No Im not lost, I was logged into my Google Web master tools this morning and saw that my number one search query on google that returned my site has changed to ‘Gavin Taylor’. So I decided to see where I am on various searches, then this time next year I can search again and see how I’ve faired.
google.co.uk
search term
search type
search position
gavin
web
unknown (page 50+)
gavin
uk
page 43, position 5
gavin taylor
web
page 1, position 3
gavin taylor
uk
page 1, position 2
gav taylor
web/uk
page 1, position 1
php developer
web/uk
unknown (page 50+)
php developer manchester
web
page 3, position 9
php developer manchester
uk
page 4, position 1
not bad results there really, not much to done on searches for my name, going to focus on php developer I think
bing.com
search term
search type
search position
gavin
web
unknown (page 50+)
gavin
uk
unknown (page 50+)
gavin taylor
web
page 1, position 3
gavin taylor
uk
page 1, position 2
gav taylor
web
page 1, position 4
gav taylor
uk
page 1, position 2
php developer
web/uk
unknown (page 50+)
php developer manchester
web
page 2, position 8
php developer manchester
uk
page 8, position 9
interestingly on the web search for ‘gav taylor’, my twitter feed came top.
again searches for my name do quite well, confirms I need to improve seo for ‘php developer’
Will be interesting to see where I end up for these searches in Feb 2011
Since I moved to my VPS, one of the biggest problems I’ve had is with spam. Not just with my email account but everyone who’s email accounts Im hosting on the VPS have all seen a sharp increase in spam emails.
On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day! I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.
My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.
The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.
I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.
I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.
The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.
All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.
While your at it, remember to upgrade to the latest version of Firefbug, there have been some great improvements in the net panel, improved timings etc and the html inspector has had a lot of updates made to it. More details can be found on http://getfirebug.com/
I’ve been listening and watching these videos for a long time and was speaking to a fellow developer last night and he didnt know about them!
So I thought today I would make a quick post to let everyone know what they are and why you should listen to them.
What is the Google Webmaster Central Channel? Its a channel on Youtube that is used mainly by Matt Cutts (project leader of Googles web spam team) to pass on little snippets of info and answer questions made by Joe Public and his wife on the Google Forum. It is also used by other teams, to give useful information and advise on how to make the most out of Google and the web as a whole.
Why should I watch them? Why not? Google are market leaders in their field and they are giving advise (for free) on how to improve your website, I’ve learnt many tips and tricks from watching the videos and a lot of them have helped out a lot.
Fennec is the codename for Mozilla’s answer to mobile browsing. While an alpha and now beta versions have been available for the Nokia N810 for several months, this week it was the turn for Windows Mobile based devices. Mozilla have now released version 1.0a1 for WM6.1+ devices to developers for testing.
We have been waiting for a mobile version of Firefox since forever, currently on WM6.1 we have a choice between using Internet Explorer 6 Mobile or Opera Mobile, There are some other browsers available but none that really tear people away from IE or Opera. While Opera Mobile is vastly superior to IE6mobile and renders pages as a desktop browser does, it unfortunately comes with a small price tag unless bundled with your operator and so means a lot of people are stuck using IE. Fennec is about to change all that.
I’ve been playing with Fennec since its release on the 15th and I have to say its rather good. Navigation is quick to respond and doesn’t take long to get used to, like existing mobile browser users swipe and tap the screen to pan and zoom in on pages, tabs and menu items are available by pulling the left and right edges of the screen respectively, to open side menus, this works well on a mobile device as you save space for viewing the website, although I did find when reading some pages I accidentally opened the menus more than I’d liked.
Websites load as expected and without any particular long load times, other than the expected result of mobile browsing, I tested via WI-FI and didn’t notice any load time at all, built in javascript engine was able to handle some very javascript heavy sites like Facebook with out giving up in the way mobile IE does. I could even get Youtube working once I’d enabled plug-ins.
There is support for basic add-ons and as mentioned before tabbed browsing, both of which help to improve the mobile browsing experience although opera has had both these (tabs and widgets) for a while, Fennec seems to load them quicker than the version of opera i have installed.
The only problems i found while testing fennec were a result of my win mobile device, it seems to use a lot of memory which my poor tytnII doesnt have much of spare, am sure on the newer win mobile devices it runs fine.
Overall for an alpha development Im very impressed, the basics are already in place and Im looking forward to the next release.
