Blogging Archive

I’ve just read a story from the BBC about the iPhone tracking users movements. It’s a normal BBC story that doesn’t really take sides and conforms to corporate policy. But.

But, what is the point? It says in the article that the information stored isn’t uploaded to Apple. Ok, fine. It also says that the data is only stored locally and therefore can only be accessed if you have the actual phone (in so many words). So what information are they trying to give us?

They say that there is no indication to the user that this information is being stored. Really? I figured it out using the Pictures app – it tells you where you took the various photos on your phone. How do they think it knows that? Magic?

But my big problem with it – the reason I’m on a rant is the headline “iPhone tracks users’ movements”. For a supposedly impartial organisation like the BBC why have they chosen a simple 4 word sentence that will grab the attention of every iPhone user and scare them a little? What are they doing to help people? Nothing.

The BBC is behaving no better than a tabloid newspaper. But unlike the tabloids we are forced to pay for it.

I’ve just moved some of my blogs to a new hosting package with my current hosting company. Since it’s the same host it was pretty easy. Download the files, upload them to new webspace. Export the database, import it to new server. Done.

Problem was that one of the sites, Wellsy’s World was working fine but not displaying any Adsense ads. I went to check the settings and everything was fine so I went to check Google’s reports and it turned out that site hadn’t had any impressions for well over a month – something had broken before the move and I hadn’t noticed.

I tried altering the adsense settings, updating WordPress, checking the privacy settings, creating a new adsense ad and adding that to the site but nothing worked. I then tried removing the plugin and trying some others. None of them worked – half of them wouldn’t even install. At the point when I was about to give up and hard code the adsense code into the wordpress files myself I tried installing the original plugin again and for some reason (maybe is was a newer version) it didn’t just pull in the saved settings from before but asked me to set it all up from scratch again. I did so and hey-presto!

I should have originally just followed rule 1 of IT support – turn it off and turn it on again.

After finally getting all the logins fixed as mentioned in the previous post, it turned out that now two of my four blogs would not allow us to post to them (ironically this one that I posted to saying I’d fixed everything did!). Whenever we clicked on Save or Publish all that would happen is that we’d get dumped to the homepage. It would however save a copy in the Drafts folder. Sensing that this was a PHP issue and not a MySQL issue, and that there may be weeks of tinkering and fixing in my future, I decided that a WordPress upgrade might be the best way to fix it.

I went and got the latest WordPress 2.8 and uploaded the files to my server in the folder for the first blog. I ran the upgrade script and everything seemed fine. I was greated with the new styled login page and then got to the dashboard without a hickup. I then found my post in the Drafts folder, hit publish and it informed me that it had been published – nice!

However, when I went to the site to view the post, all I got was the Blank Screen of Death as it’s known. I bit of tinkering showed me that the PHP files were working fine – it just didn’t want to output anything. After a bit of playing around in the admin bit I finally clicked on the Themes and was presented with a message saying my theme was broken.

I loaded up the default theme and now everything works fine! Now I can just tinker with the new version and then find a theme that isn’t so boring…

[Note: I've since changed the theme so no offence to the person who designed this one]

We tried to logon to some of our WordPress blogs yesterday and even though we hadn’t changed anything at all, whenever we logged in it just sent us back to the login page with no error messages at all. After some checking I was pretty sure that none of the passwords or anything had been changed.

Much Googling later seemed to suggest that people were having the same problem after an upgrade to 2.6 but we were still on 2.1. There were suggestions that the problem could be caused by a plugin incompatability so I thought I’d try disabling them to see if it helped. Since I couldn’t login all I did was FTP to my server, browse to the plugin directory and rename the entire thing to plugins2.

This let me login without a problem so I recreated the plugins folder and copied them back one at a time to see which ones weren’t working. I repeated this for them all and now everything is fine

There’s a number of reasons for having a blog:

• Something to pass the time
• Generate extra pages and hopefully PageRank for business and revenue generating websites
• Generating direct revenue from Google AdSense or similar
• Feeding the ego by getting onto page 1 of the SERPs for your name etc

Generally I use my blogs for all these reasons and as for the last one I’m doing OK, being top for “Devblog” and my nickname “Wellsy”. As for my actual name, “Andy Wells”, I’ve got a bit of competition out there as there’s a rock band and a mayor in the US both with the same name. I’m starting to make progress though and have made it up to number 4 on Google (even above Wikipedia).

Yay me!

Although I like my job, the problem with being salaried staff is that no matter how hard you work or how ever much overtime you do, the only way to get more cash in your pocket is by getting a pay rise (hint, hint boss).

Because I like money I’ve been setting up a few sites and blogs with ads on to try and get some extra cash. So far I’m really happy with the way Google AdSense is performing on the various blogs and other sites they are on.

I did want to create some articles on a particular site called Opportunity Club and then put some specific ads with the content. I headed over to Tradedoubler and found the various programmes I needed and applied for them.

Every single one of them came back “Denied”. Now I can see why various companies might not want to approve this site, even though it is trying to make them more money directly. The problem I’ve got with Tradedoubler and the way they do things is that it’s not just that domain I’ve had problems with.

I’ve also been refused for numerous programmes for the Medicology site which is surprising since it’s a well designed, corporate site with high PR and traffic.

I’ve also been refused for various computing and technology programmes for this site. What the hell do they want? “XYZ Computers are great!” in a H1 tag on your homepage with the banner underneath? It’s stupid.

Now I realise that some of this isn’t Tradedoublers fault, but there’s other things that annoy them about me:

• The half a dozen “newsletters” they seem to send me every day
• The absolute uselessness of their website and reporting tools
• The fact that their ads either don’t work or slow your site down so that you loose visitors
• Some of the bizarre rules and restrictions they have

Well, I’ve decided to give Commission Junction a try for a while since they seem to be approving my requests to join programmes and I’ll obviously be sticking with AdSense.

I’ll probably update this in 3 or 4 months when I get a feel of what CJ are like.

In the past I’ve usually taken projects and sat down with the MD to spec them up and finally sat down to write the code. This was the approach for pretty much every website or program I’ve done (including the software this blog used to be run on) as it gives us much greater control over the visual characteristics and the features of the stuff we produce. Another reason is that some of the sites we’ve done have been suites of sites, such as Find Locally which just aren’t compatible with existing bits of software and need to be custom from stage 1.

Recently though, we’ve been working on projects that lend themselves quite well to being run on open source solutions. I therefore decided to give it a go and set up one of our retail sites, Erogenicity, to run off OScommerce and then see how difficult it would be to modify it to our unique requirements. As it turned out, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be so I decided to take the plunge and reduce maintenance time on some of our existing projects (such as running all our blogs on WordPress), as well as reducing development time on new stuff.

So far there haven’t been any problems so from now on I’ll be checking for any open source solutions I can utilise before sitting down to weeks of coding. I’ll also be looking for any missing features so I could possibly write an extension/contribution and give something back to the community!

I was a bit bored this morning so I was thinking of ways to get more traffic around the site. One of the shortcomings of the current way I do things is the Archive part. I was basically a series of pages (i.e. 1 | 2 | 3….) with links to all the posts on them and a line or so from the start of the post. It worked but wasn’t exactly search engine friendly. Plus the link to the archive was just a single link from the sidebar. Again not the most search engine friendly way of doing it.

I decided to redo it in the way some other blogs do with links to an archive page for each month and then displaying the posts for that month in abreviated form with a couple of paragraphs from the post and a link to it. It’s more search engine friendly (content is king!) and should help the spiders get around a bit easier.

I didn’t really need to post about this but I didn’t have anything for “November, 2005″ yet!