If you hang out on enough web development forums, mailing lists, or chatrooms, you’ll eventually get asked this question:

What language should I use to program my next project?

As someone who has been on a few of said forums, mailing lists, and chatrooms for a while now, I hate seeing this question. Yes, it comes around a lot, but repetitiveness isn’t what bugs me about it. What bothers me is that there’s usually very little background information attached to that question, which makes it as open-ended as asking what mode of transportation you should take to get to the store. I can tell you anything from a skateboard to a jet and either vehicle can get you to the store, but to give you the best answer I need to know how far you have to travel, what you plan on buying, and how much money you have, among other things. The same holds true for the programming language question, so let’s look at some factors that can help you choose which language to use on your next project.

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On my server, I have several domains and I have corresponding email addresses for a few of them, for example: ses5909@mydomain.com, ses5909@anotherdomain.com, etc. I have come to find that in Plesk if I have a domain that has an email user named ses5909 and I need to make the same username on another domain, they are not allowed to share the same domain. So if I give ses5909@mydomain.com the password: supersneakypw, I cannot give that password to ses5909@anotherdomain, or anyone else that has the same username. This is pretty lame if you ask me. The reason for this is that mail is not handled on the domain level, but rather the username level. That is a whole other issue though.

Well today I needed to get into my mail and I wasn’t at the computer that I run my mail client on so I went to my webmail account. I couldn’t remember the password for the life of me. I tried a few that I commonly use, but no luck. So, I needed to try to find my password. I could have reset it, but I’ve resorted to this in the past and I am just tired of doing that. I needed to find a way to retrieve my password.

So, I logged into mysql as the root admin. I looked through the databases and noticed there was a psa db which I am assuming stands for Plesk Server Administration. I immediately looked for email and finally saw mail. I saw all of the usernames and a quick join with the domains table showed me which column belonged to which domain.

SELECT mail.mail_name, domains.name from mail LEFT OUTER JOIN domains ON domains.id = mail.dom_id;

But, now I needed to find the passwords for these. After some more hunting, I found the accounts table where passwords are stored in plain text. If only I didn’t have 200 to look through. So a query was in order:

SELECT accounts.id, mail.mail_name, accounts.password, domains.name FROM domains LEFT JOIN mail ON domains.id = mail.dom_id LEFT JOIN accounts ON mail.account_id = accounts.id

Problem solved

What is the PageRank Decoder?
The PageRank Decoder allows you to visually see how Google factors PageRank based off of link structure. Be sure to view the Demo first.

What’s it good for?
You can examine different link topologies and see how PageRank is passed amongst pages. This allows you to see if your websites link structure is as optimized as possible.

How should I start?
I would recommend that you start by adding a bunch of pages to the canvas and then start interlinking them - then hit the calculate button and hover over the toolbars for their PR value. This allows you to see how different link topologies pass PR.

Later, for fun you can start looking up pages by entering in their URL in the textbox.

How does it work?
You should start by reading the article, “Google’s PageRank Explained.” Once you have a firm understanding of the article you will have a better understanding of how the PageRank Decoder is working.

Is this thing really accurate?
Yes and no?

To calculate the PageRank for a page, we use Google’s original formula:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

If the above code looks foreign to you and you have never seen this formula before, then start by reading, “Google’s PageRank Explained”.

It’s accurate if all pages start with a PageRank of 0. If you looked up a page or set a page’s PR at something other than 0 it can mess up the formula. This is because that page now starts off with a PR other than 0 and that then gets compounded in the formula.

Google doesn’t do this; they start all pages at 0 (or rather 0.15) and then run their formula for each page factoring all incoming links. Google’s database exceeds a million pages and for each page they look at its incoming links, some pages may have well over 1000 incoming links. It takes Google somewhere around a month to update all pages.

The PageRank Decoder is not working with a database to track incoming links for a page; rather it just looks at what’s on the canvas. So instead the PageRank Decoder allows you to artificially set a page’s PR.

I thought a ranking can’t go beyond 10?
Remember, there’s a difference between PageRank score and the toolbar-shown PageRank. The toolbar has a max score of 10. I don’t know Google’s scale when setting the PageRank in the toolbar so it gets inflated quickly.

Be sure to read the 'READ ME' file...no really...

* use myPod.html and myPod-slim.html as an example if need be

STEP 1
copy and paste the below 2 scripts between your <head> </head> tags

STEP 2
copy and paste the below code where you want the webPod in your page

STEP 3
- In the above code, modify the path to the webPod.swf file.
- If you're using the webPod-slim then change the above code from webPod.swf
to webPod-slim.swf and change the width from 165 to 125.
- change the flashvars "xmlFile=tunes.xml" to the correct path if need be.

STEP 4
make sure the song title in the playSong method is identical to the one in
the title in the XML file. IT IS CASE SENSITIVE

STEP 5
Upload your MP3s and modify the tunes.xml file