Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Even though Blogger blogs have been undergoing a lot of changes recently it still causes people who use it quite soem headache. One recent example: even people as well known as Mike Grehan fall victim to a Blogger template acting up. Check out this post of his - which in itself is an excellent post with a lot of insight, but it is hardly readable in Firefox. (I have posted about Blogger template problems in different browsers a while ago - in my case, it was IE though.)

While Mr. Grehan’s post contains a lot of interesting and discussable points, the comments to the post are a great example of, so to say, “post hijacking”, even though it wasn’t intentional - half the people commenting talk about the template problem. From this point of view of view, it is interesting to see how Aaron Wall handles both issues - he mentions the template problem while giving a lot of thought to all the informative content of the post

Just checked my AdSense account and noticed that I can now use Firefox ads as well. previously, they were only available with the Adsense accounts registered by Americans.

I have received this emial recently from SpreadFirefox site that is promoting the Firefox browser:

The Spread Firefox Team became aware this week that the server hosting
Spread Firefox, our community marketing site, has been accessed by
unknown remote attackers who attempted to exploit a security
vulnerability in TWiki software installed on the server. The TWiki
software was disabled as soon as we were aware of the attempts to access
SpreadFirefox.com. This exploit was limited to SpreadFirefox.com and
did not affect mozilla.org web sites or Mozilla software.

We have scanned Spread Firefox servers and at this time do not believe
any sensitive data was taken, but as a precautionary measure we have
shutdown the site and will be rebuilding the web site from scratch. We
also recommend that you change your Spread Firefox password and the
password of any accounts where you use the same password as your Spread
Firefox account. We will notify you again when the site is back up with
instructions on how to change your password. (Note: We do use MD5
hashing on the passwords, but MD5 cannot protect all passwords against
off-line dictionary style attacks.)

After Spread Firefox was compromised in July, we instituted procedures
to ensure that we apply all security fixes to the software running the
site (Drupal and PHP) as soon as they become available. Unfortunately,
those procedures overlooked the installation of the TWiki software since
it is not used by the main Spread Firefox site. When the system is
rebuilt, all the software will be audited to ensure that security
updates will be applied in a timely manner. We deeply regret this
incident and any inconvenience this may have caused you. Sincerely,

Spread Firefox Team
Mozilla Foundation

My Firefox has just informed me (through a floating window with updates info) that Firefox 1.0.7 is now available for download. I haven’t downloaded it yet and don’t plan on doing it today as I am currently too busy with other things - but I am interested to see what has been improved in this version so will definitely get it some time soon, check and report back.

When asked to comment on this new release, Earl Grey said it is cool that a new version has been released but he doesn’t use Firefox. His browsers of choice are Internet Explorer and Opera.

I have finally uninstalled Firefox 1.0.6. It was crashing a few times a day, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes. Went back to the previous version I had - at least it’s more stable. The reason I first installed the new one was hoping that the old issues of new windows taking forever to open, and taking up too much memory and CPU as it keeps running would be at least partially solved - but no… infact the new one appeared even worse. They really need to do something about eating up so much resources - on slower machines it makes Firefox almost impossible to run.

I have recently installed Firefox 1.0.6, hoping the bugs that caused me problems in the older version would be fixed in it. But to my dismay, the new version has its own problems as well. I can say it is a bit faster than the previous ine, but, say, opening a new window on an old and not-so-powerful computer like mine still takes forever. Moreover, in the past 24 hours it crashed 3 or 4 times already - which is really bad if you have like a dozen tabs open and half the links you don’t want to lose. Of course when it crashes, most likely the links won’t be saved in the history. Well, it’s getting there slowly, and hopefully some day all the vital things will be fixed. I should probably start reporting bugs to Mozilla…

Came across this plugin for Firefox on their plugins and extentions site: CustomizeGoogle. The description says:

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). All features are optional and easily configured from the options menu.

Funny, this sounds like AdSense/AdWords killer, doesn’t it? Also, I’d like to know just how exactly this thing removes spam and what is qualified as spam. Haven’t downloaded and installed it myself - nor do I think I will bother - but if anybody does any experimenting with it please share your impressions.

Another aspect is what Google thinks of it, considering the competitors links and the rest, and whether this can be qualified as copyright infringement.

It is a nice tendency to create various tools, toolbars and plugins for Firefox along with IE. As more people (especially more Internet-savvy people who would be interested in those tools in the first place) switch to Firefox it is nice to see that those tools are available for it. Recently, I’ve come across a few nice ones I will be covering in the next posts.

I normally use Firefox so I don’t see what’s happening in IE - but now I decided to check my blogs to see what they look like and was in for a very unpleasant surprise. The div’s aligned with CSS that Blogger uses in its standard templates are all messed up in IE.

To evaluate how bad this problem was, I checked my stats for visitors’ browsers and here’s what I got for just one of the blogs:

63.00% MSIE 6.0
20.00% Mozilla 5.0
6.00% Firefox 1.0.4
4.00% Firefox 1.0.6
2.00% Safari 1.2
1.00% Firefox 0.9
1.00% MSIE 5.5
1.00% Netscape 7.1
1.00% Firefox 1.0.5
1.00% Netscape 7.2

Out of all the visitors, different versions of Firefox account only for 12% of all visitors, while 64% run different versions of MSIE.

I am now facing some sleepless nights replacing the div’s with regular tables in those templates - and I should get to it soon. I’m losing AdSense clicks cause of this problem.

The templates Blogger offers look nice as templates even in IE - but once you start filling them with content things are immediately messed up. Your sidebar goes under the rest of content, etc. Just one more example of how Blogger screws up.

I first downloaded Firefox a few months ago, mostly out of curiosity and also because I was redesigning a site and had to see what it looks like in it, especially with all the buzz about FF gaining a growing share of browser market. Well, since then, it became my main browser, mostly because I like the tabbed browsing, the way CTRL+F works, etc., all the little things that add up and contribute to user experience… There are, however, some things that piss me off. There must be something in the source code that’s just not working right. Seems like some sockets are not closed after they’ve been used by Firefox or don’t know what it’s called, me not being a programmer, but gradually it gets to use most of my poor old computer’s memory, and sometimes the only way out is to kill the process and restart Firefox. Also, when a new window opens it literally freeses the whole computer for a few seconds. Sometimes it pisses me off to the point when I say, no more of that shite, I’m going back to IE. But that’s not so easy. IE doesn’t know anything about all the places I’ve been going to in the last few months - and I’m not even talking bookmarks, those can be copied/imported/whatever. Say when I start typing a URL in the address bar FF just shows the rest of it - and many of those are not even saved as bookmarks! I guess I could still hack the registry and fix the problem by copying the list of recent URLs into IE - but there’s so much of other stuff going on now that I can’t be arsed.