A new project (that @willvrny was working on) which incorporates a user logging process and a custom user area brought with it a few new challenges. Read More
Stop Firefox going offline automatically
June 22, 2010 – 12:00 pm
A short post with a handy tip, mostly for posterity but for those that may stumble across this post in the future.
If you are using Firefox 3.6.3 (may work on older versions too) and on Windows XP (not sure about OS X), you may notice an annoying little quirk that was propbably intended to be a helpful feature. Read More
Get the parent slug of a post in WordPress
June 21, 2010 – 12:00 pm
I’ve been doing a little more WordPress (v2.9.2) hacking as a new project required a little more CMS-like control over a website than WordPress by default provides.
As a result I’ve resorted to extending WordPress and the results have been pretty encouraging already. I have to say, for the record, that the WordPress team has made extending the WordPress platform a breeze through custom plug-ins and hooks.
OK. Enough WordPress appreciation and on to the reason for the post. Read More
Do I need to hire a separate SEO company?
April 22, 2010 – 12:01 pm
While there are obvious merits to employing a specialist to perform a specialist task such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it does not have to be your only option if your internet marketing objectives include better website rankings in search engines and more online referrals from prospective clients.
The primary role of a SEO company is Read More
Random Crashing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4
April 15, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Recently I came across this little or well known (depending who you talk to) bug in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4 (although it would appear that it has existed since CS2 too) on my iMac running OS X Leopard (10.5.8).
The symptoms are immediate and sudden crashes when launching the application. You don’t even make it past the loading splash screen but instead you’re greeted by the Adobe crash report asking if you want to send it to the guys at Adobe (not sure if that every really works!).
Taking a look at the crash report you’ll notice the following keywords in the error report under exceptions:
EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) and KERN_BAD_INSTRUCTION.
After spending over three hours on the Internet looking for a solution and granted you don’t have much to go on beyond the fact that the application just suddenly crashes it can be easy to give up.
Instead of giving up, why not try the following solution. Read More
Add/Remove www using mod_rewrite and .htaccess
April 8, 2010 – 12:00 pm
URL uniformity is important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) reasons because to a search engine, http://www.artofsimplicity.co.uk, is not necessarily the same website as http://artofsimplicity.co.uk and often they can be treated differently and attain different rankings.
Where this becomes a problem is if you are engaged in SEO practices to improve your overall Search Engine Ranking you need to focus your efforts on promoting your URL in a single uniform way to avoid Read More
In Brief: Google SERP Positioning
March 30, 2010 – 12:00 pm
There is no short answer to the question of “how do I get on the first page of Google”, but nevertheless I’ll attempt to give you the long and short of it. If you would like a more in-depth explanation on the technology Google uses to rank pages, you can find a slightly more detailed explanation of Google’s PageRank Technology here.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google will never divulge exactly how the system works Read More
WordPress Auto-Upgrade Problems
March 22, 2010 – 9:05 am
As a little memo to myself and for anyone else who is having trouble getting the WordPress automatic upgrade feature working, particularly if your on a Linux (CentOS 5) VPS with 1and1.
I have great admiration for the WordPress auto-upgrade feature particularly as it saves you loads of time especially if you administer a number of WordPress based websites not to mention your own blog.
Read More
Connect remotely to MSSQL with PHP on CentOS 5
January 6, 2010 – 6:07 pm
For some time now I’ve been looking for a solution for projects that are using PHP but are connecting to a remote Microsoft SQL Server database.
As many already know, the webmasters ideal (or at least mine) is a LAMP stack which, for those that are not sure, is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Why is that an ideal, you ask, well have you ever tried getting PHP interacting with a MS SQL database? Enough said.
In short doing the above is definitely not straightforward, even on a Windows platform, where you’ll most likely be transferring and copying .DLL’s from one system folder to another and editing .INI files left, right and centre. Read More
Moving WordPress Installations
December 7, 2009 – 1:00 pm
If you are managing lots of WordPress installations for different clients, or any other content management system for that matter (eg. Joomla!, Drupal etc.), you need a way to deploy changes quickly and easily. Read More