Webmaster tutorials and examples

Netcat (nc) can be use as a mini server which can listen to either tcp or udp port on Mac or Linux. nc – listen read more

Netcat (nc) can be use to check if a remote port is reachable and client can connect to it. The following commands were tried on read more

An error in robots.txt can cause Google to stop crawling a section of your site. In such case it is good to update and resubmit read more

Linux (or Unix) command line utilities like awk, sort, uniq, can be used to analyze apache log to get interesting stats. One use case is read more

Sometime we need to block all robots from crawling a web site. This can be needed if you have a stage or sandbox website for read more

By default Disallow entry in robots.txt is based on url prefix. To block every url beginning with /foo/ the following robots.txt can be used. User-agent: read more

It is important to maintain healthy xml sitemap for your site. In case you are using Yoast SEO plugin to generate xml sitemap for a read more

Submitting an xml sitemap to Google webmaster tools is recommended way to get site urls indexed by Google. This helps google to reach various urls read more

APC (Alternative php cache) is opcode and object cache for php. It caches the php bytecode on first execution of a php script which increases read more

Memcache is one of the most popular distributed memory based cache system. It can give excellent performance results if configured correctly. Its a good idea read more

When you are running a site in php (wordpress or non-wordpress), there are two popular options for in-memory cache. APC (Alternative PHP cache): Opcode and read more

Cross site scripting (XSS) protection is handled by many browsers. I was able to test it in Google Chrome and IE (IE 8 and higher). read more

In case you have moved a site to new domain and set all the HTTP 301 redirects (HTTP permanent redirects), then user who visits your read more

WordPress lets you display a list of pages as links with many customizations. You can use wp_list_pages or get_pages to display or get list of pages. read more

MailChimp can be used to setup email campaign and send a regular email newsletter to all the email address in a list. Most common use read more

MailChimp is very popular tool to manage email campaigns/newsletters. The first step in setting up any campaign or newsletter is to create an email list read more

Google feedburner offers an email subscription to your feeds. So far I was using that. Mailchimp is one of the most popular email list management read more

If you are using Google feedburner for rss feeds, you can setup feedburner email subscription newsletter within few minutes. I have been using it for quite read more

Netcat (nc) is pretty powerful command line tool on Linux & Mac and can be used to send data on network. It can be quickly read more

If you have been using wordpress for directly serving rss feed and have recently migrated to feedburner, then some of your users are still being read more

When you create a feed your your wordpress blog you get a url of the form http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedid. You can change feeds.feedburner.com to your own domain. It read more

When you install wordpress you automatically get feed or rss setup at url /feed/ (or /rss/). It seems to be a good option to continue read more

[Update: Authorship is no longer supported by google. You may also want to visit Google rich snippet documentation.] Google displays author information in search results read more

HTTP expire header can be used to set a expiry time for an image, css or any other content type. The browser does not fetch read more

Migrating a site from one domain to another can be a daunting task. But if we create a clear plan then it is a manageable task. read more

You may need ssl for your site for multiple reasons. I needed it for facebook apps. So my requirements are not so strict. For building read more

One of the main activity a webmaster has to perform is to monitor and fix 404 pages (not found pages) on the web sites. When read more

W3 total cache by Frederick Townes is probably the best wordpress cache plugin. Setting it up for best outcome can take sometime. But once you get read more

WordPress crons are different from traditional Linux or Windows crons. Traditional cron runs as independent processes at regular interval. WordPress crons are php hooks which read more

Alexa is a powerful tool for getting high level insight into any website. It can be used to research websites related to a specific topic read more

Almost all of us spend a great deal of time deciding what domain to use for our site or venture. Moreover once you pick a read more

Many times you want to remove urls from google index. There can be many reasons for doing that. Some of the reasons are: A page read more

Google provides extremely useful Search console (webmaster tools) to perform various activities and view stats of your web site. Here are some reasons why you read more

I recently noticed that my site (https://infoheap.com/) which was hosted on AWS North Virginia data center was very slow. I was accessing it from Airtel read more

Cross site scripting (XSS) happens when some input on a page (through GET or POST request) is not properly escaped before displaying. If that happens read more

I noticed that google bot is crawling javascript and css regularly from by wordpress blog site. Here are some entries from my apache log: 66.249.75.66 read more

WordPress is a great blogging platform and there are plugins for pretty much everything you need. But with too many plugins it affects the performance read more

I have been doing some research on whether to use www or not in domain of the urls of the site. If you setup wordpress read more