The cause of the evacuation is not yet known.

OK, so in my last SEO related post, I talk about gunning for the top spot in Google for “manchester freelance” which has a healthy competition of nearly three million results.

10 hours after making the SEO changes I’m on the first page of Google at position 4 which is again a lot quicker than I expected and has made me eat my words:

I don’t expect this to happen overnight though!

Edit: July 8th @ 12:30 – Now at position 2!

Old Style Red Bus by craig.hamnett

Yes, it’s true, some bus drivers just blatently exist just to piss people off and to massage their overly sized ego.

I’m sure they’re not all like that but the bus driver this morning very kindly waited until I’d ran all the way to the door of the bus, only to pull away at the perfect time, leaving me replay the Peter Kay sketch (at the bottom).

Much to my surprise (as there was no traffic) I caught the bus up 3 stops down the road, tried to summon up a snarky comment, but unfortunately I’m still recovering from the trauma of actually running!

However I made one blog post and within an hour I was appearing at the top of Google for “Manchester Freelancer” which surprised me a little. It goes to show though how much Google likes trusted platforms such as WordPress as publishing engines, and combined with it’s automatic pinging service, SEO starts to become a breeze.

For some reason though, Google wants to correct the search term to “Manchester Freelance” (minus the ‘r’) which has six times the competition, over 2,600,000 results. Therefore I’m going to modify the SEO strategy slightly to see if I can make a dent in that. I don’t expect this to happen overnight though!

Going through the path of logic, I started at the beginning to find the bottleneck. The “index.php” file was fine, this then requires “wp-blog-header.php” which in turn requires “wp-load.php”. From then on I was just blagging my way through, because at that point I got lost. Logic isn’t my strongpoint.

Anyways, it turns out to be a theme problem, here’s the fix.

1. Login to your phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress database.
2. Go to the wp_options table.
3. Find option_id 49 and 50 which relate to the template and stylesheet.
4. Change these to another template which you had installed, or if you still have default installed, just change the value of these fields to “default” without the quotes.

Then simply visit your website and things should load normally!

You can see Lance Armstrong’s Twitter status on this here: http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/1212580498

Once again, we can see the power that Twitter has to break news! Please Retweet and spread the news.

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin and the awesome Agregado theme (meaning “syndicated” in Portuguese) from Darren Hoyt. Wordpress is now flowing smoothly in 2.7 goodness, taggy goodness, commentable goodness, lifestreamy goodness etc etc!

Just released a new website at work which you should definitely check out. It’s about fractional ownership, albeit the slight variation is that it’s split into way more affordable fractions and called Select Ownership! Props to the design team, Ben, Joe and the unrelenting grafter, Matt!

• www.google.com/hauntedhouse08/

Apparently it is an issue which is only affecting countries outside the US. To take a look at what should be there visit this proxy or any proxy based in the US:

• http://anonymizer.nntime.com/

Choose the “United States”, enter the URL, “www.google.com” and click on the link on the Google Homepage.

I’ll see if I can find out more about why this is happening or whether Google are purposefully restricting people outside the US.

I find it hard to keep a blog sometimes (microblogging via Twitter is far less painful!) , but there’s a little project I want to do that should hopefully give me something interesting to write about. I want to take a photo a day for a year. I know that it’s nothing new (jeez, hardly anything is new nowadays,) but it is something which I think will be good for me to aim towards. I think the ideal time to start this will be on April 13th*, which will give me enough time to get the site prepared for it, and it coincides with Abbie having endured 6 years of being with me (poor girl!)

Good news about University. I have two more assignments (each 2,000 words) and then I am officially finished, done, and through with education. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning, we learn new things everyday, that’s our nature. I’d just rather learn things in a less artificial environment, and start learning practically.

I feel this year will be a challenging year, entering the real world where you don’t get financially bailed out 3 times a year with a nice student loan. Getting on the housing market seems damn near impossible with the current conditions, I just hope that things start to calm down and even out sooner rather than later!

*Edit – How can this be in the past? I meant to write May 13th, stay tuned.

1. The eeePC is so hugely in demand that ASUS aren’t able to meet the demand of them. Currently only 30% of the people that want one actually get one delivered. I have been waiting now 4 weeks for one since I ordered, and there are still no guarantees about when they will be delivered.
2. The eeePC 900 is coming out in a few months time. The main difference being the 9 inch screen, and higher resolution which will make the eeePC easier to work with and more productive. Also at very similar size and weight it will be better for on the go entertainment such as watching movies when travelling.

Hopefully I’ll get over the disappointment of not getting the initial eeePC, but maybe it will be a blessing in disguise; as they say: patience is a virtue, and the newer eeePC will hopefully be a far better purchase!

Normally you can just turn these on by going to the Task Bar and Start Menu properties, then selecting them in the Notification area. When I have tried this these options have been grey and I’m unable to change them. After digging around I have found a solution for this bug. If you have also experienced this problem I will explain how to remedy this with a few screenshots.

The problem as highlighted above is that the System icons do not load up. We first start by opening the Task Manager, either by CTRL + ALT + DEL, or by searching for “taskmgr” in the Windows search bar.

Once we’ve loaded this, we want to kill the process, “explorer.exe”. As shown below, right click on that process and choose to end it.

As this process is critical to the operating system, we need to run the process again, simply by clicking “File” in the top left, and choosing New Task (Run…).

We then simply create the new process “explorer.exe” and click OK.

Then, as if by magic, your icons will be restored in their rightful place and you can then check them and uncheck them as you would normally in the Task Bar and Start Menu properties.

Unfortunately this bug hasn’t been squashed by the Vista dev team in the new release of SP1, but hopefully there will be a permanent fix in the future for this.

I absolutely hate Threadless Newsletters because I love Threadless! Damn them. They sent out a newsletter saying that they have extended their sale and within 15 minutes I had bought 1 t-shirt for myself and 1 for my girl!

Two t-shirts each $10, and $8 for the shipping. Coming to a grand total of £14! With exchange rates like I love the demise of the American Dollar because it means that I get original t-shirts which very few people in the UK wear. If you are from the UK, don’t check out Threadless because that means that I will be slightly less cool as you will end up buying something from their awesome range!

If I can I like to take the chance to kill two birds with one stone (Metaphorically speaking, poor birds.) As part of my assignment I have to design a portfolio website, and as this site is in need of a branding/positioning makeover then it seems like the perfect opportunity.

At the moment it’s just a plain ole’ blog powered by Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, I do really like Wordpress, but it simply doesn’t beat my favourite CMS which is still relatively unknown. For my needs, Website Baker has always remained the number one tool, it’s simplicity, and as I’ve got to know it inside out; it’s power.

In combination I want to maybe add a more interactive point of view with video media, and will definitely be integrating Twitter and Flickr into the site. I’ll be working on a concept over the next few weeks, and hope to release something fresh. I’ll also be tackling the issue with the growing mobile Internet users, by also adapting the site for mobile content. I’ve recently experimented with this on a client site, and it’s been a great success so I hope I can reproduce similar results!

Also in the pipeline is a new media company, a venture with a great American counterpart, and another personal venture targeting the lower end of the market. Obviously these are secret works in progress but will be discussed more here once released!

Well, I’ve order my brand new eeePC! Due to high demand it will take another 4 weeks to get here, but I really can’t wait! I love the simplicity, the size, the weight, and the specs of the little laptop and what’s more it only cost £220! Now I’ll be taking that where I go, partly to show off, partly because I can, and mainly because I can do everything on it that I would with my normal laptop!

I’m sure there will be a longer blog post about it, and maybe even a little review when I have time. Right now I’ve got some business cards to design for Debbie at Wedding Bakes, and then I’ve got a long list of client edits for Bishop Maginn High School! That will keep me busy for a few hours!

Of all the places, I really didn’t expect Preston to suffer from an earthquake! It happened at 00:55 and lasted for about 8 seconds. It shook the floor, and I could definitely feel it on the second floor where I live. I couldn’t actually believe it, but I looked out the window, and there were quite a few other puzzled faces peering out of their windows across the road.

There was also the obligatory car alarm going off, signifying the end of the earthquake! Probably measured 0.01 on the Richter Scale, but then again I’m fortunate enough not to live on a fault line!  Well that’s tonight’s exciting news over!

Edit -News travels fast (thanks Facebook – you have one use at least), and apparently this wasn’t just limited to Preston. People as South as London felt this tremor, which must mean that it was actually fairly large to shake most of the UK. Hopefully it wasn’t anything like a nuclear bomb, and just a harmless earthquake!

Edit 2 – Just found out that the magnitude of the earthquake was a whopping 4.7!

Today however, I can reveal the true identity of “The Stig”. Photo’s of the Stig have been published, and thanks to the use of flash photograph his eyes were visible. Out of all of the candidates which are a possibility for the Stig, the only person that this can be is Ben Collins. He is a highly acclaimed driver, although relatively unknown outside of the racing circles, but he is an awesome wet weather driver.

Williams the bookmakers have Ben at 8/1 that he’s the Stig. Russ Swift is currently the bookmakers favourite, being 2/1 on, but there ain’t any crows feet on this Stig. Obviously I can’t be held liable if you make a bet and it turns out to be wrong, but you can make your own judgment, from photo’s online!

When dealing with clients and speaking to prospective clients I have always found that they appreciate being told technical details in a way in which they are able to deal with. Take hosting for example. The client doesn’t need to know that their website will be on a server located in the Gnax datacenter on a clustered Linux server running the latest Apache 2.2.8 version, with PHP 5.2.5 pre-installed.

The clients do however need to know the principles behind how their website is run. I’ve found that simplifying hosting into an analogy of a house really helps clients to understand the workings of a website a lot better. In effect the server just acts as is a place to live, it is where all the files reside, and when someone knows our address (domain name) they will come to the house and we can show them around. Every once in a while we either have to clean the site (maintenance) or we have to do some D.I.Y (server downtime) which prevents people from coming in to look at our house.

All too often (and it’s very easy to do) technical folks forget that 99.8% of the population have no idea how a website works, and nor do they want to. It’s this that keeps people in work on the Internet, but at the same time those working in this field have to recognise that being a geek will mean that what you say will go straight over a clients head. This doesn’t lend itself to a good client relationship, and so therefore a more human approach is always favoured.

This touches on the principles behind communication. Communication is a two-way process, consisting of a speaker and a listener. It is always the role of the speaker to ensure that the listener understands the message. That art of communication is tough to master, but simply knowing the target audience and tailoring applicable communication methods to them plays a vital role in ensuring that the listener fully understands the message which is being communicated.

Although upgrading Vista from XP about 6 months ago was initially a pain in the ass with compatibility issues and the like, as soon as updates came out, I have loved working with Vista ever since. It is a beautiful creation, and to me just far more intuitive to use than a Mac. I’m not saying you should buy Vista, I am simply saying that it works for me and my needs.

That’s what I love about competition as a consumer. We are free to choose between XP, Vista, Leopard or even Linux. I think this is a broad enough choice for all people needed an operating system, and I don’t understand the need for fierce fanboy rivalry which I see so often on the likes of Digg.com.

I mean this morning when I was about to start work, I turned on my laptop and managed to tidy my whole room, make my bed, sort the bins out before I had to enter my password on the login screen. I mean what other OS allows you that kind of personal time to do other things! I can’t wait for the Vista SP1 to be rolled out in a few weeks time. Apparently it fixes a lot of the bugs which I notice on a daily basis, and is a welcome upgrade!

Now I’m up and running, I suppose I’ll have to get on with some work!