denyerec.co.uk

As some of you may know, I’ve been building a site for a good friend of mine for a while now, and the performance of it has been a bit of a mixed bag. It’s for a business in China that produces woven labels, clothing accessories and the like, damn good ones too, for all the big fashion names that I’m not prone to wearing On the one hand it’s a young site, so performance against established competitors wasn’t expected to be as good as it has been, but on the other hand it’s really frustrating to see it trapped in 11th place for “Woven Labels“, one of the key search terms they’re rooting for. Human attention spans are so short that apparently the majority of search traffic goes on the first place term, relevant or not, with an exponential decay from there on out. If you’re on page two, for the majority of the populous, your site may as well not exist. Want to sell woven labels, buttons, zippers, cardboard swing tag oojits and other such paraphernalia and you better hope you can haul ass onto page one. I’ll be watching you, Google, to see if your creepy Theia-esque arachnid pays attention here.

We shall see.

I’ve noticed a few of the people I’ve done photos for now citing the photographer as “Den Yerec” (Incidentally I have a kungfu certificate made out in the same name, much to my amusement). It’s understandable I guess, given that I’m only ever introduced as “Den” and the web address kinda, sorta makes it look that way. Anyhow this post is just to attract the attention of the search engines and clear up that I’m not actually Mr Yerec, just Denyer. You might also be interested in the Flickr profile of Den Yerec too

Bit of a cheeky SEO punt here, but Typo3 has released a major update for its Open Source Content Management System, version 4.4. Featuring an overhauled backend, improved introduction package and install, as well as a new framework for extension authoring, it’s a pretty big update. One of the best Open Source Content Management Systems out there, providing you can scale the near-vertical learning curve (Something the new starter package is design to assist you with!)

If you’re like me, and seem to spend what time you’re not sleeping or working on the telephone, then a headset is a mighty sodding good idea. Plantronics make one called the C65 which pairs with any GAP (Generic Access Profile) capable DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) phone such as the handy-dandy Seimens Gigaset E495 I now happen to own.

However, pairing the DECT headset trips some people up as indeed it got me earlier. The snag was the base station PIN.

1. Reset the PIN for the base station to 0000
2. Confirm the PIN is 0000 by re-registering a handset as per your DECT phone manual
3. Hold down the volume wheel on the C65 headset for 3 seconds (When the light comes on, you can let go)
4. Put your base station into pairing mode (On the E495 base unit, this simply requires you to hold down the button on the front of the unit for ~3 seconds)
5. After 4-5 seconds, the light on the C65 should go out. Press the main button on the headset and you should get a dialtone
6. You can now set the base PIN to something less obvious if you wish, but as registering a handset requires physical access to the base unit you’re not at risk from pikey neighbours stealing your phoneline.

Hope this helps someone, I had a brief headscratch moment earlier thanks to my over exuberance with changing the PIN before I’d registered the headset!

I really don’t think I could have put it better than this chap on BoingBoing. Allowing libraries to shut down is just cretinous. It’s beyond the absurd. Spending billions on building a wall across Mexico, blowing up parts of the desert, spying on old enemies, hunting down bogeymen and paying private contractors Billions of dollars of money to perform tasks that a government run institution could do for less? Go right ahead. Put a little money aside for a library? No chance.

If this is a sign of things to come, librarians in the US better start stocking up on rations and ammo. Disgusting.

Sad thing is, if the resistance to US Government backed healthcare is anything to go by, people are probably cheering the cuts thinking it’ll save a little on their taxes, whilst being so uninformed as to not realise they’re paying more per day in taxes for Iraq Part Deux than they would to run every library in their country. If this absurdity ever comes to pass over here I’m leaving for the moon.

More Damning Anti-Shoe Material, the same old really, but I do find myself wondering if the Chiropodists are in league with the shoe manufacturers.

This very-much-expected UK ID Card Failure needs no real comment, beyond the somewhat smug “I’m surprised it took them that long…”

Wow. April was the last time I made a meaningful contribution to the internet via the medium of blogging, between then and now not a lot has changed, but a lot has changed. Cryptic zen nonsense perhaps, but there’s a shift in my outlook now that is going to promote a flurry of relaxed activity over the coming months. Whether it’s down to the sun coming out, or the magnesium citrate that I’ve taking to examine its effect on depressed mental states I don’t care, but I’m more enthusiastic about things in general than I have been in years. Don’t expect anything overnight, but at least in the coming months the plan is to finally start doing all the things I’ve thought about instead of just thinking about them. Hopefully the change in mood isn’t temporary, as that would be devestating.

In other news, Trier is a really, really nice city to visit in Germany if you like old things (Roman, Medieval, etc) and getting there by Ryanair can cost you as little as £8 each way (ALL IN!) so long as you read the smallprint. Never quite understood why people get so passionately aggressive toward companies like easyJet and Ryanair, as what can one really expect when paying so little?

Finally, it was brought to my attention recently that the Government is subsidising rail transport so heavily that it may as well re-nationalise it and stop the idiot managers creaming off the “profits”, which turn out to be just un-spent subsidy. East Coast Rattletrack is already back with Big Brother, I just wish they’d get a move on and fix the lot, the current situation is a sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham of a mockery.