w.y.s.i…WTF?

Just caught a Six Revisions posting about things to help fine-tune the performance and reliability of your site, and it included a link to a free website service called mon.itor.us that accoriding to the article “set up alerts for when a service becomes unavailable”

tried to check it out, but…

it was unavailable.

so if they are using their own service, how will they know that their site is down…?

(probably, dugg hard)

via OSNews.com

Anyone who has had to dig into another developer’s code can attest to this measurement.

 http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

One of my last posts was about someone else ripping off one of my company’s sites and that at least this one may go somewhere. So the powers-that-be want some documentation.

So we decided to give them print outs of all the site pages and a copy on disc of the site.

For “downloading” the offending company’s website, we needed to use a auto-download program (becuase doing it by hand would have just been a colossal waste of time). Plus whomever ripped off the site in the first place probably did the same thing (though I really hope they weren’t that smart and spent a ridiculous amount of time doing it manually).

After trying several Firefox extensions and some other trial-crippled software packages, I landed with HTTrack Website Copier, a free open-source application that allows you to input the URL of a website and it will spider the site and download the pages and images, retainign the linking structure of the site, so that you have a navigable (is that a word?) version stored locally. Worked like a champ. There are Windows, Linux and Mac versions available.

It also works with dynamic sites, so if you ever have a client that wants to have their dynamic database driven PHP site stored on a CD so they can brows it locally at a tradeshow, desert island, Iditarod dog race in Alaska or some other place that doesn’t have internet access. (But of course it may also really help to have a static version if your database ever craps out on you and you still want a functional site).

Now for the print-outs issue, that would take a while, so here was my workaround:

1. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to return a list of pages* it had in it’s index and use the “Export to TSV” option usually found at the bottom right of the results page. This will give you a full list of the pages for that site that has indexed, rather than just the 1st 10 links in the paginated results.
2. Open the TSV file in Excel and save it as HTML
3. Open the HTML file in Internet Explorer (I prefer Firefox, but IE is what makes the next step possible)
4. Choose to print that one page with all the links and in the print options look for “print linked documents“
5. Kick back and reload your paper and toner as necessary

This was just a hack for getting this done and I am sure there are other, better options. I am sure there is a Firefox extension I am not aware of that woudl have really helped with this. If you know of one, I would love to know and link to it.

*Since I was depending on Yahoo’s index of the site, it is a possibility I may have missed some pages, but it gave me more than enough to show what we needed. Just a disclaimer.

Hope this helps anyone who might find themselves in the same boat.

P.S.
There may be some Mac folks out there thinking “An Automator workflow would have been able to take care of all that” and you may be right, but the 3-4 hours I spent with it never seemed to be able to connect the steps correctly, even after trying the very promising “Download URLs as PDFs” action. Automator was the one of the coolest features I had seen in an OS and it made me quite interested in moving to Mac, but so far for me, it has been nothing but a big tease- it looks like it can do almost anything and makes it seem easy, but the pieces never really fit together the way I need them too. But I’ll keep trying.

Great tool to share today.

Ran across this website XML-Sitemaps.com that does exactly what you would want it to do.

You enter the website you want it to crawl and generate the XML sitemap for and a few minutes later it provides links to XML (compressed and uncompressed), text and HTML sitemaps for easy use.

It also allows you to specify the frequency, priority and created dates.

There is a 500 page cap on the service, but they also offer a PHP script version for about $20 bucks that you can install on your own server to generate sitemaps for unlimited pages.

Check them out and save yourself some time.

XML-sitemaps.com :  Free Online Google Sitemap generator

For anyone who read my previous post on getting one my sites ripped off,  this is not a follow-up, but if you read that post you’ll understand that I don’t expect to have any resolution to that individual issue for the very reasons that made it so frustrating.

However, another site has done the same thing and even worse. And these guys are open-season.

But what’s really interesting is how we found these site-ripping bastards:

We work closely with a specialized 3rd party ecommerce service provider that provides a hosted service, where mulitple clients have “stores” all on their servers. So this service provider was contacted by a client with an odd situation. Apparently they billed and sent a gift card to a customer who had not ordered from their site but from another site in another state.

How on earth could that have happened? (ahh, come on you know how)

The other business ripped off the site we built for our customer and did not change one of the links that led to our customers hosted store. So when their customer followed the “bad” link they hadn’t changed, it sent their customer to our customer’s site and since they looked identical, their customer had no idea they were buying from another company entirely.

Quite amusing, actually, especially for my co-workers who were really hoping that I would call the offending company (they really enjoy it when I rip into people for some reason).

But alas, while it was our work that was ripped off, it is work that we were paid for so it is our client’s property and their fight. They have been informed. They are not happy. And they are the ones with the lawyers on staff.

At least no bureaucratic nonsense should prevent this one from getting interesting.