To ensure that we are able to provide the quality of website services our clients have come to expect we provide the full services of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This enables us to provide custom, secure and high performance website solutions.  We provide services to manage the complete web presence for your website from registration and hosting through security and performance monitoring and support.

Update: we have now combined this site with our main site! And all the articles are available in the one site.

We wanted to create a home for our knowledgebase and created the website technology.blue-bag.com. Here we provide a range of articles and posts covering issues from using CMS systems such as Drupal through to security articles covering securing access to your website.

Whether you are running Drupal,Wordpress, Expression engine, Joomla or in fact any web site one of the regular tasks you should carryout on your web site is a bit of log analysis. It is often left up to modules, plug ins or someone else to protect your web site until it too late.
We all rely on Google Analytics to tell us about visitors and maybe use our log analysis software (AWStats, Webaliser etc) to report on log entries - but it is always worth using tools locally to dig deeper into your logs. These can range from simple reports on accesses to your site to more detailed forensic analysis of site activity.
By doing this we get to know better how visitors are accessing our site and can uncover some interesting answers to questions such as:

• How often is Google actually spidering my site?
• How many errors am I getting and what are they?
• Who is stealing my content?
• Is anyone trying to crack my site?

In this post I will briefly cover some useful techniques to analyse you logs and see if any one is abusing your hospitality.

One of the trends these days is to lose the www. from your domain name.
Arguments for are usability (e.g. you don't have as much typing to do - it is easier to not have to say dubyadubyadubya every time you give out your web address).
There are counter arguments of course to do with cookie control and sites that have sub-domains etc.
What is important though is that you choose one and stick to it. In any event you should decide for one and not allow both.
Supporting both will cause duplicate content in Google and you may suffer in SEO terms.

I use the .htaccess file a lot on hosted servers. On our own servers I prefer to use the httpd.conf as it performs better and is not reevaluated on every request. But if you are on a hosted server the .htaccess is your earliest port of call for handling incoming traffic and can be more efficient than using modules for certain tasks. One common gotcha is how to discard the querystring for a redirect.