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Shareworld reaches 100,000 visitors

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:26:47 +0000

My longest running website (Shareworld) reached 100,000 visitors today! Its taken 5 years but its finally made it! Please visit the site and show your support if you are interested in investing!!

Infinite Web Canvas!

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:05:59 +0000

This is brilliant, take a look (goto N225,W333 if you want to see what I done)…

Talk Talk Talk Talk…

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:50:08 +0000

How do we have such useless companies dominating the broadband/telephone market? As you may have heard, Talk Talk has recently acquired Tiscali and as they proudly state on their website, it makes them the “biggest provider of broadband to British homes” – I think numbers are the ONLY thing they care about and they have achieved numbers by providing their broadband for free – “3/4 million people have now ordered free broadband from TalkTalk. We are the fastest growing broadband business in the UK!“.

Unfortunately “you get what you pay for” is an apt saying in this case – I dealt with a business customer today who has three phone lines with Talk Talk, and when the latest bills arrived for each account, each bill was addressed to a different name – none of which were the account holders name. When we queried this with Talk Talk (whilst speaking to them using one of the three phone-lines on the account), we were told that because our name was not the name on the account (the problem we were phoning about) they could not discuss the account with us!

We have been advised to send in a “Change of Ownership” form (By post I might add) which requests a signature from the current owner of the account(s) in order to change ownership – even though we (the customer) have been with Talk Talk for the past 4 years! I asked if they had a Fax machine over at TalkTalk so we could send proof of address etc, but apparently they don’t have one!

Nothing to Declare

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:37:37 +0000

Non-Design

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:59:30 +0000

Came across a great website the other day – it has been build on the concept of non-design – which is purposefully avoiding any design element what-so-ever from a presentation. Apparently this is very difficult to achieve as the exercise produces its on design – the way Modernista has achieved this non-design is by building the refering page into their own page-design and therefor although there is a design element there, its not theirs!

Measuring your website

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:17:22 +0000

Does anyone remember Silktide Sitescore? It was a website testing software that would measure your website based on many variables – such as valid code, PR, text to image ration, meta tags, load speed and several other factors. Silktide closed down several years ago, but now they have re-launched the service as Nibbler. The new version has many more factors that it will measure. Although uts easy to get carryed away trying to improve your score, I think its a great tool for checking your website – especially when you are concerned about search rankings – all you ned to do is type in the url of your website and Nibbler will score it out of ten, based on many factors – it gives you a great insight into how well written your website is.

Top Tools for Website Optimisation

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:10:13 +0000

XML Sitemaps – For creating sitemaps of your website

Google Webmaster Tools – Submit your sitemaps here and check for indexing errors

Twitterfeed – automatically post your RSS feeds to Twitter

Trade Doubler – The one place for all of your affiliate programs

W3C Validator – Check the validity of your website

Web Page Analyzer – Website speed analysis tool

Browser Cam – Check your website in a massive selection of browsers for compatibility issues

Spam Attack

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:24:05 +0000

One of my websites (Shareworld.co.uk) has been the repeated victim of spam attacks in the last few days. I have been trying to trace the attacker – the first attack came from 75.101.225.120 which, after a lookup at ip-address.com I found belongs to Amazon Web Services – Elastic Compute Cloud – this is a service provided by Amazon where users can instantly build a virtual scalable server space – the attacker clearly uses this service in order to stay anonymous. We have also had attacks from the following IP addresses: 89.149.202.119, 62.193.245.233. Hopefully I can work out a way to block these attacks even though they are coming from different IPs!!

Blacklisted by Yahoo

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:27:04 +0000

Getting Blacklisted by Yahoo’s Mail Servers is becoming very difficult to resolve! Although our server is not actually on any blacklists and does not partake in spam emailing campaigns, because we did not have Reverse DNS setup correctly, we have been blacklisted by Yahoo. Yahoo are contactable here but when your communicating by online forms its always an arduous process!

The monster that is

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:44:30 +0000

Are there any large companies that have actually managed to stay in touch with their customers? It seems impossible to have any sort of reasonable interaction with them, I wont mention any names, but working in the IT industry I find it frustrating when dealing with large companies – you have to claw away at the feet of the giant to get anything done. I know theres a word for this, think its called DE-centralisation, I think alot of companies struggle with this the larger they get…