-
Users of Internet Explorer or Maxthon These are the most useless browsers know to man on the internet. Download a GOOD one NOW!
-
Laycat, Kyklo, what next?…and even admits is ‘cloaking’ itself
When I was looking through my November website logs, Laycat and Kyclo were of the highest visiting robots above Yahoo and Google. Of course, I googled it to see what on earth it was and sure enough other people were also complaining it was their highest visitor.
It is a relatively small cross-section of web designers and developers that actually look through their records and we’re one of them, the hits from Kyclo and Laycat were too big to ignore. Only a handful of people at the time reported about this particular Robot, some said that they were getting a minimum of 550 hits eg http://jagf.net/blog/?tag=laycat,
For a short period Laycat.com issued a web crawler notice on their site saying that they were simply gathering information for a new search engine…. and that was good enough for some, since a poster had copy/pasted the robot notice on a forum. The robots are sporadic, keep changing names, hit A LOT and the links to their website did not have any information on multiple occasions they were checked therefore this post was originally written. It looked a bit dodgy.
Now that this post was brought to the attention of Laycat/Kyclo, the very plain robot information page is back online, after being assured by the admin at Laycat that it must have been temporary down-time when I was looking.
There are currently 3 known robots all named differently operating under the same people. (rather odd – and how many more are there?) Kyklo.com, aceleo.com and and laycat.com. Not to tell someone else how to run their operation but couldn’t you simply use 3 different server names at one domain, for example kyklo.laycat.com aceleo.laycat.com and laycat.laycat.com? This might make people slightly less suspiscious of 3 different robots with completely different names linking back to the same place.
http://www.kyklo.com and http://www.aceleo.com all redirect to http://www.laycat.com/, – Don’t expect anything too fancy – it’s just a plain robot information notice blurb - no site, no branding or company information, nor anything further, plus despite being asked for further details on several occassions, they with not oblige and instead want to insist we change our public and might I say rightfully free, opinion of it, without further information, I’m sorry if that’s the way I ran my life I’d be a devout christian who thought science was just the devils way of trying to trick us because I’d be ignoring all evidence and putting my faith in the hands of someone elses words.
The admin at Laycat have been extremely bitter and resentful about their bots being mentioned on here in a skeptical light. Their initial contact was immediately followed by the post being re-titled, their admin being thanked for the 3 links above and thanked for their Robots text being re-issued online…. I got told I was being ‘Nasty’ !
Without further aggrevation, Laycat admin continued to bombard us with very long comment posts laced with further derogatory comments, calling us ‘undocumented trolls’, using childish tactics of posting word counts of his posts, due to the fact we said the comments length may have been something to do with Askimet Spam canning his comments. Ripping our post and comments apart line by line (Just like what would normally be considered “a troll” on most forums/blogs) with negatively verbose responses etc. We were painted as simpletons, writing rubbish to just drive people through our affiliate links (hardly advert city here with a maximum 4 links placed for layout aid vs 30+ links to our own site and services), we just wont stand for that, tell us we’re wrong by all means, but provide proof of it, don’t just bombard the comments with links and excuses.
Laycat (also aceleo and Kyklo…. even though I was told that it was kyclo not kyklo by Laycat even though the Kyklo website is kyklo.com), they have an absolutely stinking attitude to say the least. Given Laycats response, the dawn of a new search engine being the reason for these robots has become highly unlikely in our minds, and if it has that sort of childish mentality at the head of it, then frankly we don’t need it. Considering the type of responses that were given, we find it is far more likely this new search engine will be the next “Web Ripper” and not a search engine at all. Due to the nature of our site in comparison to the nature of his comments, we have been forced to remove ALL comments and re-write this post appropriately and close further comments, if admin@laycat.com would like to further comment on this post, we invite him to use our contact form http://www.symsysit.com/core/Symsys-Contact-Details.php to do so, beware though if you fill your email to us with lots of links, a massive character count, swear words etc, then our Web Spam filter will probably pick it up as well.
As repeated in all of Laycats comments, it is highly recommended, that their bots be blocked in the form of IP banning and robots.txt block lists if you think they may be maliscious – I am only repeating the advice given by Laycat admin here and just to please him, since he thinks we have such a controlling effect on our readers, I must molly-coddle you all by saying, “We encourage you to make up your own mind and this post is purely for informational purposes, we are not the definitive voice on the internet” – Laycat do you feel re-assured that we still don’t like your bots but have told our readers to make up their own minds? Readers do you feel re-assured that you’re not being “ordered” to believe what we tell you to?
Laycat, Kyklo, Aceleo maliscious?…..I say HELL YES … well, the admin certainly is!
Paranoid?….. YES :) lol, maybe just bored. At the end of the day, it is your site, you should be able to control what drive though taking your information to some extent, be it on the Internet or not. I’m now off to put on my tin hat, install barbed wire fencing around my house and instruct my datacenter to restrict all traffic to and from my server, just because I feel like it!
Our crawler has visited your web site?
Do you have any questions?
1) Why is your robot visiting my web site? Laycat crawler is a web documents indexing robot.
5) What is the search engine this web crawler is working for? The search engine this crawler is working for is currently in an early
development stage, and will go public as soon as we achieve the beta stage.
His job is to retrieve millions of pages from the world wide web
in order to feed a search engine.
6) Why is your crawler using an anonymous user agent?
Many documents found on the internet are generated dynamicaly, and may present
different content to crawlers than they would to regular visitors by examining
the user agent string. Examples of pages adding links to gambling, adult
content web sites when a crawler is visiting are plethora.
This practice is called cloaking, and the goal is to fool crawlers and
search engines in order to make them index some different content
than a normal person would actually see.
This is what we might call search engine spamming.
To avoid that kind of practice, the crawler uses an anonymous user agent,
and it will remain that way until we have enough data to do it the best way.
At this point we will of course consider using a dedicated user agent.
Most antivirus software use the same method as we do when scanning web pages.
There is no real need for a webmaster to detect a crawler using the
user agent string since this crawler respects the Robot Exclusion Standard,
and webmasters can decide to allow him to visit or not using this standard.
Please also note that the crawler will never fetch more than one page every
two seconds on a same IP address, thus never eating server's resources.=4
Filed under: Robots + Htaccess ... Comments (0)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
Custom, Web design? – not at Xtra New Zealand – Its all pay for poor DIY tools
After doing some research in the Waitakere area recently we discovered that a lot of companies out West don’t actually have a website, with some further research we discovered that some do, but it’s just a holding page or a very poorly designed one, which is obviously built from a template and … just … well, doesn’t do much.
A little further research took us to the telecom.co.nz website as the root cause of this. After some seriously furious clicking to get to the right page we find some very disturbing slogans:
Get a Custom website built
but then
The Custom template layout is similar to the EasySite template layout with….
and
Get your website built for you by a website design expert
but then
Get Your Website Built for You from Templates
Telecom Xtra just doesn’t get it
Anyway needless to say that the words “custom” and “template” don’t really go hand in hand when it comes to web design, or anything in fact. Your web design is either done from scratch, in which case it’s custom, or it’s done from a template, in which case it might be “cusomized” from a template and the amount of customization varies.
Another little gem we found out recently, whilst dealing with an Xtra/Telecom website customer, is that if they register your domain for you, you cannot delegate the DNS (Domain Name System) services to anyone but them. This means they control your email, where your website is hosted, they’re responsible for your anti-spam and ultimately your website. With this in mind I HAVE to recommend to anyone in NZ that they DON’T register a domain with Xtra, period.
Overpricing to the MAX!
They advertise that you can register a .co.nz domain for as little as $39.95, when companies like iServe.co.nz (Free plug for them because we register our .co.nz domains through them) will register it for $38 flat, inclusive of GST and you can nominate your DNS nameservers and are not forced to be tied in to them forever. iServe also offer a basic hosting plan for $20 per month, you don’t get much with it but it’s enough if you can design the site yourself, maintain it yourself and you’re acustomed to sorting out email issues etc. Or you can nominate a different nameserver, for example if you’re hosted with us (Only offered to web design and technical customers, not offered as a service to the general public) you can use our nameservers and we can look after your site for you, not just the hosting, but we help you manage it, filter your email for spam and more, all for as little as $35 a month.
So how much does Xtra site design cost? This fabulous customization of a template, using an online program called EasySite, or EasySite Plus if you pay more? (Been available from LOTS of hosting companies for a long time and for free if you purchased a domain through them, if you’re in the U.K check out www.123-reg.co.uk) Well nothing, you use the site builder yourself to design it from a template, so you don’t actually get Web Design services, you get a program and do the work yourself.
The hosting is just silly!
Not only is this a terrible thing to offer, site design services by a program you have to use, but also their hosting isn’t great. They offer a $12.95 package, which granted is cheaper than us or iServe, but for that you have 200MB of storage, compared to only 20MB with iServe (the average 4 or 5 page site is less than 5MB in size unless it has LOTS of photos or extra programming) and only gives you 2GB of traffic compared to 7GB with iServe and 10GB with us, the traffic is the important part here, if you have a small site but hope for lots of business, the more traffic allowance you have, the better.
The next package they offer is no better, you get 10GB of storage (WAAAAAAAAAAAY to much for any standard website) and 400GB of transfer, (again WAAAAAAAAAAAY to much for any standard website) and you get upgraded from EasySite to EasySitePlus, everything else remains the same, you only get 2 domain email accounts, so address1@something.co.nz and address2@something.co.nz compared to unlimited with iServe and 5 with us here at Symsys Ltd. In typical Telecom style they charge for overuse, 10cents per 1MB you go over your traffic allowance (Easily done on a good month, trust me) and 75cents per 5MB over your storage allowance (Thankfully since they provide so much you shouldn’t exceed it).
So do they actually offer custom websites then?
No not really, if you click on their link to have a custom site built without templates you get the following as the second paragraph:
The Custom template layout is similar to the EasySite template layout with a banner design along the top and navigation along the left hand side so it is equally suitable if you already have an EasySite website and want to improve it.
So they’re not actually offering custom sites at all, they’re just offering you the EasySite pro package, so you’re once again doing it yourself, but paying them for it.
Conclusions
The conclusion is this, if you want a customised website that works for you, is optimised for search engines AND speed of loading then you need to go to a professional, we’re a professional and if you don’t like us there are quite a few other professional designers out there in NZ as well, you just need to look for them. We don’t use templates at all unless the customer asks us to make one for them, in which case we start from scratch and produce a template for the customer that they can then use to produce extra pages at their own will, instead of having to pay us.
It’s never a good idea to design your companies site yourself, unless you’re one or preferably all of the following:
A Graphic Designer
A Web Coder
An SEO specialist
We are in fact all of the above bundled into one company, we have a B.A.(Hons) qualified designer on staff, diploma qualified programmers and we have resources at our fingertips to provide quality, GENUINE, SEO services that will ensure your site gets found on a search in google, whether it gets found first or 21st just depends on how much competition you have, how much content you give us to put in to your site and how often the submissions to the engines get made. Making a site come top of the listings when you search for it’s company name is simple, making it come top of the search engines when someone searches for the service that company provides and doesn’t know the company exists, well that’s a science, and one we’re VERY good at.
If you want your site to look good, function properly and appear in the search engines (We’re not promising you’ll be at the top of them because that’s a promise NO ONE can keep), then you need to speak to us, or someone just like us, not design it yourself through Xtras proprietary software offer.
So once again, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t buy your domain, hosting or site design through Xtra, I don’t care if you don’t come to us, but for the love of good look elsewhere! Oh and if you REALLY must use easysite you can, check out their homepage here http://www.easysite.com for more information on what they provide. But seriously, and I mean SERIOUSLY, pay someone to do it, or download something like wordpress, joomla or another CMS (Content Management System), then buy some PROPER hosting from someone like iServe or WebBase or Site5 and do it yourself that way, at least CMS programs tend to be very searchable based on content.
Filed under: Advice ... Comments (0)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
I think there is nothing worse than owning a few domains and having nothing on them and so, we are starting to go through both new and old domains. First up is www.websiteNZ.co.nz.
It is a fantastically easy to remember name and certainly no tongue twister to tell anybody over the phone or remember from a passing advertisement. It will be very aparrent that a lot of our time has been invested in the Symsysit.com website but once we end up with a design that works and functions exactly how we would like, it then leaves less room for play.
Pure CSS, No Script, Tableless Horizontal Website
The new Website, www.websiteNZ.co.nz has been a refreshing technical challenge over that last few weeks. The goal set was a crazy idea to make a site that is horizontal, no plugins, no script, NO TABLES allowed using valid XHTML Strict and CSS 2.1 maximum. Also, to look right on my 22″ widescreen running 1680×1050 and equally look right on a 17″ square 1024×768 screen be it IE6 or Google Chrome.
Argh I hear you say….. and yes BIG ARGH it was.
Some of the problems to overcome when creating a Navigable horizontal Website.
When placing navigation to skip back and forth through a single horizontal page using anchors, it becomes a virtually impossible nightmare.
One of the main issues is Internet Explorer.
ALL other browsers known to man will skip to an anchor aligned to the right of the page, to show the page it belongs to.
Mictosoft IE based Browsers do not know their left from Right
So, basically any web designer trying to do a site like this for IE only would have to revert to a mentality of that lower than Kindergarten student. It would be like being a passenger in a car driven by an American in NZ or the UK tackling their first roundabout…. understandably very confusing and very messy unless you are in the know.
See the diagram below for the result. The page will never quite get to the screen in an IE based browser unless you
A) give the anchor it’s own dedicated cell to bounce left to right in. and
B) write double the code to alternate left and right for Everyone else with common sense versus IE based browsers.
Thanks a bunch Mictosoft! But then I suppose it is fitting to have so much unnecessary bloated code to satisfy the conditions. The rest of the bloat is to cover up their opposite understanding of margins and paddings and magically invented extra pixels solely by guess what – …. IE Based browsers.
Microsoft Kindergarten Level knowledge of Direction
The best web design practice, is to design and test for Chrome and Firefox, then add adjustments for IE7+ then again add adjustments for IE6 and other inferior browsers. This way, you know your CSS is correct even when IE decides to do the exact opposite of what it should be doing.
Filed under: CSS,XHTML ... Comments (1)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
Debian (Lenny) Linux – Beta2 is now my desktop OS
Well anyone who read my review of Lenny last month will probably have expected this, but I’ve dumped my 64bit installation of Ubuntu Hardy in favor of Debian 5.0 (Lenny). I couldn’t be happier in all honesty, it runs faster (Even though it’s only x86/32 bit as opposed to 64 bit like Ubuntu was), it looks nicer, it does what I tell it to (Sort of) and I feel like a grown up again instead of a newbie using an easy OS. No offense to newbies but you are who Ubuntu is designed for to be fair.
Debian (Lenny) FF3 Installed - Screenshot.
You can see in the screenshot to the right that I’ve managed to install FF3 instead of being forced to use IceWeasle, which I’m sorry I don’t care who you are or how much you tell me it’s the same, it isn’t ok so shutup! lol. Anyway the point being that Lenny does have it’s downfalls when it comes to installing some programs and drivers that are very easy on Ubuntu/Kubuntu Hardy. For example, when you install Kubuntu Hardy and you have an Nvidia card, Ubuntu pops up and says “I see you have an Nvidia card, would you like to install the drivers for it?” You click yes and you’re on your way, with Lenny however you log into your system and there’s no such pop-up, so you say, “Lenny, I have an Nvidia card and I’d like to install it please”, to which Lenny promptly replies, “Well drop to console and work for it bitch!” Obviously you understand Lenny isn’t a real person and it doesn’t actually talk to you in voice by default, but I had to do it that way for the joke to work. 
I’ve installed all my usual programs, like Yakuake (Screenshot below, which also includes my dual screen spanning desktop just for good measure), Filezilla, Thunderbird, aMSN, Opera, Netscape, Flock and a host of other simpler but neccessity applications for me like, Flash player, VLC, MPlayer, Audacity etc.
Lenny Yakuake - Screenshot.
This last few weeks has seen lots of change in the world, our own fair New Zealand has taken a new government, America elected a new saviour, sorry I mean president, I mean, well you get the point, so I decided it was time for the Symsys-Kubuntu-804 machine to become Symsys-Lenny instead. Change is good!
After installing my applications and installing the wonderful “Breathless” Icon theme, I changed a couple of fonts, uninstalled Open Office 2.4 and installed 3.0 from debs I already had, then decided I’d blog about how great it was.
Lenny 'K' Menu - Screenshot
So the long and short of this installation is that Nvidia drivers are not yet very easy to install in Lenny, unless you install them immediately after installing your system, unfortunately if you do that you’ll need to re-install them once you update to the 2.6.26 kernel, which will have been compiled from gcc-4.1 and if you’ve updated your kernel you’ve most likely upgraded gcc to gcc-4.3 or higher and the compilation of the Nvidia Kernel module will fail because of that very fact, so just a quick tip for those others out there googling this problem (And I found a few myself during the process as I had other errors too), make sure to download the absolute latest drivers from the Nvidia site, now you won’t be able to do that easily either, their site is now entirely flash/java and doesn’t tend to work well with Konqueror, Opera, Firefox or Netscape until the Nvidia drivers are actually installed (Dumb right?), anyway, visit http://www.nvidia.com/downloads and you’ll get what you need. Once you’ve got the latest drivers from Nvidias site, drop to console (Closing the GUI all together I mean here not just bring up Konsole or dropping to Ctrl Alt F4) make sure you have the correct linux-sources and build-essential installs, then type apt-get install gcc-4.1 then export CC=”gcc-4.1″ then immediately after that cd /usr/src && sh ./NVIDIA*.run agree to the license, say no to downloading a pre-compiled kernel and say ok (No other option) to compiling a new kernel, hopefully all should be well. Obviously don’t take this as a guide to installing Nvidia drivers by default because you may find that they install just fine for you if you have a newer release of Lenny, or a .deb package to install them with etc.
I might actually write a blog about the nvidia drivers installation with a few hints and tips on troubleshooting as well for those who get lost. Have a look for it in the menu on the right, if you can’t find it in there I haven’t written it yet so just stick a comment below here to give me a jab to do it.
I’m really really really impressed with Lenny and I couldn’t be happier to get rid of Kubuntu 64bit, now that’s something I never thought I’d say, Ubuntu/Kubuntu has always been so easy to install and easy to maintain but lately I’ve just been feeling frustrated, it’s so much harder to do “power user stuff” in Ubuntu now BECAUSE it’s so much easier to do the easy stuff. Now that Debian have given us Lenny with a fantastic installer, a brilliant package of programs out of the box and you still have the genious that is aptitude and synaptic if you want to install it, then I think I can now safely say that Debian is well and truly the Ubuntu for professionals and power users, although some may take offense at that so let’s say Ubuntu is the Debian for newbies, but no wait other people will be offended at that, hmmmmmmmmmm, well I like both, I prefer Debian for my pro stuff and Ubuntu for my clients that aren’t so technically minded, yeah that works .
Filed under: Linux Reviews ... Comments (5)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email