A few weeks ago I’ve made a few posts on installing Linux CentOS 5 on a VMware Server. Well today I realized I didn’t post the part about installing the VMware Tools. These tools allow you to increase your virtual machine’s performance and capabilities.

Prior to installing the VMware Tools, there are a few things you want to do. The first step would be to install the kernel header files and a C compiler:

# yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel

The second thing would be to create a symbolic link pointing to your kernel header files:

# ln –s /usr/src/kernels/[your kernel version] /usr/src/linux

Now you’re ready to install the VMware Tools. From the VMware Server Console (with your virtual machine running), click on “VM => Install VMware Tools…”. Nothing is supposed to be happening at this point, it’s just like you inserted a virtual CD. From the command line, mount the cdrom drive, copy the installation files to a directory on your virtual hard drive and untar them:

# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
# cd /mnt/cdrom
# cp VMwareTools-[version].tar.gz /tmp
# cd /tmp
# umount /mnt/cdrom
# tar zxf VMwareTools-[version].tar.gz

Execute the VMware Tools installation script:

# cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl

Go through the installation and answer all the questions. I’ve left every settings to its default value.

When you’re done, simply reboot your virtual machine. I’ve had a little problem with X as it wouldn’t start upon reboot. I just used the X configuration wizard (which launched automatically) to make some adjustments, rebooted the VM again and everything worked fine.

Knowing your visitors is crucial to your website, especially if you’re generating an income from the traffic you get, whether it’s through sales or advertisement. That’s why it’s important to have good statistics about your site. You want to know where your visitors came from, how they found your site, which pages they’ve read, how long they stayed, how often they come back, etc.

While there are plenty of tools available, I’ll focus mainly on AwStats today. AwStats is a free and powerful tool that generates advanced statistics for many protocols including web, streaming, ftp and mail transfer. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and generates statistics in HTML format.

Installing AwStats On Linux

1. Get your copy of AwStats from SourceForge.net at
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13764
2. Extract all files from the archive and upload it to a temporary folder on your web server. This folder needs not to be accessible through HTTP.# tar xvzf awstats-[version].tar.gz
3. Move all the content from the archive to /usr/local/awstats. When you’re done, this directory should contain:
   • ./docs
   • ./README.TXT
   • ./tools
   • ./wwwroot
4. Change directory to /usr/local/awstats/tools and execute ./awstats_configure.pl# cd /usr/local/awstats/tools
   # ./awstats_configure.pl
   
5. Go through the configuration script.
6. Add a cron task to update statistics on a daily basis. To do this, simply create a new file named awstats_updateall.sh into /etc/cron.daily. This is the script’s content:#!/bin/sh
   /usr/local/awstats/tools/awstats_updateall.pl now
   
7. Add execute permission to awstats_updateall.sh
   
   # chmod 0755 /etc/cron.daily/awstats_updateall.sh
   
8. Create a directory named “awstats” into /var/lib.
9. Verify that the following directives have been added to your httpd.conf file. If not, you will have to add them manually:#
   Alias /awstatsclasses “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/classes/”
   Alias /awstatscss “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/css/”
   Alias /awstatsicons “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/icon/”
   ScriptAlias /awstats/ “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/”
   #
   # This is to permit URL access to scripts/files in AWStats directory.
   #
   <Directory “/usr/local/awstats/wwwroot”>
   Options None
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   </Directory>
   
10. Edit your AwStats configuration to make sure all settings are correct. This file is located in /etc/awstats/awstats.[your domain name].conf
11. Make sure your httpd access log file format is “combined”. To verify this, open /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and look for:
    
    CustomLog [your log path]/access_log commonandchange it to:
    
    CustomLog [your log path]/access_log combined
    
12. Restart the httpd service:
    
    # service httpd restart
    
13. Generate some statistics:
    
    # /etc/cron.daily/awstats_updateall.sh
    
14. Try accessing AwStats through your web browser at http://[your domain name]/awstats/awstats.pl

That’s pretty much it!

You can read the AwStats documentation here : http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html

Last time I’ve wrote about find low competition keywords. Now that you’ve built your huge keyword list, we’re going to see how to create a new campaign.

First log into your Google AdWords account. From the “Campaign Management” tab, select “Campaign Summary”. To create a new campaign, click on “keyword-targeted”:

First, you need to specify a name for your new campaign and ad group. Don’t worry, you will be able to add more ad groups later on.

For the example above, I want to create a campaign to promote TheWebmastersCafe.net. My first ad group will target visitors that who search for linux-related keywords.

(more…)