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Cmsmadesimple upgrade to 1.7.1

May 2, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

Just finished upgrading Shareworld from Cmsmadesimple Version 1.7 to 1.7.1.

It took quite some time because I have modified News Module files and Admin files – I was going to leave the News module as it was but it seems theres been some sort of upgrade done to it – as my news items would not work when I left the old News files in place – so I had to go through and amend the necessary files manually.

Other than that, the only issue was that Captcha had stopped working – it always showed the same text and would not accept when the right combination was entered. To solve this problem, I just un-installed and reinstalled the Captcha module and now everything is working fine!!

Fundraising

May 1, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

Shareworld is donating all of it’s revenue over the next 7 days to help support www.nikki-fundraising.co.uk. Please visit the site and show your support.

Php share prices on shareworld

, filed under Computing, stocks and shares; Comments Off.

Just finished the beta of a share price lookup tool for shareworld. The tool is written in php and will look up price information from yahoo finance and will also return news items relating to the company in question.

The tool accepts company name as well as ticker symbol. Take a look at it here

Link Building best practices

April 29, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

Bring back the USEFUL links page! Read my link building article to find out more.

Problem with W3C Validator?

, filed under Uncategorized; 4 Comments.

There seems to be a problem with W3c Validator at the moment – When trying to check Shareworld I am getting the following error:

Line 1, Column 1: end of document in prolog
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.o…

This error may appear when the validator receives an empty document. Please make sure that the document you are uploading is not empty, and report any discrepancy.

I was pretty sure this was incorrect as Shareworld is nearly completely valid XHTML (baring in mind it comprises over 1100 pages). I tried checking the validity of a few other sites I run (including this one) and got the same error.

To make doubly sure this was in error, I downloaded a sample html page from the W3c website and tried to validate that; it also produced the same error.

I have since emailed W3C via their feedback section, but have not yet received a reply.

I will post an update when I get one.

A certain Telecoms company and Domain Renewals

, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

I have had an issue today where a domain has expired despite the fact it was supposed to auto-renew – this means our exchange server has gone down which is a real pain. I spoke to the technical team at the company concerned – and by the way, the technical support at this company is pretty good compared to any other company in the same sector – and they informed me that there may have been a billing problem which prevented the auto renewal – fair enough. I was also told that an email would have been sent to the administrative contact for the domain flagging up this issue – of course I had already done a whois lookup for the domain, so I pointed out that his company were listed as the administrative contact – this being the case, he agreed that they would have received the email alerted them that they had a problem processing the renewal – but nothing was done about it!!

It always frustrates me that the larger the company, the less personal support you get – its sort of understandable in a way, when you think this company probably have hundreds of thousands of domains registered on behalf of their customers. But if a small company can provide a certain level of support to its customer base, shouldn’t a larger company be able to provide the same level of support to a larger customer base?

My opinion is that as company’s get larger, they don’t seem to increase there infrastructure proportionately – instead the percentage running cost seems to gradually get low and the pockets of the big guys gradually get bigger!!

Bing – Microsofts Search Engine

April 28, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

I know Bing was launched quite some time ago, but I recently used it for the first time, and I must say, although I struggle to see that any search engine can compete with Google, I found Bing to be making a pretty good effort – The first thing I noticed was the lovely backgrounds they have each day – I think this is a really refreshing approach to design – and is a nice alternative to Googles minimalist design.

The next thing I noticed is that when you perform a search, each site has an arrow to its right, which when hovered over, displays some more information that the site contains – this is useful if you want to get more of an idea of what the site is about before you click on the link.

Despite all the great points to Bing, it still only has 3.11% share of the global search market. The trouble is, Google are so good at doing what they do, that unless you have a search niche – like Youtube (for videos) MSN for news, how much more can a search engine bring to the table than Google already has?

Link building

April 24, 2010, filed under SEO; 3 Comments.
Tags: SEO

Shareworld is at the stage now where we’ve done a lot of work on seo – we have a good site structure, regular news items, the site is almost completely valid HTML.

Our next big target is link building – which is proving a very difficult task – we have toyed with link building services such as direct link ads and text link ads – two services that offer paid for link exchanges, but after Reading up on the subject I found that google does not condone these services.

As much as I think they do work, I don’t want to get into bad habbits, so it’s back to the drawing board for our link building strategy – we are picking up natural back links over time but it seems such a hard area to actively work on – whilst also sticking to the rules… Comments please.

Google Adwords not compatible with Opera

April 21, 2010, filed under Computing, SEO; 2 Comments.
Tags: google, opera, web browsers

I just tried logging into my Google Adwords account only to find that Googles Ad Center is not compatible with Opera Web Browser.

It annoys me when I see that sites don’t support certain browsers – I know Opera only has a small share of the web browser market – about 1% apparently.

But I would have thought Google would be sure to incorporate all common browsers into its software – I spend ages checking my websites in all browser, using software like Browser Cam, its a shame Google cant follow suit!

Shareworld on Youtube!

April 19, 2010, filed under stocks and shares; Comments Off.
Tags: investing, level 2 share prices, youtube

Shareworld has recently published its first video on Youtube! – Its a tutorial on Level 2 Share Price systems, so if your not interested in Investing, it may not be of much use. However, please take a look anyway!!!

Web Server Load Testing

April 11, 2010, filed under Computing, SEO; Comments Off.

I have been trying to test how much load my server/website would take in terms of concurrent connections.

After looking at a lot of expensive services to achieve this task, I came across a great site called Load Impact – They offer a free stress test for your website which will simulate up to 50 concurrent visitors – there are also payed for services they offer which can simulate up to 5000 concurrent users.

After testing two of my websites, I found that Nikki-fundraising could take about 30 concurrent visitors before it crashed, and Shareworld could take about 40-45 concurrent visitors. After doing these stress tests, I came to the conclusion that it will depend greatly on how much data needs to be provided in order to view a particular site – after taking the advice of Websiteoptimization.com I managed to greatly increase the speed of Nikki-Fundraising by removing alot of styling-images that we didnt really need – including changing the visitor counter to text rather than an image – as the amount of objects that need to be downloaded by visitors puts more strain on the server – since doing this, the site has been able to take more concurrent visitors!!

Server reload

April 3, 2010, filed under Computing; Comments Off.

I had to reload my web server last night after having trouble with plesk, lucky I decided to check the backups first though – as none of them worked! After some investigation I discovered that when the backups were uploaded to 1and1s FTP server, because I hadn’t explicitly selected binary as the transfer mode, the tar files had become corrupted- it proves a point that a backup isn’t worth anything unless you test it regularly!!

Sponsor my sisters charity walk

March 26, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

My Sister is doing an 18 mile charity walk for her friend who has cancer – please sponsor her here.

Link Exchange Best Practices – on the Web Squeeze

March 13, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Link Building is the easiest thing to do badly and the hardest thing to do properly – Read the rest of my article published on The Web Squeeze.

Shareworld reaches 100,000 visitors

March 9, 2010, filed under Uncategorized; Comments Off.

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!

March 5, 2010, filed under art; Comments Off.

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

Talk Talk Talk Talk…

March 4, 2010, filed under Computing, In the News; 2 Comments.
Tags: broadband providers

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!