It's the holiday season so I've ended up in Ohio for a while and without my trusty laptop. I originally bought my Dell i9300 back in September 2005 for the whole purpose of designing websites whilst I travel; back then I spent 6 weeks in Connecticut and had everything I needed to continue my profession whilst away from home.

Now here we are a couple of years later and my trusty Dell i9300 is kaput. Well, not totally, but here's a few reasons why it was not a great machine:

Firstly, it was one of those laptops with a faulty battery. Even though I had two batteries and one was OK I kept both. Only problem is that these were the batteries of the kind that caught fire at a conference in Japan!

Secondly the laptop is just too damn hot to sit on your lap anyway. Even with the safe battery I recorded temperatures of over 100 degrees near the nether regions.

Third. BIG. The i9300 with 17" WXGA screen is a beast and a heavy one at that.

Fourthly and most importantly - LCD Inverter... No, not the soundsystem, but the little board at the foot of the screen that makes it work. i.e. my LCD inverter is totally buggered and I have no 17" WXGA wide screen. Instead I have been recently plugging in to a flatscreen 15" LCD but the bulk has been too muh to be portable...

So there you have it; I have no laptop with me and hence I am lost. No fireworks, no Dreamweaver, no Filezilla, no source files. I'm blogging from my fiancee's Macbook thingy so I can do any writing I like in blogger or wordpress but nothing more than that. Damn, I really need to edit the background image of this site but I'll have to wait until I get back to Blighty...

Labels: personal

Is Dreamweaver 8's FTP client too slow? Is it driving you nuts? Time outs? Connection breaks? Well, here's the answer....

Use Filezilla instead. I got fed up with DW8's FTP timing out and leaving me with hug installs on one of my servers having missing files. So when I found Friday's upload was incomplete I took a nightly build of my favourite CMS on Monday morning, grabbed all the files in that nightly build folder and added them to the QUEUE, then in TRANSFER options, FILE OVERWRITE SETTINGS I ticked OVERWRITE IF NEWER and then in QUEUE hit PROCESS QUEUE.

Lightning fast and accurate. Job done.

Labels: dreamweaver, tools

What a great idea. SEOHosting.com

What's the crack with this and what the hell does SEO have to do with hosting?

Well, certain search engines, that we won't mention, look at the IP address of where sites are hosted and factors this into their ranking algorithm. What they specifically look at is the class C IP address, so for this site with the current IP address 70.85.48.84 the class C IP is 70.85.48.

If the search engines see links between any of these class C IP addresses then the links are quite simply devalued. I once knew a guy in the US who, many years ago, hooked onto the fact that links boost sites and created something like over 300 sites with virtually no content, all linking to eachother.

Now, the SEs aren't daft so they introduced this cross-linking detection which stops someone setting up hosting on a reseller package and creating tons of sites that all link to eachother.

That's bad news if you're legitimately building sites on the cheap and you find genuine value of linking to other sites, especially if they're in the same arena e.g. you link one Automotive site to another, or you're a designer hosting your clients' sites on your reseller account, pointing to them from your portfolio and having them point back to you.

It's good news if you're a hosting company because to avoid class C IP penalties you'd have to spread your sites over different servers far apart, at different companies etc. For the small fish inthis big pond, that can be quite a pricey problem.

That's where SEO Hosting comes in: SEOHosting.com from Hostgator specifically has a number of class C IP addresses where you can avoid these penalties... for now ;)

So, from an SEO point of view you can optimise, promote, build links and not worry (too much) about Class C IP penalties.

Labels: hosting, seo, server, services

We're currently working with a client by the name of Oceanwide Properties who sell property in Turkey.

As well as consulting for their web design & web development projects we're project managing their SEO strategy and slowly but surely raising their profile in the search engines.

The site will be undergoing a redevelopment & redesign to help their SERPs and we'll be adding features to make the site more useable.

Watch this space.

Labels: consultancy, development, news, search, seo