Sysadmin Tales: SEO by Stealth

February 3rd, 2010

Although the names have been removed to protect the guilty and innocent, I received this:

Hi,

My name is Amy and I’ve been using your page: … to do research for a presentation I’m putting together. As a prelaw major, it was very helpful to me.

Sorry to take any more of your time, but I wanted to let you know of a link (…) on the page above that doesn’t work. And as a thank you, I thought I’d suggest a replacement/additional resource for it. I’ve been using this other page: … and it has a lot of information on the brain (i.e. functions, disorders, injuries, etc) that might be useful to you.

Thanks Again,

So, just a polite email telling me I have a broken link, until I saw this:

Hi Lisa,

My name is Beverly and I wanted to provide feedback on your page: … I was using it to do research for a lesson plan on earthquakes and as an Earth Science teacher, I’ve found it to be a tremendous help, thank you.

I figured I’d take a minute to return the favor. I noticed you have a broken link here: (…), so I thought I’d recommend another page for you. I’ve been using this page: … and it’s a great source for plate tectonics offering good information and extensive academic links which I really appreciated and wanted to pass along.

Thanks again,

It is at least a clever scam: Identify websites with high page rank (the site I got this on is very authoritative as it’s had a very long life, with the webmaster being especially sharp at keeping continuity on the site organization over multiple iterations to ensure good search engine ranking on relevant terms), find broken external links, and get them to change your bad link to their good link and give them link authority.

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AIM Authorize.Net Integration Hiccup

January 30th, 2010

Two hiccups while attempting to configure Authorize.Net AIM method, and how I fixed them:

  • Using Curl, I was submitting by POST with an array.  This caused it to use multipart/form-data encoding, which sure looks like it doesn’t work.  To get it to use www-form-urlencode, I had to urlencode the arguments myself and pass the argument string, not the array.
  • The ampersand (&) is not a field separator — it’s a stop character.  The spec calls for all key/value pairs to end in an ampersand.  If you pull out any old library that will do the previous one — or, let’s say you had one homebrewed… — you might not have put an ampersand on the end.  Without the ampersand, you’ll get that dreaded (92) error.

Do that, and, like magic, it works.

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New again, in WordPress

January 30th, 2010

As I do periodically, I restarted jonathanlbrown.com to be a study in Wordpress.  I have been doing some blog work, and it seemed timely to set up a guinea pig for experimentation.

Although I will try to keep things current here — don’t count on high-volume posting or frequent items.  I’ll link to several of the companies that I have started that are doing interesting things — I can’t tell you everything, of course, and, as with many things, there may be a 6 month publication delay…

Thanks!

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