Ever have one of those days where you are so eager to get home and watch Lost that you totally forget to log out of your Remote Desktop instance? Well I have, and usually it is not a big deal, because Windows Server Terminal Services allows you to have multiple logins with the same user account. Unless you are running on GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated server, where the default configuration only allows one connection.

So I called up GoDaddy and they said my only option was to power cycle the machine. Gasp… Yes you head me right, a power cycle of a live running website. My heart actually skipped a beat when this level one tech said this. I also wasn’t allowed to talk to level two techs because they can only be graced with e-mail, talking to actual GoDaddy customers is beneath them I guess.

Well to make a long story short I found a way to increase my Maximum Connections to two, which is just enough to allow me to login with the Admin account and kill my other session. Here is what you have to do:

To Set Maximum Connections for Remote Desktop Connections

1. From your servers’s Start menu, point to Programs, point to Admin Tools, and then click Terminal Services Configuration.
2. In the right pane of the window, click RDP-Tcp.
3. Click the Network Adapters tab.
4. Change the Maximum Connections to 2.

Also while you are at it you may want to change the session log out time.

To Set Timeout Options for Remote Desktop Connections

1. From your computer’s Start menu, point to Programs, point to Admin Tools, and then click Terminal Services Configuration.
2. In the right pane of the window, click RDP-Tcp.
3. Click the Sessions tab.
4. Specify the values you want to use.

I usually set End Disconnected Sessions to 10 minutes and Idle Session Limit to 30 minutes.

I don’t know why the maximum connections for RDP isn’t set to a reasonable value as the default, but many of the default settings at GoDaddy and puzzling and disturbing. So it really doesn’t surprise me.

Tags: GoDaddy, RDP, Remote Desktop, Session Timeout, Virtual Dedicated Server

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New Theme

My first major change was the development of my own theme. My old theme was clunky and overall I didn’t like the feel that it gave to my reader base. I became greatly discouraged looking for a new theme as most are more of a testament to art and less on readability and functionality. So I decided to create my own that had a very simple layout.

Optimization of Load Time

One of the things I hated about my other blog was the fact that I didn’t have control over how the HTML and thus JavaScript was laid out. Especially the JavaScript because I had duplication where I didn’t need it. The script that Technorati gives you is hardly optimized for load time because of duplication of a supporting script file.

<a class="tr-linkcount" href="http://technorati.com/search/{your URL here}">View blog reactions</a>
<script src="http://technorati.com/linkcount" type="text/javascript"></script>

If you notice the 2nd line in the script above never changes. Well to optimize this I only included the 1st line in my post text and the 2nd line is at the bottom of the page with the rest of my JavaScript.

The next thing I did was optimize my load time using YSlow. See Jeff Atwoods Description.

1. Add Expires headers to all my static content for 10 years from the day it is downloaded.
2. Enabled Gzip compression for all my static content.
3. Put all CSS at the top of the page.
4. Reduced all DNS lookups by downloading images from LinkedIn, Technorati, and others and hosted them locally.
5. Moved all JavaScript to the bottom of the page.
6. Removed duplicate Technorati scripts.

I also moved hosts from GoDaddy’s shared Linux hosting. To GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting on Windows. This proved difficult since URL Rewriting isn’t currently built in to IIS 6.0 like it is in Apache. I will talk a little about this setup in a later post.

SEO and SEM

I did a decent amount of SEO and SEM work to get my blog up to snuff. I took the following steps when redesigning the HTML for easy of indexing by Search Engines and Googles Media Bot (Used for giving relevant results in AdSense)

1. I download the MySQL file from the database and normalized all the URL’s to the one you see above.
2. Google AdSense only allows you to have 3 AdUnits per page and the placement of the AdUnits counts. For instance I had to red0 my theme so the content was before the sidebar, in terms of the HTML, so that the AdUnit in the articles placed first so that it received the highest quality Ad.
3. I reduce my categories to a handful of manageable ones, and migrated the rest to the new Tags feature.
4. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags sparingly. They should be a way to document the internal structure of your HTML page. (i.e. logical sections) My logic is as follows
   1. H1 is used for the blog title.
   2. H2 is used for the article title.
   3. H3 is used for sections of the article.
5. I started using the Post Slug is very important and should abide by the following rules
   1. No more than 3-7 keywords
   2. No common English words such as (if, about, when, my, etc.)

So that was how I spent my holiday creating a new design for my blog. If you have any suggestions, I am all ears about how I can improve my blog for the better.

Tags: GoDaddy, How To, sem, SEO, Technorati, theme, wordpress, YSlow

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