thebeebs

How to find High Pagerank Domains on Go Daddy Auctions

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:43:00 +0100

Right, I'm going to let you in to a little secret. I don't receive much traffic on this website so if you're reading this then you're one of the privileged few. I've come to use a website called Valid Domain Auctions. This website publishes a list of valid, high page rank domains, on a daily basis. As you can imagine, this will save you heaps of time. What Valid Domain Auctions (or VDA) does, is sift through the thousands of domains and do away with all the ones with a fake PR. Unfortunately the service isn't completely free, but with that it ensures the higher PR auctions aren't public knowledge. At the moment they're charging $0.49 a day to see the higher PR auctions (PR4 and above). From the top of each post there's a count of each PR rating, so you can gauge how many higher PR domains you'll get for your money. Think about it - if you pay $0.49 each day then it will still cost less than $15 a month for inside information to stop you forking out $$$s for fake domains.

www.ValidDomainAuctions.com

A word of warning though. The amount of traffic a website gets depends on a number of factors. If you find a domain on ValidDomainAuctions.com which you want to buy, make sure you triple check the pagerank, and more than that do some background research on the website.

I hope this information has been useful.

Pre-Order Wii U

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:50:00 +0100

We all know how difficult it can be to purchase the latest Nintendo technology, and I don't think the upcoming Wii U will be any exception. If you think back to when the first Wii console was released shortly before the Christmas rush it was nigh on impossible to get your hands on one. People were forking out way over the odds on ebay so they could play Wii Tennis on Christmas Day. It was bit ridiculous. I imagine it will be the same this year with the Wii U.

Now, for those in the know it was actually quite easy to pick up a Wii on it's release from a major retailer for not a penny over RRP. I registered with a website which monitored all the major retailers and displayed alerts when a retailer (Argos, John Lewis, Amazon, etc) had any in stock. As soon as they listed them it was possible to jump to their website and order away, in multiple (for your friends of course)!

I recommend this year you stay ahead of the game. Keep your eye on www.wiiuorder.co.uk which will, come crunch time, let you get your hands on a Wii U.

IE9 and Flash - The day the web broke

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:27:00 +0100

I was talking to Andrew Spooner a few weeks ago and he reported that one of his Laptops were having an issue with displaying Flash in IE9. I assumed the issue was limited to just his laptop and suggested that he uninstall and re-install flash to fix the issue. However, it turns out that the issue wasn’t just Andrews… in fact it affected anyone with IE9 + Intel HD Graphics and would result in Flash elements being drawn at the wrong position on the screen.

The fault was caused by an update from Adobe. They acknowledge the failure here and on the 31st of May they sent out an update to flash which fixes the issue.

It seems Abobe just forgot to test IE9 across all major graphics cards. Which is a little bit complacent… but everyone makes mistakes I guess. With that said it’s good to see they solved the issue so quickly.

Windows Phone 7 Colours

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:50:00 +0100

I was putting together a WP7 presentation recently. I needed to use all of the WP7 colours as background for the slides. It took me a while to collate all of the colours so I thought I'd post them up here in case anyone needed them.

Magenta	#FF0094	RGB( 255, 0, 148)
Purple	#A500FF	RGB(165, 0, 255)
Teal	#00AAAD	RGB(0, 170, 173)
Lime	#8CBE29	RGB(140, 190, 41)
Brown	#9C5100	RGB(156, 81, 0)
Pink	#E671B5	RGB(230, 113, 181)
Orange	#EF9608	RGB(239, 150, 8)
Blue	#19A2DE	RGB(25, 162, 222)
Red	#E61400	RGB(230, 20, 0)
Green	#319A31	RGB(49, 154, 49)

People of HTML5 - Remy Sharp

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:37:00 +0100

In the second instalment of Chris Heilmann’s People of HTML5 series he talks to VimmmVimaaa about JavaScript and HTML5.

In this episode Remy and Christian talk about the topics below I’ve added the time that the topic starts at the beginning of each topic.

0:25 - JavaScript and it’s recent maturity as a language.
3:00 – Accessibility.
5:40 - IE9s adherence to W3C and browser innovation outside of the spec.
7:00 – Security with full screen video.
10:00 – HTML5 is not a Flash killer.
11:40 - Seb Lee-Delisle (P.S he's talking at one of our MSDN conferences next week)
15:00 – How complicated some NEWT technologies like WebGL are for exisiting frontend developers.
16:00 – Serverless applications (IndexDB, WebSQL, Offline Storage).
21:10 – HTML5 showcases should be based around real web applications.

In summary Remy suggests that we should use the full power of the browser to create real world HTML5 applications and if something doesn't work or could be improved we should provide feedback to the browser vendors by filling bugs.

Google Drops H.264 codec support

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:27:00 +0100

Now I will be honest, I wasn’t expecting this.

Google have today decided that they will remove support for the video codec H.264 from their Chrome browser in the next couple of months. H.264 is the codec that's used currently in Flash, PS3, Xbox and even my trusty little flip cam.

More importantly for HTML5 it’s also the codec that's used by Safari, that means iPads and iPhones.

Going forward Chrome will only support WebM(V8) and Theora.

IE9 Beta currently supports V8 and H.264 but not Theora .

Safari currently only supports H.264

There are currently 3 main codecs used with HTML 5 video:

H.264 - is patent-encumbered meaning that people that build encoders or decoders need to pay a licence fee to MPEG LA.
VP8 - is open source and was released by Google although the licence situation is a little murky
Theora - is distributed without licensing fees freely available, but is seen by many as having inferior playback quality.

The current state of browser support looks something like this:

	H.264	VP8	Theora
IE9 Beta	Yes	Yes (if codec installed)	No
Chrome	No	Yes	Yes
Safari	Yes	No	No
FireFox	No	Yes	Yes
Opera	Depends on OS	Yes	Yes

How can you tell if a browser supports a particular codec?

This position switch by Google is a great example of why feature detection is so important when coding HTML5. You can’t rely on browser sniffing as browser vendors can change the HTML5 features they implement at any time.

Modernizer is a great JavaScript library which will tell you if a visitors browser supports a particular codec. I talked about it earlier in the month here.

How do you encode VP8?

I had a quick look on my machine and the net to find software to encode WebM and didn’t find much, after asking Robert Reinhard for a good tool (In regard to video encoding: if he doesn't know about it, it’s not worth knowing) he recommended his video encoding service videoRx.com (of course he would) so If you need to encode alot of video to support Chrome, it might be worth paying him a visit.

New generation Amazon Kindle

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:24:00 +0100

Everybody knows the main advantage of an e-books device. These kinds of devices are loved because of their portability, readability, long battery life and so on. The most popular electronic book reader is the Amazon Kindle. First it was distributed in USA and later around the world. Millions of people prefer the Amazon Kindle because it is the smallest, the lightest and the cheapest electronic book readers available on the market nowadays. A new type of Amazon Kindle has recently appeared. The All-New Amazon Kindle e-book is available in two variants – Kindle Wi-Fi and Kindle 3G.

Because of the Wi-Fi you don't need a computer or other device to download books. Now faster and simpler you can get the book you need, and it isn't necessary to delete anything as the unit is able to hold 3, 500 books! That's much more than you're ever likely to read. The weight of the device is only 247 grams, so you can have an entire library in your hand.

The life of the battery depends on whether the Wi-Fi is turned on. The battery can run for ten days without charging with the WI-FI, and a whopping 30 days without. That makes life easy when we forget our charger when travelling. It happens often to everybody, right? With free 3G wireless you are able to download books any time and any place, especialy as Amazon has local wireless coverage in more than 100 countries.

Does it happen often when you can't fall asleep and you need to read a bit but you are worried turning the pages would be disturbing for the person next to you? With New Amazon Kindle this will not happen anymore. Its buttons are absolutely silent and easy to operate. Reader can customize its features easily with requirements. Amazon Kindle has a large variety of e-books through its eBook store. You are able to browse through 450 000 books in all genres, as if you were browsing their online store.

The Amazon Kindle is claimed to be very simple device, so people from all ages are able to operate it. Enjoy your time with the new generation Amazon Kindle electronic book reader! I recommend it!

You can purchase the Amazon Kindle on Amazon for a current bargain price of £89.00.

People of HTML5

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:22:20 +0100

Over at the Mozilla Blog Christian Heilmann (Former Yahoo, Now Mozilla Evangelist) kicked off the 1st in his “People of HTML5” series by getting together with Bruce Lawson from Opera Software to chew the fat.

The result is a really interesting Video that talks about how Bruce started, HTML5 Doctor, NEWT, feature detection, the dream of the semantic web, web applications and a ton of other stuff.

Chris asks Bruce at one point some of the sites he’d recommend to Learn HTML5 and below are his suggestions:

If you have a spare 15 minutes you should really take a look.

P.S. I absolutely love the Universal Subtitles that are used along side the HTML5 video player.

Learning Umbraco from the Master

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:40:20 +0100

I hadn’t got around to looking at it before but Neils Hartvig (@umbraco on twitter) gave a great talk about Umbraco Basics at Tech Ed Europe this year and you can watch it here. Below I’ve also cut up the video into smaller chunks along with my own notes.

Just in-case you didn’t know, Umbraco is an open source ASP.NET-based content management system. Version 4.6 beta was released in late December more info can be found at http://umbraco.org/ or you can view our quick into here.

Installing Umbraco

Niels shows the installation process using an early beta of Umbraco 4.6. The current version which can be downloaded here now has a much prettier installation screen and a nice selection of skins. If you use the current version of Web Platform Installer to install Umbraco you will not get this skin selection option as you will be installing 4.5.2 not 4.6. Soon you will be able to install 4.6 directly through web platform installer. Watch my blog for updates.

Creating pages in Umbraco

Niels runs through the basics of editing a page and creating a page. He also shows how Umbraco versions content so that you can rollback or preview some content before publishing it.

Adding Properties

Documents in Umbraco don’t have tons of properties by default, for example an article won’t have a teaser field (a teaser field is a brief introduction to a document) you can easily add the different types of properties to a document and in this short demo Niels shows you how. You can also add validation to these properties so authors have to fill in the properties correctly.

Adding a custom control

If you are a .net developer then you’ll probably be familiar with the concept of user controls. You can easily add your own user controls to an Umbraco website. Niels shows you how by creating a really simple “Microsoft conference demo user control” (how very cheeky) and then adds it to the Umbraco site he created earlier. He also talks about the Umbraco concept of macros which is a great way to add compiled user controls to your Umbraco website.

Using parameters and macros

If you have a reusable control you probably will want to pass parameters too it. This snippet shows you how you can bind data from Umbraco to your controls.

Creating a Gallery Part 1

I found the following demo really useful when I was getting to grips with the flexibility of Umbraco. Niels creates a document type called photo, he then creates a collection of these photos by creating a Gallery Document type which contains these photos.

By the end of the 7 minutes demo he has a list of photographs, in part 2 he shows you how to customise the look of the gallery using jQuery.

Creating a Gallery Part 2

Using the gallery created in Part one, Neils uses a jQuery plugin called pikachoose to take his rather boring list of images and convert it into an interactive gallery.

Creating a Gallery Part 3

In the previous parts Niels used xlst to produce the gallery markup. In this part Niels uses a razor control that he created the previous day to show how you could use razor syntax to achieve the same result. The control that Niels demonstrates is now part of the full Umbraco 4.6 release.

If you haven’t looked at razor before take a look at this for an overview:

Pirates love daises - a HTML5 game

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 10:07:31 +0100

Pirates love daises is a game developed by Grant Skinner written using HTML5 and JavaScript. And it available to play here http://www.pirateslovedaisies.com.

Now I must have been off sick when they covered this in school, but apparently pirates love daises? Who knew. In this game it's your job to recruit a crew of pirates to protect your stash of daises from being stolen. Grant talks about the reason they chose daises and the games development over at the companies blog.

It’s really fast in IE9

We’ve been getting up on stage and talking about IE9 performance a great deal recently. Pirates love daises shows that IE9 isn’t just fast on test suites, it’s also fast on real world sites. The game works in IE9 Beta, Firefox 3.6, Safari 5 and Chrome 6 and higher. Giorgio Sardo tested the game in all the latest browsers and the table below shows the performance on his machine:

	IE9	Firefox 3.6	Firefox 4b7	Chrome 8	Chrome 10	Safari 5.0.2	Opera 11
Full Game	Excellent	Very Bad	(crash)	Bad	Good	Terrible	NA
Simplified Game	Excellent	Terrible	(crash)	Very Bad	Good	Terrible	(good/bug?)
CPU (%)	13	49	NA	44	48	45	40
Memory (MB)	100	144	NA	175	143	180	240

Start developing With Canvas

If you’ve not looked into developing using the HTML5 canvas element, take a look at a basic tutorial I wrote earlier this month. If you interested in developing your own HTML5 games then you can also use the Easel JS Library that the team created to make future game development easier, it can be found here: http://easeljs.com/.