Unintentionally Blank

Watching the keywords that drive traffic to your site or blog can show a few things; the interest in certain posts, whether users are finding what they search for when they arrive at your site and the amusing combinations and events that conspire to cause one of my posts to appear as result number 31 for the phrase “strange experience blindfold”.

Another interesting result turned up two days ago, when I received a couple of visits for the search top wordpress designs. Whilst touched that Google considered my design to be one of the top WordPress designs, I didn’t believe them and decided to look closer into why I appeared so high up the ranks for these keywords.

Continue reading “Google Flatters Me: When SEO Goes Right” »

I did not complete the 36 questions posed by A List Apart in the first Web Design survey. While I considered it and even started it once, I didn’t finish it. I wanted to, but I wouldn’t have felt right if I had.

Why not? Because I am not a designer, developer, project manager, writer, editor, information architect or usability specialist… yet. In fact, there was absolutely no mention of support desk worker for an implementation of SAP HR or HR analyst, as I like to call myself, though I can’t say I’m surprised!

Web development is currently a hobby for me, a past-time I really enjoy. Creating my own sites or code is great as is helping other people too. Blogging sits on top of that as a way of interacting, getting my code, my thoughts, my opinions out there for anyone to read and it drives me on. Nothing drives me as much as the thought of working and being a true part of this profession though and the positive feedback and growing traffic I am receiving here serves to boost me everyday.

I am in the market for a new job now, if you have any tips on getting into web development professionally, I would love to hear from you. I’ve had a couple of interviews so far and things are going reasonably well, but every little helps.

Who knows (and I’m keeping my fingers crossed), this time next year maybe I will be taking the survey. In the meantime, I eagerly await the results to see what sort of an industry I am trying to get into.

I am going to upgrade my computer. My current PC isn’t the flashiest box out there at the moment, in fact, with a Celeron processor and 256MB of RAM it’s pretty sluggish. I am due an upgrade.

What’s with the title then? Well I have been considering my options for this upgrade and I am leaning towards the idea of getting a Mac. I was hoping you could help though. I’ve never had a Mac and I have never seriously used one (wandering into the Apple Store and playing about on one doesn’t count). I have always used PCs (except for my old Amiga 500, those were the days) and need some help deciding what is right for me.

Can You Help?

Do you have experience, good or bad, with Macs? Can you tell me why I should be getting one? Can you tell me why I shouldn’t, why I should stick with a trusty PC?

I like coding and making websites, listening to music and surfing the web. My girlfriend loves uploading digital photos. Should we stick with what we know or change things up a bit?

If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. I’m a little confused right now as I try to justify spending almost double on an Apple over a PC. I hope you can help me out, or at least point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

A buzz has gone around the Internet this weekend. Sure, Microsoft bought out an advertising firm for $6 billion, but a deal like that pales in significance when there is a rumour of Google making a purchase. The excitement is, of course, doubled when the company on the other end of the rumours is one of the blogosphere’s favourites, FeedBurner. Vecosys reports that Google is to buy FeedBurner and Valleywag followed that up with the likely price tag of $100 million.

But why would Google do this? To revive contextual advertising within feeds, to integrate more data into Google analytics and tie bloggers and other publishers into the Google way even more? I think that both of these ideas, while incisive and probably true, forget what Google do, and want to continue doing, best. Search.

Continue reading “Google To Buy Feedburner? The Real Reasons” »

A friend pointed out recently that the subdomain my tests and examples are kept on had no index page in the root, so if anyone removed the page name from the address they could access my entire directory. I didn’t think that this was a good idea, so I decided to change it. I could have added an index.html file or something else there to protect the directory, but I wanted to link it in with the rest of the blog and learn something at the same time.

I created a page on which I could display all of my tests and examples, it’s the Test Centre that you can find linked above now. As a page in my blog, it is part of the main domain, so how do I connect the subdomain http://test.unintentionallyblank.co.uk to the page http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/test-centre/?

Continue reading “A PHP 301 Redirect” »