibility.

But I’m learning again – there seems to be some positive results already and it’s another string to my bow.

An impressive practical use of Google Maps (and Twitter to get the word out) during the flooding here in Brisbane:

Google Map of the affected areas and road closures

Fortunately I’m in the inner city and a floor up in an apartment, so wasn’t affected, unlike far too many (including a close friend who arrived home from the pub to a flooded front lounge and no electricity ? )

I also attempted to split my IPv6 allocation (a mere /64) over 2 physical links – bad idea and an epic failure on my part. It was worth a shot I guess.

All of my revision controlled code has been switched from bzr to git – I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner – it’s been a breeze, and the learning curve hasn’t been steep at all – or perhaps my needs aren’t too complex? (I’ve been primarily a bzr/cvs/Subversion user). The “tailor” package from the main Fedora repository was also helpful – it’s not the easiest to use, but the results were excellent.

I’m converting my rather venerable Samba domain controller to an LDAP backend (it’s currently tdbsam and a pain to manage) – using Fedora Directory Server (ahem “389” now – admittedly good vendor-neutral branding there folks) has been fairly painless, barring my unfamiliarity regarding how it manages ACLs (or perhaps that’s just the management console not doing what I think it is)

Speaking of which – I’ve had a dreadful experience with LDAP management apps – both gq and lat crash on me badly and while I don’t mind phpldapadmin (and use it at work) it’s not particularly fast. I welcome suggestions for alternatives ?

I’m currently hand-editing via ldapvi and feeling rather old-school.  A little Perl CGI app called “pluma” has piqued my interest – I’ll package it up if it turns out to be worthwhile.