Gabriel Harper's Blog

How to Ban an IP Address With .htaccess
Once in a while you might run into a suspicious IP address accessing your website. Maybe it’s doing something funny like probing for vulnerabilities, or just spamming the heck out of your server. Being a responsible webmaster, you decide to ban the IP address from your server completely – but how? Using Apache Web server [...]

Social Networking in Business
Social networking in business can be both highly rewarding and extremely distracting. Leveraging the strengths of social networking in your organization requires a strategic plan, education on social networking for key employees, and understanding it’s role in your business model.Social networking connects with individuals on a personal level, and it’s important to respect this to [...]

Raising Money for Haiti Earthquake Disaster Relief
I just read about the horrible earthquake that tore up Haiti yesterday. Reading the initial reports was bad enough, but stumbling across some more graphic photos of wounded, lying in the streets with crushed limbs, just made my stomach turn. Not in disgust but despair. It’s times like this I feel so helpless to do [...]

Test DNS Transfer with Windows Hosts File
Here’s a simple trick you can use to test DNS changes on a Windows PC. You can fake or override DNS lookups by manually entering an IP address for any domain name you want. Use it to see if yoursite.com looks OK on the new server or IP address before DNS makes it around to [...]

Bogus Bing Trademark Infringement Lawsuit
A degree of scepticism is observed in public response to the trademark infringement lawsuit filed against Microsoft by a small St. Louis design company for using the Bing name on their heavily publicized new search engine. Is this just a rally for publicity on behalf of the plaintiff? The case appears questionable, but there may [...]