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.

Flow3 – PHP Framework

Saturday 0103hrs

If you’re interested in web development, like myself, and whether or not you’re involved with PHP or any projects involving or supported by it, you might find the new application development framework fresh out of the Typo3.org bakery, the Flow3 PHP Application Framework. Typo3 is a CMS that I’m rather fond of and, for the next iteration of CMS goodness the developers in their wisdom thought it’d be nice to have a solid framework to build the application on top of.

So they wrote one.

Rather than regurgitate their website for you, just head along and take a look but, I warn you, Aspect Oriented Programming is not a topic you want to take headlong if your last thought before reading this was “I might go to be soon”…

Website Upgrade

Tuesday 1248hrs

I just updated to the latest version of wordpress which powers this site. Nothing broke. I like it when that happens.

I also made the defaul font size a little larger. I’m getting old and the smaller text was making me dizzy… :)

Image Thieves

Monday 0812hrs

My images are being stolen. This is beginning to piss me off.
The more hawk-eyed readers will notice that at the bottom of the gallery pages is a Creative Commons licence, which permits someone to use my photos for non-profit, if they simply attribute the original image to me. Not a tall order, to be honest. If I could use a Nikon D3 camera for the price of simply telling people I got it from Nikon, that would rock! And you know what, it would be easy to do, too, because the camera has “NIKON” stamped on the top in big letters. Peice of cake.

Oddly enough , my images have “M Denyer” on them, this lets people know that the person who took the photo is called, who’d have thunk it, M Denyer. (The M is for M, by the way.) You’d like to infer from this that such a person deeming my images fit for use would then have to simply display them, as-is, and the attribution part of the bargain is complete. Actually ZERO effort required. Literally, none. It’s actually harder to copy the image to your own FTP server than it is to hold up the attribution part of the bargain.

This is therefore why I get angry when thieving punks like this git running a website about a Jersey Water polo Club and another individual running some blog (I will not abuse this fellow human just yet, as I only hailled them this morning about the issue, so have yet to see how they respond. If they respond correctly, I will be crediting them with a link. If not, I’m going to get angry on their behinds.) use my images and go through the arduous trouble of attempting to conceal the copyright notice.

If you are a non-profit organisation and you leave my copyright notice intact, the images are FREE FOR USE. Get it? It’s clear these people are either compulsive kleptomaniacs for whom the thrill of the steal is the main event, or they’ve got some kind of learning disorder and simply cannot read. Given the fact that both of them have managed to author websites, even if not of any noteably great standard, I am lead to conclude that they are just plain old thieving bastards. Yeah that’s right, I said it.

Just for the record, the original photograph of the White Faced Saki and the Jersey Cow can be found in my gallery.

—–
Update – After lunch
Looks like the blog owner over at Quedat took my polite yet-ever-so-Britishly-aggressive message to heart and has reversed their copyright chop, to display the full image avec-copyright. One down and one to go! (That I know of…)

SEO Musings

Tuesday 1341hrs

This site has a fairly high page rank, as does my business site Sozu, though because Sozu is under redevelopment and has been stagnant for over a year it’s not faring too well in the old search engine listings. Thus I wondered if name-dropping on my blog would have any bearing on the ranking of Sozu. Seemed like a fair strategy, some people set up entire networks of pointless sites to crosslink for search engine purposes so… Meh.
Anyway, the first test will simply link through to it using the text Loughborough Web Design to see if that encourages any movement. The next test, coming later, will involve some paragraphs of text explaining the subject in an attempt to engender “relevance” in the link.

Sorry for the really boring post.

Captcha

Monday 0345hrs

Right, I’ve had it. Just recently my contact form (Powered using the wp-contact form plugin) has come under pretty heavy fire from spammers. They’re not hi-jacking it, simply sending me lots of emails.

Until I can figure a way to route the wp-contactform data through Spam Karma, or add a Captcha to the form, I’m taking it offline.

If you’d like to contact me, you can do so by commenting on the “Contact Me” page, or any post for that matter.

Hopefully it won’t be offline for long.

Contact Me Now!

Monday 1819hrs

After a period of offline-ness the contact form is back online. Why you ask? Well we had a bit of a tantrum and it turned out that due to a multipart message exploit some dirty spammer was using my oh-so-innocent contactform to send out crap.

It’s not all my fault! I’d simply used the “WordPress Contactform” plugin, which doesn’t take care of this.

Bit of fiddling later and *bam*, now it’s (hopefully) resistant to that kinda of foul play. I should probably inform the author of the plugin but I’ll do that later under the Sozu banner.

What are you waiting for? Contact Denyerec!

Spam Nirvana

Saturday 1543hrs

Ok. Almost 2 days into using the Spam Karma plugin. Give the man a Nobel prize and get his code into the WordPress core.

Awesome work, basically. If you have wordpress get this plugin, no question about it, simply the best spam blocking doo-jar whats-a-mah-jig available.

If I actually had any money, I swear for something this useful, I’d part with some of it.