SEO and image file names

Surprisingly it looks like even the filename of an image used in a website has SEO benefit – see supporting links below – this may be a pain but a multilingual site should consider duplicating images in order to use different filenames containing keywords in each of the languages a site uses.

Supporting Links:

Alternatives to GUID with PHP

GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. It is a string of letters and numbers and useful to allow website visitors to access a site without needing a username and password because although the probability that a GUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is close enough to zero to be negligible.

In fact Wikipedia says that you would have to generate 2.71 Quintillion (an 18 digit number) GUIDs to have a 50% probability of a collision.

However a GUID isn’t pretty, they look like 204FA460-65C6-DAB0-C69E-013ECE71F5D0 which can be scary to non-technical users when used in a URL.

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Windows 10 April Update and problems printing to shared printer on a Mac

After installing the Windows 10 April update on my laptop I couldn’t print to the shared printer attached to my Mac any more.
I didn’t remember how I originally got the printer working but I already had Bonjour installed. Bonjour is the recommended way of remote printing between Windows and MacOS (download Bonjour from Apple here https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999)

When I tried to find and connect to the remote printer this time I got the message: “Error 1796 You do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the printer”.
My account has Admin rights so that shouldn’t have been a problem. I located where the Bonjour executable was found and right clicked to ‘Run as administrator’ but that gave the same message.

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ServerPilot Pagespeed Message History

To enable Message History in Pagespeed on a server managed with ServerPilot – useful if you need to diagnose if there are any problems. You need to create a global level config file – adding it for a particular vhost isn’t good enough.

Create a file pagespeed.conf in /etc/nginx-sp/http.d

pagespeed on;
pagespeed MessageBufferSize 100000;
pagespeed FileCachePath /var/cache/pagespeed;
pagespeed Statistics on;
pagespeed StatisticsLogging on;
pagespeed LogDir /var/log/pagespeed;

Create the folder to hold the logs at:

mkdir /var/log/pagespeed;
chmod 755 /var/log/pagespeed;
chown www-data /var/log/pagespeed

This enables Pagespeed for all the sites on the server so if there are any that shouldn’t be using it, you’ll need to add pagespeed off; to a config file in that particular vhost folder.