DS32.com - Welcome

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!

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.

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

Read more about SEO here

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!!

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!

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…

Im afraid they came with the WordPress theme! Perhaps I will change the image at some point, but I kinda like it!

So Alex won big brother yesterday – I’m really happy that he won – I think he has had alot of “bad press” (He’d love that!) and Big Brother has given him a chance to make himself actually known – and I think he seems like a decent bloke – Obviously alot of other people thought the same, thats why he’s won.

Welcome to my new website layout – I know this site keeps changing (And I know that it doesnt make any sense writing this – because no-one really looks at the site anyway!) but its because I want a website where I can just talk about stuff when I want to, and I’ve been looking for quite some time for a good Content Management system that will suit my needs – think I may have found it in WordPress!

Anyway, the old site is now officially gone, so is the old-old site (The one with the website design tutorials on – if you are interested in that site, you can email me because I still have it all backed up).

If I had the money, I would invest in a few stocks of companies that I like, they would be the following:

Tesco

Google

Opera Software

Find out more here.