Author Archives: Todd Huss

Disassembling the MacBook Pro

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Todd Huss

I had quite a scare today when my new MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot. It would turn on, the screen would go white, and after about 20 seconds it flashed a question mark in a box on the screen. I thought … Continue reading →

Posted in Desktop, OSX, Systems Administration | 4 Comments

Tracking your SEO pagerank

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’ve started using Sitening’s free SEO SERP tracker to track the position of GreatSchools.net for terms we want to rank for in Google. If you rely on search traffic and want to keep track of how you’re ranking for certain … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off

Using image tags (for style elements) in HTML is bad design

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more … Continue reading →

Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Design, Search Engine Optimization | 9 Comments

New Segway Dali LE (Light Edition)

Posted on April 10, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’ve always been intrigued by the original Segway but until recently they were out of my price range. That all changed with the new Segway Dali LE (Light Edition). Here I am enjoying the commute on my new Segway Dali … Continue reading →

Posted in Humor, Travel | 3 Comments

Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references

Posted on April 5, 2006 by Todd Huss

We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with & as a separator instead of plain old & in a few … Continue reading →

Posted in Design, Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off

Java’s SEO blunder: jsessionid

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update: Bryce pointed out a servlet filter you can implement to disable JSESSIONID’s… very nice! When we started moving GreatSchools from Perl to Java + SpringMVC + Hibernate one of the first things we had to figure out was how … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Search Engine Optimization, Web | 9 Comments

Search engine market share changing is an understatement

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Todd Huss

The market share change between Google and Yahoo has been breathtaking this past year! The article Google gains search share, widens lead on Yahoo (over at Yahoo news) indicates Google’s market share was 36.3% a year ago and now it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

Will a language scale? Wrong question!

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Todd Huss

This tongue in cheek post by Dion about Ruby not scaling made me chuckle but also got me thinking! The whole question of whether a modern language scales or not is really the wrong question to ask. Almost any language … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web | 5 Comments

Ruby on Rails Mac OS X Intel Binary

Posted on March 25, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update 8/13/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.6 Update 5/10/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.2 and built Ruby with the ri docs per Duncan McGregor’s comment Update 4/7/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.1 Update 3/28/06: Now that Rails 1.1 has arrived I’ve upgraded this … Continue reading →

Posted in Desktop, OSX, Ruby, Software Engineering | 26 Comments

Issue and solution for upgrading Lighttpd from 1.4.8 to 1.4.11

Posted on March 25, 2006 by Todd Huss

After upgrading Lighttpd to 1.4.11 from 1.4.8 it was no longer working with my Ruby on Rails project saying it couldn’t find public/dispatch.fcgi. Well, it turns out they made this security fix which breaks relative paths typically used in lighttpd.conf:

Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration, Web | 7 Comments