Engineering and technology notes

Duplicate content – Search Console Help

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

  • Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
  • Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
  • Printer-only versions of web pages

If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content, there are a number of ways you can indicate your preferred URL to Google. (This is called “canonicalization”.) More information about canonicalization.

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Source: Duplicate content – Search Console Help

Topic: Permalink Structure Changed – Duplicate Content Now in Google!! « WordPress.org Forums

I’ve been searching through the weeds online for a related post that will address my problem about duplicate content after changing my permalink structure, here’s my problem: About two weeks ago I changed my permalink structure from tegoryname%/%postname% to just %postname%. I then downloaded and setup a plugin called “Advanced Permalinks” that creates 301 redirects for all pages with the old permalink structure to the new permalink structure. It works well and I have no 404 errors. About a week ago I

Source: Topic: Permalink Structure Changed – Duplicate Content Now in Google!! « WordPress.org Forums

emulation – Can I program for Arduino without having a real board? – Arduino Stack Exchange

I would like to start the development of some basic Arduino projects but I don’t own an Arduino board yet. Is there a way I can write my code and emulate/test it using a desktop computer so after my board arrives I just have to upload and run my project on it?

Source: emulation – Can I program for Arduino without having a real board? – Arduino Stack Exchange

TX stuck ON, serial port greyed out

I am a newby, and I have an Uno, running Arduino 0021 on Ubuntu 10.10.It worked fine running the example “Blink” and some simple variations (I could change the blink times, so I know code was uploading), but after I uploaded the example “DigitalReadSerial” the TX LED always on.    Pushing the reset button causes the “L” LED to briefly flash, but the TX light stays on any time power is applied.  The RX LED does not come on.When I try to open the serial connection or upload I get a message “Serial port ‘/dev/ttyACM0’ not found.  Did you select the right one from Tools > Serial Port menu?”  When I look in the Tools menu, the Serial Port selection is greyed out.I rebooted my PC, but that didn’t fix things.  I also tried a different USB port, but no difference.Any ideas on what is wrong, or how to fix it?Here are a few port diagnostics (I have no idea what they mean):

Source: TX stuck ON, serial port greyed out

Arduino – PROGMEM

Store data in flash (program) memory instead of SRAM. There’s a description of the various types of memory available on an Arduino board. The PROGMEM keyword is a variable modifier, it should be used only with the datatypes defined in pgmspace.h. It tells the compiler “put this information into flash memory”, instead of into SRAM, where it would normally go. PROGMEM is part of the pgmspace.h library that is available in the AVR architecture only. So you first need to include the library at the top your sk

Source: Arduino – PROGMEM

Add Schema.org Markup To Any WordPress Theme – Tyler Longren

Make Google, Yahoo, and Bing like you more! The last post I made on this topic was a bit too specific to the Independent Publisher theme and was more editorial like, which made it really hard to follow. So, at the request of Manish Suwal ‘Enwil’, I’ve decided to write a more generic version that […]

Source: Add Schema.org Markup To Any WordPress Theme – Tyler Longren

Add Schema.org Markup to WooCommerce Products – Tyler Longren

WooCommerce & Schema.org Is Awesome Adding schema.org markup to a well coded WordPress theme is relatively straight forward and doesn’t take very long to get setup. I covered how to add schema.org markup to your WordPress theme in a previous post, but I recently needed to apply schema.org markup to an e-commerce site using WooCommerce. It’s surprisingly easy to do. You’ll need to be using a child theme for the steps that follow.

Source: Add Schema.org Markup to WooCommerce Products – Tyler Longren

delete events older than x days – ZoneMinder Forums

Is it possible make filter that deletes events older than for example five days?

I do mocord with four cameras daytime, and record one camera (other disabled) at night (motion detection does not work correctly at night)

I want to delete recorded events for this camera that are older than 5 days, so that they don’t fill my disk.

I know there is purgewhenfull filter, but this way I know that I have five days allways left. And it would not delete other camera events.

Source: delete events older than x days – ZoneMinder Forums

Video Generation Failed – ZoneMinder Forums

My setup:
Zoneminder v1.28.1
Ubuntu 14.04 Server

– First I open the event by clicking on the event number and the video starts to play
– Then I click the ‘Video’ link just above the video playing (this gives me the video popup)
– I accept the defaults and click the ‘Generate Video’ button
– Then I get the ‘Video Generation Failed!’ message

The System Log entry from Zoneminder Console:
“Unable to generate video, check /usr/share/zoneminder/events/2/15/04/16/10/51/59/ffmpeg.log for details”

– I don’t find an ffmpeg.log there, only the individual image files and the zmEventDetail.html and zmEventImages.html files

In the /var/log/apache2/error.log, I see these corresponding entries to my failed video export attempt:

Source: Video Generation Failed – ZoneMinder Forums

ZoneMinder Wiki – Wiki – Using a dedicated Hard Drive

On many installs you may wish to dedicate a hard drive or partition for Zoneminder events. There are many reasons why you may want to change the storage location – security, data segregation, preventing encroachment onto OS partition by zoneminder etc.

It’s not terribly difficult to do, but may be non-obvious to the untaught so here’s a brief guide.

Some commands here are based on Debian/Ubuntu installs

1. Become root or “sudo -s” to gain root privs.

2. Stop Zoneminder. “service zoneminder stop”, “/usr/bin/zmpkg.pl stop”, or “systemctl stop zoneminder”

3. Mount your new partition onto the root filesystem, ensuring it is automatically remounted at boot time by editing /etc/fstab — For the benefit of this guide, I’m calling my new partition /newdrive

Note this new partition can be a local drive, raid partition, lvm/md device, external NAS, SAN, NFS share or SMB share. The only condition is that the I/O throughput should be up to handling what Zoneminder will throw at it. For that speed reason, some favour non-journalled filesystems and accept the extra risk of data corruption

4. Locate Zoneminder’s “events” and “images” directories. In Debian and Ubuntu, these are under /var/cache/zoneminder. In CentOS and Fedora, these are under /var/lib/zoneminder.

If you wish to copy the data across, MOVE the events and images directories to /newdrive/zoneminder (Note this will take a long time on systems with many events). Also, DO NOT restart zoneminder until this entire process is completed. Doing so will cause all your events to be lost!

If you don’t wish to preserve the data, it is MUCH faster to simply delete or rename the original events and images dirs and create new directories in /newdrive/zoneminder. There is no need to remove the “orphaned” entries in the database, zmaudit will take care of those.

Eg:

mkdir /newdrive/zoneminder/events

mv /var/lib/zoneminder/events/* /var/lib/zoneminder/events_old/ — or — rm -rf /var/lib/zoneminder/events/

Add these lines in fstab to bind-mount an alternate location:

Source: ZoneMinder Wiki – Wiki – Using a dedicated Hard Drive