SEO News

Geocities Closes Down and Part of My History Dies with it

April 24, 2009, by No comments yet

Techcrunch is reporting that Geocities has finally closed its doors.

Back in the mid 1990′s hosting was expensive and a young design student at Staffordshire University had to resort to one of the many free hosting accounts that were ad sponsored at the time.

Having cut my teeth on the basics of HTML via online chat forums (remember having to manually refresh the screen to update the chat lol) I needed somewhere to host pictires that could be dropped into my conversations which is where Geocities came in. Later I learned how to use tables for layout and put togther my first single page portfolio .

I remember my geocities address was something like geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/1944/ (notice no vanity URL’s in use yet) and everything had to be managed via a web interface which made file management and document creation a nightmare. I even posted an interactive 3d flash environment there lovingly ‘scripted’ in flash 2 lol.

There were other free hosts at the time like Angelfire and Fortunecity but I Chose Geocities because the ads were less intrusive which made for a better page.

I remember that for years my pages were still live but with vanity URL’s being implimented early in the 00′s I guess they decided to close all inactive accounts.

Geocities Closes Down and Part of My History Dies with it

Download IE8 Final

March 19, 2009, by No comments yet

It seems that Microsoft have decided to finally take the IE8 browser out of beta and its now available to download in its complete form (despite the fact that its still not secure – yet more secure than apple’s safari!).

Download IE8 (Final)

Download IE8 Final

Swearathon – We Swear to Fund Raise for Comic Relief

March 11, 2009, by No comments yet

This week at Click 4 we’ve decided on possibly the best way to make money for comic relief. Some climb mountains, others sit in baths filled with beans, but we’ve decided on a swearbox.

3 days in and all I can say is you have no idea how much money we’re raised so far (mostly due to Steves outbursts) which are taken to a new heights when messing about.

I’ll announce this weeks total on Friday.

Swearathon We Swear to Fund Raise for Comic Relief

Dell PWND Nvidia Quatro FX 4600 for £5

January 12, 2009, by No comments yet

Just been given the heads up on an error on the Dell site where theyre selling £1000′s of graphics card, the Nvidia Quatro FX4600 for £4+delivery (£12 in total).

Just go to dell.co.uk and search for item number a1662660.

Whoo! eBay here I come!

Update: BOO! They cancelled my order so no quick cash for me!

Dell PWND Nvidia Quatro FX 4600 for £5

Google Dewey Update

April 4, 2008, by No comments yet

So its reported elsewhere on the Internets that Matt Cutts, Googles resident spin doctor has leaked information about the Google Dewey update. The change happened late March and has caused tremors in the SEO community with SREPS going up and down faster than … Well I’ll leave that to your imagination :)

My own personal viewpoint is that the latest update is Googles latest attempt to internalise all search traffic back through Google related services as I am now seeing Google Books results appearing a close second to the ever dominant Wikipedia listings. I say latest attempt as the previous updates based around self interest include showing Youtube content and displaying Google news prominently above other commercial listings.

Its sad times indeed.

Google Dewey Update

Macworld 2008 – Interesting Hype Machine

January 15, 2008, by No comments yet

Just like the Atari and Amiga before it, Apple has its fanatics and an hour before the doors open on the event its interesting to see what hype is already springing up on the Internet.

Air

Lots of speculation and fake images of a super-thin laptop. Personally I think its going to be more about wireless everything as with the recent CES show which featured wireless TV’s and suchlike. so my guess is to expect wireless apple displays (except for the PSU)

People are also reporting that the apple store is down which does indicate either a significant technical problem or sizeable product update.

Both Engadget and Gizmodo are running dedicated post categories and have given us…. well nothing more than some images of people queuing, sleeping and ambling around an entrance hall with the obligatory apple "theres something in the air" poster.

Give it an hour or so and I’ll see if im right.

Go fanboys go!

Update

Heres a quick update on the first reactions of Macworld 2008.

Engadget show us just how thin the Macbook Air is compared to Apples previous incarnations. Link

Gizmodo’s hands on gallery and comentary of the MacBook Air. Link

Cnet – Crave’s first look at the MacBook Air Link

Engadget point out that the MacBook Air doesnt have a replaceable battery and thus either an expensive service fee, or limited lifespan as already discovered with iPods and the iPhone (naughty apple!) Link

Gizmodo’s keynote gallery of the Macbook Air’s launch (anyone noticing wwhat product was Apple’s biggest anouncement yet? Link

Engadget show us something different with coverage of Apple TV 2 and what promises to be some sweet new features Link

Cnet – Crave talks about Apple TV 2′s new features Link

Gizmodo announce Apple Time Capsule Server for Backup Machine – this is something every self respecting Apple fanboy needs because despite what you say about PC’s you know the apple is just as unreliable! Link

Macworld 2008 Interesting Hype Machine

Google and Wikipedia – Tit for Tat

January 3, 2008, by No comments yet

With the recent announcement of Google creating Knol, their own ‘open’ encyclopaedia to compete with Wikipedia who are currently dominating the search engine listings for most major terms, The creators of Wikipedia have now announced their intent to develop new search engine technologies and services to compete with Google.

Where will the madness end?

Google and Wikipedia Tit for Tat

Pixelsurgeon is dead – a fond farewell

November 21, 2007, by No comments yet

Opened my morning bookmarks to see a message on Pixelsurgeon.com saying they’ve shut shop. needless to say im sad to see such a great resource go as it was one of my main sources of film and music reviews.

Monday also saw the launch of the new QBN.com website as a replacement for newstoday so we’ll never hear the cheery bling blong NT jingle again :(

Sad days indeed.

Pixelsurgeon is dead a fond farewell

Firefox 3 Beta First Look

November 20, 2007, by No comments yet

Just spied on Digg that there’s a new official version of Firefox out (Firefox 3 Beta).

Get Firefox 3 Beta

Here are a few of my first impressions and some issues I’ve found.

The tab scrolling is nice and smooth with some acceleration

When you open multiple tabs in Firefox 2.x you could quickly jump to loaded tabs. This feature seems a little slow in Firefox 3 Beta.

Sites like Brainfuel.tv render in some weird hieroglyph? Don’t quite know what’s going on there – I’ve noticed it on several websites now.

The contents of some pop-up windows is not displayed.

Firefox 3 hates FCK editor (what I’m currently editing in) and doesn’t show the karat :(

Bookmarks management looks great and is intuitive, but adding a bookmark reveals a clunky dialogue.

No inline spell checking

So whats my verdict? Have a play but don’t kill Firefox 2.x just yet.

Firefox 3 Beta First Look

Barcamp Leeds 2007 – My SEO Talk

November 18, 2007, by No comments yet

I was really nervous about yesterdays Barcamp in Leeds as I’d been called out by The Hodge after slating his SEO presentation at a previous GeekUp and asked to co-present an SEO critique session with him. In addition it wasnt until around 8:30 yesterday morning that i realised that the event was an all day thing and not a 7pm start as GeekUp usually is which meant I had to rush to get there.

For those of you who havent been to a BarCamp yet (theres loads all over the world) its a strange format thats basically ‘web2.0′ only in human form with everyone opting on the day to do presentations on something they know about and its all worked out on post it notes on a board so you can see who’s scheduled to talk about what in each room. Althgether it workded really well (apart from anything that relied on technology *cough* The Hodges live linkup with Barcamp Toronto *cough* :)

With time-slots being roughly 20 mins, many people opted to simply introduce a product or service and there were few actual practical sessions which was something Ive been striving for.

…so I attended seminars on:

  • Futurology (we came up with a dog version of Match.com based on the cryptic connections between a dog and disposeable camera)
  • Drupal (which everyone agreed was too hard to get into and customise)
  • Case study on a social loan company who’ve set up a whisky distillary based on community monies
  • Case study on some interesting nodal tagging for the BBC

…and lots more.

Our presentation on SEO went well, tho I found the touch sensitive digital whiteboards a complete nightmare to work with and couldn’t really figure out how to jump into wordtracker etc to give some real impacting feedback so I opted to talk to interested people on a 1-2-1 basis afterwards. Read an impartial review here and SEOMOZ.org has a nice document that supports my comments on link juice and control of your websites internal link structure.

Loads of beer didn’t turn up due to someone not ordering it in advance. And the pub we all ended up in smelt like an armpit lol.

So will I go to the next one? Hell yeah!

Oh and I won an iPod lol!

Barcamp Leeds 2007 My SEO Talk