graeme.blog

Category: toreview

  • Diagnosis for WordPress

    Well Lorelle has got me writing again, with her article about admin plugins for WordPress. There were a few in there I liked the look of, so I’m going to work through them and see how I get on. The first is Diagnosis, which is a simple but very useful addition that tells you quite a lot about how your blog is set up. Installing it just adds a link on the dashboard, which then shows you information such as the versions of MySQL, PHP and WordPress you are running, which ports are being used for various things, what modules are installed in PHP, and so on.

    If your command line skills are sometimes lacking, it is very useful for getting a lot of knowledge about these backroom things very quickly, and gives you a handy place to check such things when you are debugging issues with your blog. I’ll put this on any blog I install in future, particularly if I was installing on someone elses hosting, as it would tell me a lot about the setup there without having to dig to much.

  • Old Skool like Happy Shopper

    Listening to 90s rap mainly today, from the somewhat more aggressive era. And Crazy by Gnarls Barkley, which is one of the few songs I like recorded this century. Really like in fact, love hearing that incredible voice echoing around my head, hearing the dirty noise in the background that whooshes in for the chorus, then just turns off, the insistant bassline, and those truely unhinging lyrics.

    Have been playing about with autoblogging a bit on other sites, it is interesting to see you can create a whole site off other peoples content, with very little work. I’m actually going to step back from it a bit, what I really want is a site that shows other stuff, but that the main focus is still my own writing, just seems fairer really.

    BrotherinlawFB is down to visit tomorrow, will be good fun, he has booked tickets for us all to see Hot Fuzz, and if that wasn’t good enough, he has booked the fat bastard seats at the back that I love so much. How to get on my good side right there, take me to a good movie, and let me sit somewhere that doesn’t wreck my back for two hours. Normal cinema seats hurt me, have done for a good decade or two, but these don’t. These are hald sofas, and I love them. Can’t wait. Should also get a little meal out somewhere, possible the noodle bar in the centre of town, then meeting friends for drinks, so looking forwards to the weekend arriving. Ideally no later than tomorrow please.

  • Coming Soon

    Have been working tonight on some changes and updates for my sites. Mainly installing a few new plugins for WordPress, but also looking at new themes. I am hoping that all of my sites will get a makeover over the next few months, but if you look very hard you will notice a few changes immediately, with more due soon. Exciting eh!

    I know 😉

  • No pop no style

    I’m still not really listening to music, and it is getting towards the two year mark now. I just found something better, i.e. podcasts. When I say not really, I do sometimes stick on mixes of my collection in the evening, or listen to the occasional track on the ipod, but it is just that, occasional. I can manage sometimes 3 or more hours of podcast per working day, just seem to prefer the spoken word now. Seems like, especially looking at the charts at the moment, that I really have heard it all before. Bar my blessed electronic music of various guises.

  • Productive Weekend, mostly

    Well, we got a few things organised, most of all, got ourselves new bikes. This is Mrsfb’s:
    mrsfb's new bike
    and this is mine:
    My new bike
    I am never drawn to bikes by fancy things like suspension or disc brakes, noooooo. It was fun riding them home, as Mrsfb hadn’t cycled for about 13 years, and in her own words “the last time I did I went on the wrong side of the road, and was quite indignant at all the drivers honking their horns at me until I realised”. So she was a little nervous, but got back into it very quickly, and is now quite enthusiastic about getting out for a little ride somewhere this week. I can’t wait too, will be great to be able to go off on a long cycle ride together when it gets warmer.

    We also managed a meal out at Loch Fyne, gorgeous fish restaurant in Jericho. I had kippers followed by pan-baked bream with watercress pesto, mrsfb had an assortment of herrings, followed by crab cakes. One of the advantages of giving up smoking appears to be having money left over at the end of the month for meals out and buying bikes.

  • Do you know what I miss? In-out lists.

    Invented by The Farm they were, too.

    IN OUT
    Podcasts Music
    Singing Humming
    Out Shaking it all about
    Packed Lunchboxes Posh Sarnies
    Walking Cars
    Not eating Cheese Cheese

  • Back not too hurty

    Well I am definitely on the mend now, in far less pain, although I have to be careful when coughing or yawning. Otherwise I get psychadelic levels of pain. In general though, I am utterly peachy compared to last week.

    A nice relaxing weekend planned, meal out tonight at a nice fish-based restaurant, then a little walk tomorrow down by the river (and the first chance for me to use my new camera outdoors properly). Plus a spot of mild DIY, and some planning for our major holiday this year (NYC here we come). I’m being ultr-organised, tracking down our passports, and actually checking them now to see they are in date, rather than panicking in 6 months time. This is a hitherto unknown level of organisation for me.

    Also hopefully watching The Devil Wears Prada on DVD, and some good long lie-ins too.

  • If I had been Norwegian, I could have been Ski-Jumping at 3

    I wonder often if being an Olympic Ski-Jumper was the destiny that was chosen for me, and by some bizarre twist of fate I ended up being born in England, doomed never to have the appropriate advantages in life to help me achieve that goal. I love the concept of flying unaided. I happily watch hours of ski-jumping on the hallowed channel that is Eurosport. Yet I cannot fly. Seems a shame.

  • 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.