SuperJason’s Personal Blog

Almost a week ago I a few items up for auction. Be sure to check them out. There is a laptop, some coupons, and some wireless network equipment. If you are a friend or family member, you don’t have to pay shipping. Look quick, because the auctions end tomorrow night!

One more thing, if you haven’t checked out my eBay Sellers Guide, be sure to do so, and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Yakov Shafranovich has just posted an entry to his blog about another way of getting the UPS data into the RSS format. He uses an XSLT to transform the XML response into the RSS format.

As for my DLL that interfaces with UPS, I’m working on an article that I’m going to publish to a few sites that describes how my DLL actually works. I’m also going to be including the source with it. It’s great that there are finally some options out there for getting this data.

Apparently this blog is having some issues for some people who use IE. I’m working on it. Ignore the tests below.

this is a test

I was just starting to get annoyed by comment spam. Someone keeps posting spam messages to my blog posts. Since they use a different IP address each time, I don’t really know how to block them. I keep deleting the comments. These people use automated programs to post links to a whole bunch of websites. Their goal is to get a lot of backlinks so that Google will raise their PageRank, think they’re popular, and put them higher in the list of search results.

Google has modified their PageRank system so that you can put an attribute in your links so that those links don’t get PageRank.

For example:
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

That comment would be transformed to

Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

My only concern is whether or not this will be abused by a lot of people. For example, on my blog, I could put that attribute in all of my links, and not give anyone credit. That doesn’t really seem fair to me.

Even if you are not going to be filling out your taxes now, you should buy your software now. They give huge discounts to the early buyers. Of course I found the best deals for you.

H&R Block’s TaxCut

If you are a fan of H&R Block’s TaxCut software, you can get their federal software for $20, minus a $5 rebate, and you also get a $10 Amazon.com credit. If you buy their state software along with that, you get it FREE after rebate! If you want their DeductionPro software, it is also FREE after rebate. I have listed the links below. You need to order them all together. The easiest way to do that is to open each link separately, and add the item to your cart, and then go to the next link until you have all the items in your cart.

• H&R Block TaxCut 2004 Deluxe
• H&R Block TaxCut 2004 State
• H&R Block DeductionPro 2004

Intuit TurboTax

TurboTax has almost the same deal, except that they have a $10 rebate on their federal software. They don’t have the deduction software, but you can get a copy of Quicken 2005 Basic for free after rebate.

• TurboTax Deluxe 2004 Win/Mac
• TurboTax State Multi-State 2004
• Quicken 2005 Basic

I just uploaded a new batch of Ryan photos. Some of them turned out really well. He’s getting huge!

Carly, there are some of you and Chuck in there so don’t tell me you can’t find them!

Do they put different flavoring into the different color M&M’s? It’s tough to really tell a difference in them.

I modified .Text (Dot Text) so that all requests to SuperJason.com would be permanently redirected to www.SuperJason.com. This is very important, because Google see’s links to SuperJason.com and www.SuperJason.com as different sites. That causes your PageRank to be spread between multiple pages.

  protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)    {     string currUrl;     string redirUrl;       if(Request.Url != null)     {      currUrl = Request.Url.ToString();            if(currUrl.ToUpper().StartsWith("http://SuperJason.com".ToUpper()))      {       redirUrl = "http://www.SuperJason.com" + currUrl.Substring("http://SuperJason.com".Length);       Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";       Response.AddHeader("Location", redirUrl);      }     }    }  

When I made that change and uploaded it, it broke my site! So I took a look at the application level error handling, and noticed that it treats all exceptions as fatal, even though that is not the case. When you redirect, it throws a ThreadAbortException. So I had to change the error handling to ignore this error:

  protected void Application_Error(Object sender, EventArgs e)    {     if (Context != null && Context.IsCustomErrorEnabled)     {      if(Context.Error.GetType() == typeof(System.Threading.ThreadAbortException))       return;      else       Server.Transfer(ERROR_PAGE_LOCATION, false);     }    }  

After making that change it appeared to work. To double check, I used the LiveHttpHeaders extension for Firefox. Looking through the headers proved that I was sending a 301 redirect to the browser.

If you need to check broken links on your website, I recommend Xenu’s Link Checker. It’s small and free. It uses multiple threads to check your links, so it is very fast. There is also an option for checking external links, or just internal links. Any time I make a change to one of my websites, I run it to double check all the links.

For those of you that use my UPS RSS Package Tracking Feed, you may be interested to know that I started working on supporting FedEx. Hopefully it will be out shortly. The FedEx API actually looks a lot simpler than the one from UPS. It shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.