frooly running on Windows 7 by craig.hamnett

I’ve had Google Wave for a few weeks now and although overhyped, it does indeed have it’s uses. We’ve rather successfully used it at work as an idea collaboration tool or a moodboard. (The yes, no gadget comes in handy for deciding who’s going to the pub at lunch).

Having read quite a lot of criticism from the online community, it astounds me how many people seem to forget how primitive Google Wave is in it’s lifespan. We have to remember that it takes a redical new way of thinking to accept something so revolutionary. It’s happened in the past with computers, mobiles and with email. It took a long time, lots of marketing and a lot of tweaking to eventually get those products to the mass market stage they’re currently at.

One of the main critisicms I have read is that Google Wave doesn’t come in a desktop app format to keep you up to date with current Waves. I have a solution. Open a new window of Google Chrome or Firefox, fire up Google Wave, and leave it. For all your other web browsing use another browser window (not tabs), and there you have it, your very own Google Wave Desktop App which you can resize how you like! Amazing.

The cause of the evacuation is not yet known.

I’ll be going through some of the tech stuff on here soon! :)

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!

@philcampbell and @documentally are trying to raise awareness to win the 48hrs in Denmark competition, you can help them by voting here! (They’re names are Philip Campbell and Christian Payne)

They’re obviously on Twitter (like myself) so feel free to follow them, I’ve got a hunch that they’ll be up for winning!

Update 1:

The earthquake hit Melbourne at 8:50 PM Friday night, and according to preliminary reports it hit 5.1 on the Richter scale.

Update 2:

Over the past few days there has been a lot of seismic activity around Tonga, Western Australia and quite large scale earthquakes in Figi, all measuring around 5 on the Richter scale.

Update 3:

Official sources have indicated that the eartquake had a magnitude of 4.7 and the official time of the earthquake began at Friday, March 06, 2009 at 08:55:38 PM, with a 10km range.

Update 4:
Below is a map of where the epicenter was.

View Larger Map

Update 5:

Are you worried about earthquakes in Melbourne? Consider buying a better investment in Dubai property.

I don’t know what it looks like with thousands of unread mail, maybe it just says “lots”… If someone could update me via a comment that would be much appreciated!

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.

After frantically hunting for a solution I finally found out what the problem was. Skype naughtily installs a FireFox addon which appears to be uncompatible with the Web Developer toolbar for some bizarre reason.

Simply going to Tools » Addons in FireFox and disable or uninstall the Skype extension for Firefox 2.2.0.102 and viola, your toolbar is back in place!

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 came back to Stockport today and it happened to be my brothers Parent’s Evening at my old school! The last time I was there was 5 years ago, and a lot of the teachers have unfortunately left! However, there were 5 of my old teachers that were there and that actually recognised me (although I haven’t changed much!), and it was great to catch up with them!

It’s off to Derbyshire tomorrow for n0shit hosted by Phil Campbell, will be the first time I’ve been down there and the first time we’ll have met in person. Can’t wait, I’m sure it’ll be an awesome night!

To celebrate hearing the good news about my new job, my lovely girlfriend decided to treat me to a nice Italian (meal). Since Abbie was paying I thought I’d go for a nice chicken fillet with garlic sauce! Was delish! Abz had spaghetti seafood with little baby squids… Yuck!

Just about to watch Man of the Year (Robin Williams) to round off a very nice evening with Abz! :)

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.

In amongst finishing off a few client projects, I am drafting a redesign for this site… there’s a sneak peak here if you want to see how it’s coming along.

Twitter and Flickr will also be integrated into the new design, and maybe if I get serious about vlogging, I might have a bit of Qik or Bambuser integration, but that might be a long way off yet. If all that just went over your head then I’m glad because I did it on purpose (Because I’m mean, and the only way a geek can have fun is to bamboozle people with stupid phrases.)

Twitter is a short blogging platform (140 chars) used to update your status. Very much like your Facebook status, which is why mine are integrated.

Flickr is a photo publishing service, where I keep the majority of my photos organised. What I like about Flickr is that there is a great community of people, and a great platform to get your photos more widely recognised. There are thousands of groups of enthusiastic people, all with one common interest, photography, and some with niche interests such as wildlife or photos of UFO’s.

Qik and Bambuser are essentially the same. They are a live video streaming service which you can do straight from your mobile phone. However, you best make sure you have a WiFi phone otherwise you might get hit with a £250 phone bill (It’s happened once, and never again!)

Look out for the new design in a couple of weeks time!