As Always, Wordpress Surprises Everyone
I just grabbed a copy of Wordpress 2.6 bleeding, and in doing so, caught up on all the new stuff that’s there, and all the little things that have been fixed. Unsurprisingly, Wordpress have added another cool feature into the mix, post revisions, which (as far as I know) nobody expected. It’s given Wordpress a bit of a wiki editing style approach, and while it’s not going to effect me on GPearce very much (I don’t edit my posts much), websites with lots of contributors should appreciate it 
Another cool thing that’s been added is the support for Google Gears. I’m not 100% clued up on how it works, but another link got added to my taskbar (see the pic - click it), something about saving my css and stuff on my pc. Neat idea, I’ma give it a try, and see what it’s like
Pledge To Download Firefox 3
Mozilla are trying to break (or make, I can never remember which) a world record for the greatest number of software downloads in a day. Pledge to Download.
Claiming My Technorati
There’s nothing special in this post, Google can ignore it, it’s purely for me to claim my blog in technorati. I’ll delete it again soon.
Bye to more of my domains
I’m finally getting on with selling the domains / sites I don’t bother with anymore. Sold ProjectRecipe for ~$30 today, pretty happy with that
Something
I’ve not posted in ages. I only just realised. I’ve been busy with exams, revision, and DoW. I’m also learning some more PHP, and I’ll write some more awesome (ish) code soon 
Biology GCSE Finished
That’s my Biology GCSE done, never have to worry about that again. Just 10 or so exams left
First Exam Out of The Way
I’ve just got back from my first exam, English Literature. I think it went pretty well
Exam Preparation
As of now, I’m not going to write so much for about a month or so, maybe a little more, while I do my exams. I’ve got to give them priority, and after that I’ll get back and finish developing complete stats, maybe find something else to occupy myself with.
My first exam is on Tuesday, and I might post how I thought it was then, I’m going to spend the next few days revising. Maybe I’ll post, maybe not. I don’t know yet.
Bug Tracker Change
I’ve moved the bug tracker for all my stuff here, and tagged the existing one so that it syncs, sort of.
A Holiday Target
Apart from my exams over the next few month, and my trip to Morocco in July, I’ve now got a fair bit of time on my hands (pretty much from now until September). I’ve been thinking about what to do with that time, as the last week has been pretty crappy for me - I’ve done jack all, and been bored out of my head.
I’ve decided to spend the time learning to design really well, and making free themes / templates. I want to learn how to make full designs from scratch, rather than what I do at the moment, which is rip apart my Revolution themes license, and while that’s good, there are only so many modifications I can make.
So, I’ll be making PSDs, tearing them apart, trying to code them, and hopefully coming out with something useful. I’ll probably make a site for free templates, because I want to make quite a few as I learn - and get really good at it.
Wish me luck, I guess.
Woopra
I got accepted for Woopra today. It’s one of those analytics programmes, but the fun thing is, it’s got a live desktop client that allows you to watch visitors as they are on your website. It’s a great bit of kit, and it finds everything - where the visitor is, what OS they are using, what browser they are using, etc etc. I know analytics does this too, but the bonus of Woopra is that it’s live, as-it-happens data, which is pretty cool.
Right at this second, there’s a visitor from China viewing my tag archive for Google.
I think there’s also a function to message your visitors, which would be pretty amazing, although I think it might scare some visitors off.. 
Time for more playing ;D
Vista SP1 Sound Issues
A common problem after the upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 is that the sound no longer works, and the sound manager shows the following message:
Sound Card Not Installed
While Microsoft has a knowledgebase page about this, it’s far from adequate, and in my experience, doesn’t work. (I’ve upgraded to SP1 recently).
- The first step you should take is to reboot your pc - just in case the upgrade didn’t quite finish. It’s unlikely that this will make any difference, but you should do it anyway.
- Check that the driver is installed, and try to update it. For this, click the Start orb, and enter “Device Manager” into the search bar. Load up the top result. Windows will ask for administrator permission to continue. Once it’s loaded, you should be met by a list of components of your pc. Click the little + next to Sound, Video and Game Controllers, in the list that shows up should be your sound card. If there is a little triangle next to it’s icon, with a !, then the driver is not working correctly. Either way, try updating the sound driver, by right clicking on the device, and selecting update driver. Windows should guide you through an update process.
- If Windows says your driver is up to date, you need to try a reinstall. Right click on the device again, and select uninstall driver. Follow the instructions, and make sure “Delete the driver” is cleared, ie not selected.
Once the driver is uninstalled, select (from the top menu) Actions >> Scan for hardware changes. This should bring up an installer for the driver.
That’s all exactly the same that Microsoft suggested, although in easier language (I hope). It didn’t work for me, so this is what I did:
- Navigated to the website of the creator of my computer (Lenovo).
- Clicked Drivers and Downloads
- Inputted the information from my laptop
- Downloaded the audio driver manually
- Extracted it manually
- Installed it manually (after uninstalling the old one)
- Rebooted
Which fixed it up perfectly for me, and I hope that it does the same for you. Reinstalling the driver manually is the best way to shake problems like this
This is a continuation from my previous post ranting about this.
SP1 Silliness
I’ve just upgraded to Vista SP1 on my laptop (late, I know, but it just showed up in the updater). Great.
My sound card stopped working, errors showed up left right and center, and system restore didn’t work. Not so great.
I’ve fixed it now, but it just goes to show how rubbish the Windows upgrade system is. I had a look around, and Windows even posted a knowledgebase article about it, apparently it’s a problem across the whole range. However, their steps for fixing it are entirely useless. Every single step failed. I ended up reinstalling the driver, but not through Windows’ own system, oh no. That failed, “Driver installer has stopped working. Close this program”. Update failed. Pretty much everything threw up errors of some sort.
Instead, I went manually searching for the sound card driver, downloaded it, and patched the original one myself. After about half an hour of trying to follow the Microsoft instructions. Nice one, guys.
What worries me is that I’ve got 2 other Windows XP machines to upgrade to SP3 soon. Not looking forward to that.
My Camera Arrived
Today my new (ish) camera arrived off of eBay, so now I can start taking and uploading photos ;D Pity I don’t do anything interesting
.ws Domains - So Bad?
I’ve wondered for a long time why .ws domains are seen as “so crap” by a lot of webmasters. I mean, their not the best, but so what?
I noticed that a lot of good keyword domains aren’t registered, including lol.ws, lmao.ws, pearce.ws, and even xxxx.ws o.o
Why does nobody seem to want these domains, even though they are clearly pretty good keywords? Granted I don’t buy them, but that’s because I mainly buy .co.uk domains, their more local and fit my target market.
Expanding on that, I bought fusedmedia.net today, which I think is pretty nifty
Online Casinos Review
Disclaimer: This is a paid review, but everything I’m saying here is my own thoughts, so what I write it not in any way influenced by the payment. I was planning to stop paid reviews, but I’ve changed my mind for a while.
Okay, on with the review. Online Casinos is basically a simple website that shows a huge list of US based casino websites, so you can gamble online. It ranks them, so that you find the best places to play. There are also sub-sections for most other places in the world, but it seems that the website focuses mainly on the US.
The website design seems clean and fast, I actually quite like it, which is a surprise, because normally I find those sorts of sites (directories / comparison sites) very boring and mundane to look at. The links at the bottom are fairly useful too, once I’d finished reading that page, I went and had a look at them - the potential gambling addict should read them, all of them.
What I think the website could do with is a degree of interactivity - so the user can write about what THEY think of that casino, maybe making it more attractive to the potential gambler? I also think that they should maybe mask the affiliatel links with a package such as URLgap because it’s fairly obvious to the discerning user (and to Google), and that could hurt the rankings and traffic.
Overall, I think the site is useful, and it’s not trying to cram itself into an already packed niche, so good luck to it’s owner! ;D
Craptop Setup
I’ve now finally gotten around to finishing craptop, it works now, I can load websites off it from home (for testing & beta stuff), FTP to it (file storage) and more importantly, control it totally wirelessly while watching tv. Time to setup the Wordpress SVN so I can play with that, now ;D
Flashing My Craptop
I’m flashing my craptop in order to put the Ubuntu server edition on there, I want to see what the other tools are, and have a play around. It seems that it comes preconfig with LAMP, which is always good ;D
My SEO Experiment
I’ve always wondered about SEO, it’s made to seem like a mythical god that you should always keep happy on a lot of blogs that I’ve read. Don’t do this, do that, not this, don’t link to him.. and so on. I’ve been thinking, screw that. I’m going to experiment, and try and learn a bit more about it and how it works, through some other websites I’ll make.
I guess I can call this my first experiment, where I’m going to see how backlinks affect things. There is one main question I’m going to try and answer with this:
If you have lots of backlinks with one keyword, for instance “flubber” but nothing vaguely related to flubber on the linked page, will it still rank well for that keyword?
They might sound like stupid questions, and I can guess the answers, but I want to give it a try anyway, just for the hell of it. In the process, I’ll also be making a website that might actually be of use to people once I’ve finished with it.
I’m going to use this post as the test page, and the keywords “Tree Artist” as the hook on my links, to see what happens. After a few months, I’ll have a look at it’s overall ranking and how it’s changed.
Alexa Ranking Script
I was looking around online, and I couldn’t see a free Alexa ranking script, I was actually looking for one for my plugin. So, I decided that (with a little help from the Alexa developer site thing, and from another website) that I’d throw one together (I’m getting pretty good at this :evilgrin: ) and make it available.
I’m going to do it using a function, because it seems easier to me. We’ll make a function that checks and returns the Alexa rank in plain numbers for any given site.
<?php function findmyalexarank($site) {
$dataurl = "http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=".$site;
$process = simplexml_load_file($dataurl) or die("ugh, something went wrong");
echo $process->SD->POPULARITY['TEXT'];
}
?>
The above means that when you call the function with your URL, it’ll return something similar to 600455.
You call it like this:
<?php
findmyalexarank("http://www.gpearce.co.uk");
?>
Which returns 859044 or similar. Stick some text either side, and you could graft it into your template. Note - I didn’t write all of this, I just modified some existing code quite a bit ;P
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