graeme.blog

Blog

  • Testing my blog’s development

    I’m picking up on the post from Lorelle on her Lorelle on WordPress blog about testing your blogs development. She lists a set of links you can test your blog on, and see what sort of results are returned. So without further ado:
    Live Google PageRank – Results
    An average pagerank of 2.7, which considering that when I started the blog a few months back, pagerank was essentially 0, is not bad going. Pagerank is one measure I would like to test on again in 6 months time and see where I stand then.

    Visual PageRank – Results
    This is a good tool, shows the pagerank of every single link on a page. I note that I don’t seem to be quoting many major sites in terms of links in a post generally, if I was wanting to live by pagerank alone, I should have more links, and to higher ranking sites. I know that is by no means the only path to improving pagerank, but this tool does highlight the relative merit of your links.

    Google Cache Tool
    This checks to see what internal links have been cached by google, having read through the front page of the blog. According to this, 3 out of 7 have. Not sure if I would need to get the rest cached, but it is caching the main url of the site, which is what I would want.

    Spider View – Results
    Okay, as a topic I’ve discussed several times on here, I checked Ubuntu as a keyword on the site. This showed that I’ve mentioned it 18 times on the front page as it stands.

    Alexa – Results
    3 results here. I’ve found personally that Alexa is a bit sniffy in some senses, as they profess to only be interested in the top 100,000 websites, rather than providing information beyond this. Also, their ratings depend in part on users installing spyware, which isn’t really the ideal way forwards.

    Search Position Checker – Results
    I know from a little while ago that one of my most successful posts on this blog was a simple little explanation of how to install realplayer on Ubuntu. I was getting at one point 20 hits a day direct from google for the post. So I used this tool to search for the keywords ubuntu realplay edgy, and see where I am ranked. It shows no results for google, which suggests it may be a bit borked, as a manual search shows I am #2 for that search on google. It does show me as 5th on MSN and 11th on Excite.

    Link Popularity Checker – Results
    Important to remember here that I am only searching on graemehunter.co.uk, not www.graemehunter.co.uk, which does get very different results. Note that google shows no results at all for the www version. I use google sitemaps to submit the version without the www, but have been meaning for a while to sort out with www. This underlines it needs doing, and that each can be treated very differently by search engines. At least 3 search engines there see over 100 results with the www.

    Keyword Analysis Tool – Results
    This shows the frequency of words throughout a page. So for the front page of here, as I had guessed previously, Ubuntu was the most regular, followed by WordPress and product. Again, if I was targeting a particular audience, I would want to up this count in certain areas.

    Google Webmasters Site Status Test
    This confirms that I am included in the Google index, and that I was last indexed on the 9th February. I can get a lot more detail once I log into the Google webmaster tools, and I may well do this as a seperate exercise to blog on here soon, going through the results and seeing what they show.

    So there are a good range of tools here to check how search engines view your site. Do note by the way that the results I have referred to will change once I publish this post.

  • Dealing with no display in Ubuntu

    I thought I’d managed to kill Ubuntu today, reinstalled a sound driver that wasn’t working, rebooted and found that I could only boot to a command line. After a short and sensible period of panic, I booted into Windows and searched for a solution. The suggestion that worked was as follows:

    startkde had no effect once logged in (still in the command line only). startx launched, but I only got a cursor and a greyish screen, nothing else happened. So I reinstalled the desktop with:

    sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

    and strictly speaking you want a reboot, but I didn’t need it, startx worked fine for me from there.

  • orange.co.uk and orange mobile, you are bloody useless.

    Okay, it has taken me two days to give them money. I wanted to add a service to my phone, which means I will pay them a little more money each month. You would hope this would be easy. It isn’t. I have an account set up on their site, which is meant to allow me to manage my mobile phone account. At present, it is taking about 10-15 minutes to get into my account. I’ve got decent broadband, so it isn’t that. Their site is stupidly slow and unresponsive. When I finally got to where I wanted, it offered me a package to add, I selected it, and it accepted. Fine. About 20 minutes to do this. Most sane people have given up already.

    I then get the text confirmation about an hour later that the package has been added. Except it hasn’t. I am not allowed it on my account. So I phone them. I spend 5 minutes going through key choices, a recorded message telling me they are very busy (at 11:30 at night) then another recorded message to let me know they are shut after 10pm. If you’d let me know that at the start…

    So I called back today. I have to wait 20 minutes on the phone, listening to god-awful music that at one point distorts and hurts my ears (it wasn’t the track, I prefer far nastier sounding music normally). I finally get through to a call centre in India. The chap on the other end of the phone has a bit of trouble understanding me. Not because of his English, which is fine, but because of the quality of the phone line (Orange customer calling their own call-centre direct from his mobile, so the problem again is with them). I ask if I can have the package, he says yes, and puts it on my account.

    How much hassle is that? I’ve lost an hour of my life trying to give them a bit more money every month. How many people a month must just give up? IDIOTS.

    And relax.

  • 16 words in my head today

    back. coffee. battery. pipes. notebook. cheese. database.

    ache. present. reading.

    camera. nano. testbed.

    prawn. spice. blossom.

  • Surreal Back Pain

    Bit in the wars at the moment, had a few weeks of getting over smoking, have now moved on to suffering a nasty but thankfully quite recoverable back injury. The main downsides of which are sheer stabbing pain, and taking about 30 seconds to get up from a chair. Which isn’t very helpful.

    This is thus a slight explanation for my general malaise with regards to the blog for a bit, although I do like the list of links that are generated from what I save at del.icio.us. Anyway, more soon.

  • Snowday – The snowiest day this century!

    Well, it is supposed to really snow here in a few hours time. All the weather services have warned us all to expect snow. Serious snow. Not your bog standard little bit of snow that I have endured since I grew up. Old Skool Snow. Seventies Snow. Drifts, Blizzards, enough snow to genuinely call snow. I’ll be at home, watching it out of the window whilst I work at home, waiting to see if the predictions are true or not.

    Oh, and happy birthday to me 🙂 I officially got my new camera for it, so I am very happy.

  • Driven by sleep

    still not right on the sleeping front. Did sleep okay yesterday, but it still threw into sharp relief how much I haven’t been for a while. Going to have to be careful and make sure that where I can, I get to catch up.

    Got a couple of nice little things for myself yesterday, a Moleskine notebook, which is just the right size for everything for me, and The Silver Spoon, which is a classic Italian cookbook, and just brimming with recipes. So much so I could barely carry it home.

  • Goodbye Grandstand

    So Sunday marked the last Grandstand on the BBC. It is an odd feeling, as the show is 48 years old, and for several years of my life I could guarentee that between 12 and 5 on a Saturday I would be watching it, yet I won’t miss it. Eurosport now holds an even dearer place in my heart now, as where Grandstand would manage 20 minutes of an obscure sport, Eurosport will give you the whole thing, often live.

    That I think is the key thing that has done for Grandstand, the lack of live sport in it. I will watch far more where something is happening live, and I get to see the sport “warts n all”, see how the whole thing works.

    What is odd as well though is that they are keeping sport, showing it in the same manner, but not calling it Grandstand. That I don’t see the point in at all.

  • Print Screen in Ubuntu Edgy

    Quick little tip, found this today when CTRL + Print Screen didn’t work for me. In Ubuntu, Print Screen will capture your whole desktop, whereas ALT + Print Screen will capture the live window. The latter being just what I needed.

  • I killed my WordPress blog, and lived to fight another day

    So it was late. It was the wrong time of night to be playing with those sorts of options. And I compounded my error with the classic mistake of “oh, it’s a little change, I won’t need a backup”. Let both of those mistakes be lessons I learn.

    So what happened? Well, I have a couple of other blogs with the WordPress theme K2 on them (this is a skinned version of K2 here), and I noticed that on my main personal blog I didn’t have the same options for the sidebar. After some experimentation, I removed a conflicting plugin, then chose to upgrade the theme. I followed the instructions carefully (well apart from backing up of course), disabled the theme, and then…

    Nothing. Nothing at all. The whole site was blank. No posts, no admin, no error messages, just a blank screen for every URL. Really not good at all. So what did I do? Panicked of course.

    After a good five minutes of quality panic, I decided to have a look at my database. It was there for starters, which was a very good thing. Then it struck me, there must be an options table for WordPress. And there is, wp_options by default. In there is an entry for theme. So as a last chance, I altered it back to K2 from default. And it worked, I could see the blog once more, and could sort out things from there.

    Now, I wouldn’t recommend altering tables like this by hand. It was a qualified guess, but I got lucky. I didn’t deserve to after my other acts of stupidity, but I did. It was a handy thing to learn a bit about in case of that sort of disaster, but in this case it should never have happened, if I had backed up it would have been a lot easier to fix.

    Fate also dictates that the morning after, I notice Lorelle’s great post on fixing a broken theme.