mysite blog

Oops...I borked it

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

If anybody noticed, subdomains were broken on my site for a few days due to rather aggressive mod_rewrite rules that were put in place by SilverStripe. Should all be fixed now though.

It is one of the few minor issues I have with SilverStripe so far, other than that it has to be one of the easiest to use CMSs I'm tried, but flexible enough to expand on the core modules if you require.

New site!

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So I finally found a CMS that I want to use. It might take me a little time to get everything copied across to the new CMS, so please be patient.

Sneddo.net two-point-oh

Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

With the extra time I've had lately (job security is for suckers :P) I decided I'd finally get around to tidying this site up. The original site was a pretty hacky, quick and dirty site back when I was really just getting to grips with PHP.

The new site should make adding content, and maintenance that much easier for me. Which should mean things actually change around here occasionally. Visually, not much has changed. Its mostly the same content, although updated slightly. There are a few things that were removed, that may return in the future (more on that later).

Some bookmarks (if anyone bothered) may not work, Firefox extensions may not auto-update, and some content may not be available (either intentionally or not).

Hopefully not too much will break moving from my dev box to here...

/me crosses fingers

Minor updates

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Some minor updates: IE should display the news page a little nicer A few less errors on some of the pages.

Hopefully it won't be nearly 2 months until the next update ;)

woooooo new theme!

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

After using OS X for a while on my MacBook, I decided this place was decidedly un-Mac-like (hey, its a word now). All up it was a bit of a rushed effort, and bits of it seem a little *too* plain, but its good enough for now :P

Eeek! Ads!

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Right, so you may have noticed that google ad down the bottom of the page, unless you block them.

First up, sorry. I hate ads as much as the next person. At the moment, this is just a trial. I'm faced with the decision of whether or not to keep my webspace, as it really gets very little use other than filestorage, which there are lots of free alternatives out there. If I can earn a bit of money to help subsidise the costs, then the site will stay. So please, get clicking!

After a few weeks, or a month, they will be reviewed. I may scale them back to select pages, I may make them show only on the first page you see, I may remove them completely. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as well, so <a href='/?page=Contact'>let me know</a>.

- Sneddo

Update: Sorry about the 2 ads on the Firefox page, it won't stay like that permenantly, I'm just getting to grips with AdSense and what is available.

The Adsense experiment

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Well, its been a week for the Google ads. The first day I earned a whopping seven cents! Thankfully it has picked up a little since then, the total for the week so far is $8.92. Not bad really, at this rate I'll have $100 (the minimum required for Google to pay you) in a couple of months.

Once that happens, the ads will be scaled back. I will probably keep the Firefox ad permenantly, but the ads appearing on each page will be scaled back to the first page viewed or something like that. That way I can hopefully earn enough to keep the site going over a longer period, which will mean less ads and annoyance for anybody that stumbles upon this place.

In other news, there is another guide that was added last week. It details how to hack Firefox extensions to work with newer Firefox versions than they were designed to.

- Sneddo

Google Webmaster Tools

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

We all love Google, right? They have given us a heap of great applications, on top of their superior search engine. Today's tool that has just been brought to my attention is the Webmaster Tools.

What is it? Put simply, its a set of tools to help you optimise your site for search engines (namely Google, surprise surprise).

The tools included are seperated into 3 tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics and Sitemaps.

Diagnostic Here you see errors that were encountered when the spider was crawling your site. Great for tracking down dead links, although realistically, most webhosting comes with much more in-depth reporting on such errors.

There also seems to be a tool for Mobile website crawl errors, which could be much more interesting if you are into that sort of thing.

Also include is a robots.txt tool, which allows you to modify your robots.txt and test it from the site. Again, who really cares. Perhaps my robots.txt isn't as complex as some are though, it could be useful for poeple who have more than a few lines to their robots.txt!

Statistics This is more interesting, it ties into google searches to see what users have been searching for to reach your site. Again, this is something that any decent web stats can provide from referrer headers.

Something that it much more useful is the Crawl stats and page analysis, which breaks down you pages into High, Medium, Low, and unranked, depending on where your pages appear in google page ranks in searches. It also provides the highest ranked page on your site.

The page analysis evaluates your page content, breaking it down into the type of file, and the most common words used on your site. Considering most modern search engines work on page content, instead of the META keywords element, this is a handy little tool. If your pages mention one topic more than another, that should help the page ranking, and so on. Realistically, this is the most useful site in the package.

Sitemaps Sitemaps are an interesting thing, it allows you to add an XML based sitemap to your site. Why you really need to do this isn't really well explained. It helps Google to find all the pages on your site, and to do it faster. Although if it can't find pages simply by crawling your site and following links, what is the chance that you will add them to the sitemap? I dunno, maybe I'm missing the point...

I guess this is probaby more useful for larger or less organised sites. And to aid in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in such an environment. Although, I think the effort would be better placed in producing cleaner, easier to crawl webpages than in creating a sitemap.

Conclusion I'm a little underwealmed by this offering by Google I must admit. I had high hopes (while at the same time not entirely sure what to be hopeful for), and really what I got is something that most webstats (certainly awstats) already provide you in more detail. Although, like most Google services, its still in beta so perhaps I just need to keep an eye on the toolkit and hope it grows.

<a href='http://www.google.com/webmasters/'>Webmaster Tools</a>

- Sneddo

No news is good news

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Almost 1 year since my last news post...I should really do something more often around here! I'm looking into premade CMS packages, I just don't have the time to do the sorely needed redevelopment (or more accurately, finish the half-finished mess I have now!)