Did you know Google own Googlesucks.org ?
.. and Googlesucks.net. I amazes me how many companies own their own name with sucks on the end, Ubuntu have it (ubuntusucks.com) and so do loads of other sites. I can’t see why they do it, because the only benefit it seems to offer is that the creation of a hate-site might be averted.
Other than that, it costs money, it requires resources, and when people do work it out, it looks stupid :S
I don’t hate Google, or Ubuntu, it’s something I came across by accident, surfing..
-George
Moving Around, Servers and Shiz
Hi Everyone
I’ve just finished the move for GPearce, I’ve changed the layout of the site slightly (URL locations) and similar, and moved it onto a more powerful server with BizStreet, alongside my other sites 
Sorry for the downtime, every site I have went down in the few hours, but it was the minimum I could manage to ensure a smooth move without database problems. There are still some teething problems, like this stupid 404 issue that is popping up, but apart from that, things have gone quite well
I will return to proper daily posting tomorrow
George
Some ‘Tards Hacked Me!
Some group attacked my website 
Not this one, thankfully, but there was an attack on a *previously unknown* vulnerability on my website, caused by Wordpress’s auto installer making a wp-config file with permissions 666, which enabled it to be attacked, apparently.
Once again, BizStreet responded quickly and helpfully, and we found the source of the problem in minutes.
The hacking group were called Mir*aTu*rk (-*)(Google it, I’m not linking to them after the attack they caused on me), and they appear to have done it to loads of websites so beware, I guess.
I’m also wondering if there is anything I can do to return the favor, it seems like script-kiddies playing with some script that finds vulnerabilities, and I’m sure as hell going to make sure I harden GPearce against it now, and so on and so forth. What is there that’s legally possible to do, to return the favour? Comments appreciated
-G
Why I think Blogging Will Replace Newspapers…
This is an interesting topic to me, I read something about blogging being the future somewhere recently, a debate about it, and it interested me. It may well be old news, but I don’t care.
I’ve been looking around, and there is already evidence of this, I mean, I don’t buy newspapers to keep up with the news any more, I use Ars Technica, Google News and BBC news instead. There is simply no need to go buy newspapers; because everything is covered elsewhere, often before the newspapers are on sale 
News on the ‘net, mainly blogging, also has a degree of opinion, not like newspapers now, which just report the facts. There are thoughts, ideas and suggestions in blog news, rather than just the plain reporting in newspapers. They also cost nothing, and do much less environmental damage than going out and buying some paper, especially the weekend ones, which are massive, and normally full of stuff that barely anyone reads, it’s just there to look good
I’m sure this is old news, but there are thousands of reasons why blogging will be the news channel in a few years, I think it’s mainly the ‘older generation’ that buy newspapers now, I don’t know anyone between the ages of 15-20 that buy newspapers, apart from for the women, which defeats the object of it
-G
Ubuntu 8.04 Gets Sexier?
I’ve been looking around, and I recently found some screenshots of potential themes for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron); and, while I didn’t see much difference between 7.04 and 7.10; this is drasticly different, and I really like it
I think it’s taken on a new shinyness, which is really cool Ubuntu trumps the Vista design, once again 
I got these pics from another blog on the subject, but they are originally from the Ubuntu Wiki
I like the green one most 
-G
Never Piss off Them Clever People..
This is what happened, when Verizon managed to get on the wrong side of a ‘clever person’, This is how he exacted his revenge..
I found this while stumbling, it’s an awesome example of why you don’t piss people off if their your customers
-G
Youtube Marketing Ebook
This is the first in my big giveaways thing, from that package I bought on eBay, it’s a nice simple ebook on YouTube marketing, inside a .zip file.
I’m not going to post tonnes of information here, I’ve uploaded the ’sales page’ from the package to GPearce, if you want, you can take a peek at it here.
YouTube Marketing
And to download it, click here
Please note, this is subject to all download terms and cons, and it’s not something I made , I can’t promise how great it is. If it sucks, I’ll take it offline. Simple as
Thanks
-G
Free Giveaway Stuff and Suchlike :)
This isn’t strictly a blog post, it’s more me giving stuff away. I’ll go from the start
I bought a massive reseller package on eBay, purely because it was the cheapest way to get what I wanted, a single eBook. I don’t do reselling, but as I have some special rights over this “tonnes of content”, I’m going to give it away, or more accurately, sell it to you for $0.00 (special offer ;)), because I feel like it. I’ll start uploading bits to RS or something, and send a package of them public every few days, from tomorrow onwards. There is some really interesting stuff in there, amd it’d be a shame to waste it. I’ll mention in the indevidual posts what the rights over them are, I think there are some master reseller thingies, which you can then sell on if you get the urge, and some ones which you can’t, see each post for details.
A lot of it is eBay based, I’ll make a special category for it, so you can browse through it all in one go, nice and fast, might make things easier
It should be noted, that I am not liable for ANYTHING given away; I didn’t make any of this stuff (if I make something to give away, I’ll make it nice and obvious :P) and it may, or may not work. It cost me a grand total of £1, so it’s no big deal really.
The downloads are free, and provided without any implied guarentee or warantee at all. RS hosts them, not me. Scan them before opening, and if something’s wrong, use the contact me button, and I’ll get it offline asap
As I said, I’ll add more every few days, as I get round to it, if you want updates on it, then please sign up to the feed
Thanks
-G
Terms and Cons
1. I’m not liable for any of this. It may or may not work, by downloading it, you take responsibility. No question about that.
2. I’ve got resale rights to all this stuff; if there’s a problem, contact me and i’ll pull it offline. Simple as.
3. Please scan everything before opening it, just in case. I never trusted RS anyway
My eBay Beta Shows Up..
This may be no news to some people, but to me, who uses eBay all the time, it’s brand new. In buying something from eBay.com today, I inadvertantly logged into eBay.com not .co.uk where I usually am, and found a whole new my eBay, all flashy and fast and stuff, and I have to say, I really like it. I’m not sure how, but it’s translated itself back onto my eBay.co.uk page; and I’m not complaining, but I have no idea how it happened
The new interface retains the colours, but has gone all shiny, fast, and seems to run from a single page, which is very cool; considering the volume of data it transfers. I don’t know how to enable it for us UK people, but logging in on .com might be a way to try it
I’ll take a picture from the other laptop shortly, and add it to this post. As I said, I might be really late on this, but it looks really awesome, and … well I decided to blog about it, seeing as I have nothing else to write about
-G
Meta Tags, The Simple Guide
Meta tags are essential for SEO and good search engine results. When done correctly, they can help to increase your placing in search engines, which in turn will increase your traffic, and then, probably, your income, either from advertising or sales. However, when they are done incorrectly, they can be the downfall of a website, so I made this simple guide to explain it, and make it easier for those who don’t quite understand it
The first, and most important thing to understand is the structure. It’s very simple, but this is where the majority of errors occur:
<META name=”metatype” content=”whatever”/>
These are placed in the <head> section of your website, just below <title>(yoursitetitle)</title> ; and there are various type of META information you can show, here are two of the most important:
Description : This is a simple description of your website, and it should be included in any sites tags, it’s a fundamental.
<META name=”description” content=”This website is about this, and was written by him, featuring this that and the other.”/>
Keywords : The second fundamental. This is very important, you need to place keywords that relate to your website here, like blog,advertising, laptops and similar
<META name=”keywords” content=”gpearce, george pearce, technology, blog, tutorials, photoshop, web design”/>
By now, you should understand the structure, it’s really pretty simple, and if you are in any doubt, use the validator at validator.w3.org to check up on how things are going
Some Tips and Tricks
1. Don’t include too many keywords, Google doesn’t take kindly to this
2. Keep your description short, sweet and unique
3. Try to use unique keywords, they will be what you are most likely to be found under on Google or similar.
Hope this helps, please contact me if there are any problems
-G
It’s A Micro Mac, But Is It Worth It?
I got the email from Apple about the MacBook Air Today, and, being interested, I went and had a look. I like the tiny-ness, but the price is staggering, considering it’s specifications, I know it’s a Mac, but still
What actually interested me was the technology they’ve crammed in there, I mean they have all three wireless types (B,G,N) supported, a fully featured keyboard, proper trackpad, decent processor, decent hard drive, and various other bits, which makes the size it sits at a pretty amazing acheivement, the hard drive alone on my pc is thicker than the whole laptop there, so it looks like some serious work has been spent on it
I’d wait until I’ve seen some reviews before buying / considering it myself, I love Macs , but I’ve not been able to afford them because of their collossal price tags, maybe I’ll actually have to get off my backside and earn one :P.
What I originally asked, however, was whether it was worth it. To be honest, unless it’s for someone who is never in the same place, I can’t see many advantages of it over the normal Macbook Pro, which I really like; unless you pride yourself in having the smallest of everything
You can find the pro @ http://www.apple.com/macbookair
OLPC Laptops Go On Sale in Singles
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation is to begin selling individual XO laptops in the US, according to founder Nicholas Negroponte.
Sales of the XO in the US have so far been limited to a scheme called Give One Get One, where an XO laptop could be purchased for $399. This price included a donation of an identical laptop to a developing nation.
(Quote from PcPro)
Remember OLPC saying that they’d never do this? They sold for 2 weeks, then extended to the end of 2007, which I wrote about way back, and now their selling them like normal laptops? I thought the aim was that they should be donated to 3rd world countries, not become the latest gimick in the US? I mean, come on guys.
Although, admittedly, there are people in America and even the UK who need these laptops as much as people in third world countries, as has been said to me by a lot of people.
I’m actually wondering if this announcement has anything to do with Intel abandoning them, although I can’t see any reason for it doing so..
-G
GPearce 2.0 :)
I’m now putting the finishing touches onto the 2.0 version of GPearce, which is now live on the site, after literally minutes of work Actually, I’ve spent quite a while fiddling with this theme, and I’m not done yet
There’s more to do on the content section, but other than that, I quite like how it looks at the moment, I’m customizing it to make it load faster, but apart from that, hopefully everything is working nicely
I’d appreciate any opinions on the new design, just post a comment here, and I’ll look into them
Other than that, I declare GPearce 2.0 Officially Ready To Go!
Will the Legal Attack Kill ThePirateBay?
From articles on other news sites, it looks like thepiratebay is about to get hit by a pretty serious legal attack, and yet they seem completely unconcerned about it, do they really think that they will survive something like that? I’m not saying TPB is bad, i’ve used it for legal things before, but that sort of attack is something that would be exceedingly difficult to win, yet their just laughing and joking it off?
For those who don’t know, ThePirateBay is under attack by some Swedish persecutors, and it looks, to me, doubtful that they will win, with the weight of the case against them, and what happened to Demonoid way back
I’m not sure the extent of the attack there, and I think it’ll be sad to see such a huge site go, if it is forced too, but what interests me is that the action is also against the owners, actually persecuting them, I think, which could prove costly for them :S
My Awesome New Tiny Pendrive!
Today, my new pendrive showed up from eBay. I bought it because I liked the look of it, it was said to be fast, and it’s absolutely minute, the whole thing is about the size of my thumbnail, which is pretty amazing
I’ve been playing with it, and apart from the crappy Migo software on it, it’s pretty good. Up until I bought it (on impulse) ; I had no idea that pendrives that small existed, it’s pretty amazing
It’s called the Kingston DataTraveler mini 1gb ; and it cost me a grand total of £5 (about $10 over in the US); which for a gig is pretty good, and for a gig drive of it’s size is pretty awesome - Goes to show that not everything on eBay is a scam, this one’s got warantee aswell
I’m no fan of the colour, but apart from that, I think it’s really awesome
-G
.edu Backlinks? Sounds like rubbish to me…
I’ve seen loads on the internet in my most recent travels about the brilliance of ‘.edu backlinks’ because Google values them as “Trusted Sources”
Is there actually any truth in this, or is it another marketing scam? I was pretty sure that Google ranked stuff by it’s pagerank, not by how cool it’s extension is? Is it really true, or is it someone making something up to get traffic to their ‘brand new, never seen before tutorial’ ?
I’d appreciate any comments on this matter, because it seems like a lot of rubbish to me, and I can’t understand why Google would care what the TLD is
Admittedly, it seems that I’m wrong, and I’m not even entirely sure why, because from what I knew, Google ranked by pagerank, not extension, right?
I’ve found some pretty good PR5 .edu backlinks, if anyone is really interested in having a copy, let me know (drop me a comment) and I’ll email you them
~George
PHP Cheat Sheet
I’ve put together this ‘cheat sheet’ in the hope that it helps some people, it shows the correct syntax for various statements and I shall add to it as I have time.
PHP Statements
array ( “key” => “value”, … );
die(”messagetoshow”);
echo item;
extract ($array;)
header (”Location: url“);
if (condition) {operation]
elseif (condition) {operation}
else {operation};
session_start();
session_destroy();
PHP MySQL Functions
mysql_connect(”host”,”uname”,”password”);
mysql_select_db(”dbname“);
mysql_query(”query“);
mysql_num_rows($result);
mysql_fetch_array($result,type_of_array);
I hope this helps someone, a lot of it was learned from the dummies book and W3schools 
-G
Time to Get Off My Backside :)
Yeah, it’s time. I’ve neglected GPearce a bit lately, and now that it’s got PR3 and is getting a constant (but small) stream of visitors, I think I’m going to put some more effort into making it work really well, and get everything looking nice
From now on, I intend to make two posts in the news section a day, and one post here, as well as continuing to work on the subsites, Scorpiox and the other, un-named one
I’ll be posting more tutorials, cheatsheets and various other things, whatever I can think of on the day
-G
Using Google BlogSearch to Get Backlinks..
I recently stumbled on the Google Blogsearch, and thought about it, for most of the results in the search, the blogs allow comments. Now, a huge source of website backlinks is from blogs, so instead of faffing around with this stupid “inurl:blog” thing which misses most posts anyway; like some pagerank getting ebooks suggest, why not use BlogSearch for it?
Maybe you could use it to increase your PR, or Google rankings ; comments on relevant sites are worth like 10 on totally unrelated sites, remember
Is Google Taking Over?
I’m starting to wonder if Google is getting too big. I mean, they collect information on everyone and everything, it’s pretty difficult to use the Internet at all without them picking up some sort of information about you, every time you view an Adsense banner, they collect information, and now that they own DoubleClick, there’s very little we can do without triggering Google in some way.
This might not be the worst thing ever, but it gives Google information on everyone. They know what you like to look at, how often your online, what you search for, what’s in your emails, what RSS feeds you read, and so much more. Is it really fair for one corporation to have all this information on us?
I mean, my website shows Google ads, so just by looking at this website, you’re helping Google build up a profile of sorts on you. Do you really want that? I mean, is it fair that we have no say in it, something like 50% of all the websites on the internet connect to Google or something owned by Google, in some way, and it’s probably more now. I don’t know the exact figure, but I’ve heard it somewhere.
Google also have around 60% of the Search Engine market, which must be their primary method for building up information on us, as well as owning networking sites, video sites and god knows what else.
Information isn’t the only thing. Google recently announced a project which would rival one of the largest ad-free websites on the ‘net, Wikipedia, and they are advancing into pretty much every internet field there is. Google run services in Blogging, Video, Advertising, Search, Personal Space (Google Pages), Knowledge (Coming soon, Google Knol), and even Word Processing, with their upcoming online Google Docs, or whatever it is
I’m not saying that Google is bad, it’s my homepage and the site I use most often, but I’m wondering if what they are doing is fair? Google the search engine is the best, there’s no question about that, but is the rest of Google really playing fair?
-G
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