Find & Replace line breaks in MS Word
As a designer I’m quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there’s no formatting at all.
For instance – I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.
Rather than count line-by-line there’s a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either ‘2007′ or ‘2008′ I simply executed find ‘2007′ and replace all with ‘^p 2007′ and find ‘2008′ and replace all with ‘^p 2008′
^p
So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles
Life saver 
Make Google results pages easier to read
When you search Google you tend to get a ton of extra data the sometimes you’re really not looking for.
Normally you see, in a Google results page, the following data:
[title]
[description]
[link]
When you’re looking for something in a hurry e.g. checking out other competitors in the SEO game, you often need to peruse the results pages fast!
So how do you compact Google search results?
I just happened to stumbleupon DaveN’s blog whilst Googling for the pros & cons of having a UK website at a US IP address and I noticed his greasemonkey scripts page.
Now I haven’t used Greasemonkey in a while but it’s a handy little plugin for the Firefox web browser.
On Dave’s page there’s a totally handy little Google search compactor script for Greasemonkey.
Really handy, give it a try.
Microsoft to buy Yahoo?
Oh no. It looks like Microsoft have made an offer to buy Yahoo!
Microsoft have apparently offered $44.6bn or £22.4bn, in cash and shares.
It sounds like a good deal for shareholders who’ll get 62% over the closing value of the share on Thursday (31st Jan) night when the shares are down 46% on their high of last year.
But will this be a good thing for search & the Internet or not?
Joomla! 1.5 Live
At last, after nearly 2 and a half years, the rebel alliance that broke away from Mambo CMS and became Joomla, has finally given birth to a new CMS…
Definition: Web 2.0
The definition of Web 2.0: The proliferation of simple web technologies allowing and promoting the filling-up of the world wide web with an over-abundance of utterly useless information.
Blogs and simple CMS systems abound and I feel like I’m really starting to see the same things day after day, over and over again… Ah yes, another Blogger site, another Wordpress site, another obvious Joomla! site… Yawn!
Oh, and I see you have one of those logos with a reflection… Yawn!
Let’s get back to Web 1.9, it was much less stale and samo.
Joomla! 1.0.14 RC1
Some people have reported Joomla! 1.0.x security issues and whilst the Joomla! core dev team have been busy working on Joomla! 1.5 they’ve not been slack in getting a fix for old 1.0.x users.
As such today sees the release of Joomla! 1.0.14 RC1, so if any users could install and test for issues we could soon see a 1.0.14 stable and even a 1.0.15
Lost
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…
DW8 FTP Slow
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.
SEOHosting.com
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.
Oceanwide Properties
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.