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.

• 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.

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!

Choosing a home for a website is possibly the most frustrating thing you can do on the web, it’s in effect like choosing a new house, but combined with moving to a completely new town. Sometimes you can do all the research in the world, but nothing can prepare you for what it’s actually like to live there.

I have been a firm believer in Dreamhost, and had a great time with them. Although I have experienced very little downtime with them, I have noticed that things have been getting pretty slow lately, and decided I need a more reliable host, not just for myself, but for my clients. Their recent billing issue fortunately didn’t affect me, and the way they handled it was the reason why I love Dreamhost. Their transparency, urgency, but mostly sense of humour is definitely what has kept me there, and support has always been great with emails being answered within a couple of hours.

I have read a lot about A Small Orange, who seem to be a very reliable and trustworthy host. Although they are less transparent, and don’t appear to have as much of a personal touch I think that it is about time to actually try out another host. However I do not want to be reliant on just one web host, especially since I will still be in a shared environment, so I think that I will configure the DNS settings so that they primarily point to A Small Orange, but also have a copy at Dreamhost. This way, hopefully my websites will always be available, even if one host is experiencing problems.

I haven’t purchased an account yet, but hopefully I will test one of my domains there in the near future to see how the transition goes. If all goes well, then hopefully I will have a new home!

Time lapse videos are really quite stunning, and combined with a really nice sunset, it makes a nice short video which might makes us think that the world we live in is actually a happy one.

I love the next generation of online videos, the HD generation. This is made possible thanks to the likes of Vimeo who offer such a great service to it’s users. You can see more HD videos on the Vimeo HD Channel.

As you can see I love colour! Once I get some spare time I will be redesigning this site to compliment my new business cards, I know it should be the other way round, but I just fell in love with these when I got them!

You can see in the photo below that there was a printing error on 6 of the cards (look closely on the left hand side!) Thanks to this, Moo very kindly sent me another fresh pack so I ended up getting 200 cards for the price of 100. I thought this was a nice touch, especially that they acknowledged the fault before I even got chance to get in touch!

If anybody wants any of these just get in touch with me anyway you can think of (I love email!) then I’m sure I’ll be able to send a few lots out!

I’ve also been putting together the foundations for a website for a friend of the family who wants to start selling Wedding Cakes online. It’s coming along great and just needs content in there and it’ll be finished!

Also been chatting to a great guy in Atlanta about a new project which needs taking care of. A high school over in America, needs their website redeveloping so that should be an exciting couple of weeks working on their website and integrating it into something a lot more worthy than their current website!

A couple of Matt Hamnett specialty throws and a couple of decent headers, meant that we got a couple of goals to take us into half time 3-1 up.  After the break though the game felt completely different. The referee was absolutely atrocious, allowing a goal that was clearly offside to count allowing them get back into the game. With the game at 3-3 the referee made yet another mistake in allowing another goal to stand that was miles offside!

So with the game at 4-3 we go on the attack and our forward gets cynically brought down in the area, which the referee decided he wouldn’t see. So the game ended a 4-3 with the Spurley boys definitely cheated out of a result, but hey, that’s football and we’ve just got to get on with it and make sure we get a result next week!