Craig Hamnett
Social Media Layabout
Some Bus drivers…
Jul 8th
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!
The Manchester Freelance SEO Challenge
Jul 8th
The other day I thought that getting to the top of Google for “Stockport Freelancer” would be too niche, too easy, and a waste of time so I decided to opt for “Manchester Freelancer” which is a tad more broad with fairly healthy competition, around 450,000 results.
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!
Blank Pages in Wordpress when changing themes
Jul 4th
Whoopsie, I broke my Wordpress installation (it’s fixed now obviously!) I switched to another theme/template and when it tried to refresh both the frontend, and admin area were just blank.
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.
- Login to your phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress database.
- Go to the wp_options table.
- Find option_id 49 and 50 which relate to the template and stylesheet.
- 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!
48 hrs in Denmark
Apr 28th
@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!
Earthquake in Melbourne, Australia – March 6th
Mar 6th
There is reports on Twitter about an earthquake in Melbourne. Will update this with more information. Refresh the page for more information about the earthquake in Melbourne.
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.
Update 5:
Are you worried about earthquakes in Melbourne? Consider buying a better investment in Dubai property.