Web Dev Ireland

Upgrade seems to have woked fine

Only problem seems to be in the navigation class div there is a SQL error (you can probably see it at the end of the page)

It only shows the first line of the erroneous SQL statement and left out the table name(how thoughtful)

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ID) FROM

Is all it shows.

If anyone knows what is causing this I would be greatful to hear your answer.

Update : It appears to be an error in next_posts_link() function, not sure what is causing it still though.

Currently upgrading to WP 2.0, not sure how long this will take, expect funny going-ons for at least an hour

I came into work this morning and wanted to read something that I had spotted last night and had put into my del.icio.us page (as I have done on countless occasions before).
I tried to logon and got this message.

Delicious is down for planned maintenance. We’re doing some database rearranging so we can release new features next week. We expect to be down from Midnight till 4am (Pacific) and will be posting updates on our blog.

I miss del.icio.us

I find it hard to believe that such a huge service should ever have to close down to do some upgrades, but that is the way of things with a free service.

Does anyone else have an free online service they could not live without?

The Extend Firefox competition has being going on for a while now and today they announced the winners of the competition. I am an avid firefox extension junkie (15 extensions and counting!) and use quite a few of the awarded extensions.

Cool prizes such as the Alienware Aurora 7500 were on offer to budding entrants
My favourites which I always use are;

Sage by Peter Andrews, which is an RSS reader.
Web Developer by Chris Pedrick, an absolute gem if you are in web development.
Forecast Fox by Aaron Sarna, Keeps me upto date with live weather reports all day (while I sit indoors)

New ones that I have just discovered are ;

Separe by Massimo Mangoni, which won most useful (its a tab seperator).
Reveal by Michael Wu, which won “Best Extension Overall” creates thumbnails of your tabs so you can see which one you want really cool, but a bit of a memory hog

If you use firefox but have not tried any of the extensions I recommend that you head over to Firefox extensions page and browse around. Just a word of warning you may become an extension junkie like me!

After many years of dabbling in all things internet, today I took the first steps to truly becoming an internet entrepreneur. Myself and three partners have setup a company and plan to sell a web based service. I know the dot com days are well and truly over but I still believe that a business with a strong business plan and a superb niche market can make money on the web.
Stay tuned for more updates as things progress!

“As a human being, you are a collection of many things: skin, bones, brains, experience and emotion. But more than all of that, you are your expectations. That???s why I choose to be an optimist.” - Scott Adams

Happy New Year and many happy returns to all three readers of my blog

I have never been one for resolutions but this year I have decided to make just the one, it’s probably a bit ambitious but sure if i’m going to break a resolution it might as well be a whopper!!

Resolution Create a very useful webservice, market it and document the results in this blog!

I have a couple of Ideas already but I would realisticaly say it will be March before anything comes to fruition.

What are your resolutions?

Search engines do not release the list of criteria that they use to determine a pages ranking, so most of the information below has come from many people experimenting and seeing how high their ranking went while employing these tactics.

The main factors that will get you high rankings are as follows (in no particular order).

1) Your domain name: www.bigbluebanana.com will help you show up reasonably high on a search for “big blue banana”
2) Title tags: search engine robots rate the text in your titles pretty high (assuming you don’t abuse the tag and have 50 keywords in it)
3) H1 tags: again search engine robots rate the text in your h1 tags pretty high
4) The actual content of the page: the more unique your content the higher you will rate for the unique keywords (or combinations of keywords) e.g if you search for “big green polkadot boat” and you have these words in your content in that order you will rate highly for that term (depending of course on the number of instances of that phrase on the net)
5) Non-recriprocal, inbound links: this is probably the most important of them all, the more sites with links to your page (the higher their page rank the better) the better you will rank for the term in their A tag link to you e.g if you have 1000 links to you with the text “monkey man” as the text for the link you will rate highly for that term.
Note: apparently links from other higher ranking pages in the same “community” as your site can have more of an effect on you ranking. e.g. if your site is about football and other football sites link to you they help your ranking more then a link from a science website.
6) Meta tags: no where near as important as they used to be but still have some bearing.
7) Filenames of your pages: if your page is named photoshop_tutorial.php it will help your ranking for that search term.
8) A sitemap and a robot.txt file : search engines robots like to find these and as a result google and others up your ranking for being compliant (robot.txt only has a marginal effect).
9) Use X/HTML with CSS: if the robot/webcrawler doesn’t have to trawl through a load of style information it can give better results for your content.
10) The length of time your content has existed, the longer it exists the more times it will be crawled by spiders/robots. The Sandbox effect has a bearing if your site is only new.
There are a few more but they really only have very minor bearing on your ranking.

I hope the tips above are of some help to someone out there and if you have more of an interest in this topic google for “SEO techniques” the results near the top usually belong to the people who are best at SEO.

For the last couple of week I have been so busy I didn’t even have time to blog.
Work is really busy and I’m spending a lot of time using SQL server and Transact SQL. Some of it is very interesting, especially the object oriented database concepts.

At home I have been working with Joomla, for those of you that are familiar with Mambo. This is mambo but the Open Source developers had a disagreement about the direction that Miro are taking the project. So off they went to start Joomla and I have to admit I’m very happy with it. I spent most of the weekend creating a template and getting to know the API, I like it.
Try it if you need a content management system.

After 3 Release Candidates, a version number change (it was originally to be FF 1.1) Firefox 1.5 is finally with us. Released earlier in the week it is already being downloaded on a huge scale from all over the world.

The Release notes describe all the new features

* Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
* Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
* Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
* Improvements to popup blocking.
* Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
* Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
* Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
* Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
* Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
* Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
* New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
* Many security enhancements.

I have being using it since the day of release and I like it a lot. Already there is a feature I can’t live without the “Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs”. I have wanted this feature for a long time and already use it extensively.

If you haven’t already got it get it now! Firefox 1.5 download

Website functionality

Another reason I was so concerned about the release of Firefox 1.5 is that I wanted to see if it changed the apperance of functionality of any of the sites I have written. I looked at the sites with the beta versions and everything seemed ok but I wanted to double check with the released version to be on the safe side. I’m happy to report that none of my websites have suffered any ill effects from the release. Has anyone else come across any problems??