Ilmari Karonen

3,808 reputation

419

bio	website	vyznev.net
	location	Helsinki, Finland
	age
visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
	seen	2 days ago
stats	profile views	95

I like programming in Perl and C. I know Java and PHP too (I'm a MediaWiki developer), but I can't really say I like them. I keep meaning to learn Python some day, but never seem to get around to it.

I'm working on a Ph.D. in biomathematics. I also like programming puzzles and cryptography.

Please consider any (original) code I post to Stack Overflow (and other Stack Exchange sites) to be released under CC-Zero unless stated otherwise. You may do whatever you want with it and don't have to credit me in any way, although of course that would be nice.

	3,808 reputation	bio	website	vyznev.net	visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
419 badges		location	Helsinki, Finland		seen	2 days ago

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May 16	comment	*www..us.com not being indexed, but .us.com is on Google Webmasters* @Ojal: That's because it is a subdomain of us.com, which is owned by the company that sells the subdomains, CentralNic Ltd. It's not a top-level domain, although it looks confusingly like one. The actual ccTLD for the United States is just .us.
Apr 23	comment	How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank? @Nick: Would it really be 95%+? I can see that fraction of all your requests coming from Google, but surely the percentage must be a lot lower for logged-in users? That said, I do agree that a full second of extra latency does start to qualify as "painful". (You could solve that issue, and improve your latency in general, by having a bunch of geographically scattered front-end proxies, but that might be going a bit outside the scope of the question here... still, it works for Wikipedia.)
Apr 23	comment	How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank? @Nick: Would the delay from redirecting logged-in users from HTTP to HTTPS with a 302 really be that "painful"? It's just one request: with a reasonably efficient implementation, we'd be talking about a few hundred milliseconds at most, even from here across the ocean. Not that I think there's anything wrong with your current plan, just asking.
Apr 4	comment	Forwarding non-www domain to other domain with dns What's wrong with it is that, as far as browsers and search engines are concerned, those would be two completely different domains with (assuming no funny webserver tricks) the same content. Of course, you can first use a DNS CNAME to make your old domain an alias for your new one, and then configure the webserver at your new domain to HTTP 301 redirect any requests for URLs on your old domain to the new one.
Mar 30	comment	Google indexed URLs both w/ or w/o trailing slash +1 for mentioning 301 redirects, which really are the correct tool to use in this case. Using rel=canonical links will work too, but they're less efficient and less widely supported, and should generally only be used in cases where 301 redirects are not practical.
Mar 29	comment	Multiple IP addresses to a server That's a good point. Depending on circumstances, you might be able to use wildcard and/or SAN certificates, which are supported even by IE on XP, instead. They do have some limitations compared to SNI, but those aren't too serious unless you're planning on running a shared webhosting service or something. (Wildcard certs only apply to subdomains of a single domain name, and SAN certs need to be reissued every time new domain names are added to the server.)
Mar 28	comment	Multiple IP addresses to a server Note that the article was written in 2009. Most of the "new browsers" it lists have been obsolete for quite a while.
Mar 1	comment	Redirect from the main page on multilanguage site (continued) Anyway, as for search engines, the whole point is that it shouldn't matter all that much which version they see first, as long as you provide rel=alternate links so they can find all of them. Even dumb search engines who don't understand rel=alternate should be able to find all the versions just by following the in-page interlanguage links (which you of course need to include for the users anyway; although perhaps that is not quite so obvious that it need not be mentioned).
Mar 1	comment	Redirect from the main page on multilanguage site @GDav: I'd guess Accept-Language should be a fair starting point; some users do set it, and even for those who don't, it's likely to default to the OS language, i.e. something the user likely understands at least a little. But I don't have any personal experience with that, so I can't really say anything very useful about the details. FWIW, Google itself seems be using geolocation; my Accept-Language lists only English, but google.com redirects me to google.fi.
Feb 26	comment	Redirect from the main page on multilanguage site @GDav: AFAIK, redirecting users from a language-ambiguous URL (e.g. `http://example.com/`) to a language-specific URL (like `http://example.com/en/` or `http://example.com/fr/`) should be fine, as long as those pages don't try to redirect the user further (i.e. a user going directly to `http://example.com/fr/` should get the French version, no matter how convinced you might be that the user doesn't really understand French).
Jan 8	comment	Phishing alert but file never existed How sure are you about the "never" part? If I were trying to be a sneaky phisher, I'd only keep my pages up for a day or two before deleting every trace of them I could.
Jan 5	comment	Webhosting company able to unhash passwords? Just to confirm, when you tried to change your password in cPanel, it didn't ask for your old password?
Nov 23	comment	MediaWiki sitemap generator @trancuong: If your webhost really doesn't give you access to a shell or to cron jobs, you could try installing the Maintenance Shell extension which lets you run MediaWiki maintenance scripts from a special page on your wiki.
Nov 7	comment	folder level 301 redirect without .htaccess @w3d: That looks like an answer to me.
Nov 7	comment	folder level 301 redirect without .htaccess ...and in any case, using robots.txt to disallow the old URLs would mean that search engines will not see the redirects and won't know that the pages have moved. Generally that would be a bad idea.
Nov 7	comment	Multiple URL's going to same page - Kosher for Google? +1 for mentioning rel=canonical and breadcrumb microdata, even if I don't really like the alarmist tone.
Sep 24	comment	301 redirects in main navigation menu of WordPress website - is this okay for SEO? @GDav: That .85 would be a pretty huge drop, if true. Any sources for that?
Sep 22	comment	Separate Mediawiki Theme for Its Front Page `BeforePageDisplay` might be a little late to change the skin. I'd suggest `RequestContextCreateSkin` instead.
Sep 18	comment	How do I see what pages on the internet link to my site? Um, it isn't (and I don't really feel it should be, given than turning what used to be a normal question into CW is not something that should be done lightly). The only thing that's CW here so far is danlefree's answer.
Sep 18	comment	How do I see what pages on the internet link to my site? Ps. @paulmorriss: Is there any way (short of re-posting) to have this answer reassigned to me, or should I just let it stay attributed to you?