Earlier this week, thousands of sites, including JoeTech.com, blocked or hid their content as a symbolic gesture to protest the impending SOPA/PIPA legislation that threatened the integrity of free-flowing information on the Internet. While some sites displayed a pop-up message allowing users to move on to content by clicking a button and Google simply changed their logo to appear censored, sites like Wikipedia and Joe Tech completely blocked all content from users to truly emphasize the impact such legislation could cause. An example is seen below. This post will show you how we did it in just a few very easy steps.
Black Out Your Site Like Wikipedia
This site and Wikipedia both used a pretty harmless method to block our content for the protest. The method we used involved simply covering up the normal content with a layer of HTML that hides it and shows something else in its place. To accomplish this in an elegant way, you will need an image and/or content to display, the HTML shown below, and a small change to your site’s CSS. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Create your image and content. In my case, I made a couple very simple changes to a large version of my logo image to make it more protest-y.
2. Add the overlay code. In your site’s template (or your theme’s footer.php in WordPress), copy the code below and paste it right above the /body tag. Modify it as indicated to include your own image or message.
<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;
width:100%;height:100%;
background:url(/images/darken.png);text-align:center;">
<!-- Add your image and message below this line -->
<img src="/images/sopa.png" />
<!-- Add your image and message above this line -->
</div>
3. Stop the scroll. Update your site’s CSS file to stop the original content from being larger than the new overlay content. This may not always be necessary, but will be pretty obvious when it is. Just add the following code anywhere to the bottom of the CSS:
body{overflow:hidden;}
That’s it! Follow the three steps above and you’ll have your protest/maintenance/special message up in no time on every page on the site.
If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.
What Is S.O.P.A.?
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.
In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?
And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.
If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:
Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest
At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.
During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.
Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.
Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.
Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.
Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.
If everything went well, you found this post by way of this site’s home page or a link or maybe you just typed it in. The important thing is that you found it, but what would happen if the link was wrong or the post vanished. On most sites, when a page is not found, the server generates a “404″ error code to let the browser know. Chances are good that you’ve seen the result of this a few times. Usually, it’s boring and sometimes even uninformative, leaving you with nowhere to go. If you have a blog or website, surely you’d like to keep that visitor interested and help them find other content on your site. You’re in luck because today, I’m going to tell you how.
Create Custom Error Pages
What you see above is my custom 404 error page. In WordPress, I replaced everything in /wp-content/themes/joetech/404.php with my own HTML to make my error page custom. The HTML can be anything you want, but you should make sure to view it in a browser by trying to visit any non-existing page on your blog. In my case, I went old school with the famous Windows Blue Screen of Death that often felt like an extension of Windows 98, popping up more often than anyone would like. Of course, I changed it around a bit to include a Star Wars quote and links both to my site and to share the 404 page on Facebook for any who think it’s amusing.
While 404 is the error code and page that surfaces the most, web servers have several codes to indicate the result of a web request. A couple others that come in just behind 404 are 403 (Forbidden) and 500 (Internal Server Error). Many years ago, at an Internet service provider I worked for, we had Macho Man Randy Savage for our 500 page and Mr T. was there to “Pity da Foo” who tried to access a forbidden page. Have fun with it and post links to your results in the comments below.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? This tidbit of wisdom, passed down for generations, refers to not relying on just one thing when the outcome is critical. Savvy investors spread their money among several types of investments. Google doesn’t have everything on one server or network. These are examples of what the phrase means.
Too Many Eggs, Not Enough Baskets
Today, I received an email from Zlio. They’re a company that provided a unique way for people to create online shops and earn money. It was pretty innovative when it began, but I had forgotten about it for the last year or three. Today’s email from Zlio was intended to announce the end of life for their services due to the end of the company, but it also provided some details about how this happened. Those details underline my message.
Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.
The service will officially end on September 11!
Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe’s largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.
Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.
Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.
When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.
Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.
In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).
This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.
This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.
The email goes on to point out that they will honor amounts owed to Zlio shop owners, etc., but the important thing to note is how they describe a timeline in which they saw some early success with their Google placement that abruptly went away, and how the resulting actions ended up putting them out of business. This may be a unique case, but if you do some searching on Google, you’ll find that every time Google changes its search placement algorithms, scores of blogs and web sites speak out about how they’ve lost over half their traffic. To some sites, this becomes catastrophic.
Protect Your Web Traffic
Search engine optimization is a huge factor in the success of most websites. I’m not here to tell you otherwise, but while optimizing to make sure Google sends you a lot of qualified traffic, don’t forget other marketing channels. Share your voice on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, check your rankings in Yahoo and Bing, comment on blogs and in forums, and hand out business cards at events. Whatever you do, spread those eggs around in many baskets and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else when the industry shifts.
