Bad Web Practices In Everyday Life Situations. Can You Relate?

December 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’ve all been there, trying desperately to buy something online, and after clicking through all of the add-ons and special offers, the site times out and you are forced to head all the way back to the start (Air Asia springs to mind).

Although we all know how desperately annoying this is, it is still surprisingly common. So many companies and web developers these days seem to be completely out of touch with their visitors and offer shockingly miserable user experiences.

Google knows this only too well, and so Google Analytics has put together these funny and surprisingly relatable videos demonstrating bad website practices, but in everyday physical situations. Worth a watch, if just for a chuckle, but I bet everyone can relate to at least some of the issues that are shown.

Filed Under: Humour Tagged With: ,

Updating Ioncube Loaders on Web Host

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes you may be looking forward to rocking your new software and are all set to become the greatest internet marketer of all time when your host randomly throws you an “ioncube loader error” curve ball. To solve this minor (and unbelievably still common) setback, you will need to update the ioncube loaders on your host.Why the hosts themselves can’t keep these up to date I will never know, but hey…

Anyway, because the whole process looks an exceedingly complicated one, i thought I would make a video of the time I had to update the ioncube loaders on my Bluehost account.

 

When you come to update your php.ini file you will need to use the following lines of code

zend_extension=/complete path to the ioncube loader.so file
zend_extension_ts=/complete path to the ioncube loader_ts.so file

The path to the files will depend on where you have uploaded your files to, but an example of the code might be

zend_extension=/home1/your_username/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so
zend_extension_ts=/home1/your_username/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2_ts.so

Add this to the bottom of your php.ini.default file and then save it as your php.ini file and overwrite the old one.

Job done!

Filed Under: tutorials, website setup Tagged With: ,

Flickr for Free Images for Commercial Use?

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Yes that’s right, Flickr can be used to find images that you can use on a commercial website without being sued back to the bronze age. You just have to know how to search and what to look for.

Filed Under: website setup Tagged With: , , , ,

Samuel L Ipsum

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Samuel L Jackson Are you looking for a placeholder for your site? Looking for some random text to plug in to fill the gaps? Bored of the usual Lorem Ipsum nonsense?
Looking for a quick laugh?

Then head over to the Slipsum site where the big SLJ himself will give you some ready made, easily formatted placeholder code to slap on your site. It’s useful and it makes you chuckle. What more can any website offer? Obviously inspired by the great title – Samuel L Ipsum. Quality!
When I saw this site I knew i just had to link to it. It’s awesome.

Caution: If you are easily offended by strong language, then you might want to steer clear of this and go somewhere with bunnies.

Filed Under: Humour

Transfer Domain Name to Host Domain Name Servers (DNS)

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Okay, so you have bought your brand spanking new domain from your favourite register, and now you want to set up the domain on your hosting account so you can start building your website. How do you go about pointing the name that you bought from one company to the servers that you host at another company?
You need to transfer the domain name servers (DNS) from your registrar to your host. It really is as simple as finding out the name of the servers of your host and pasting them into the right place on your registrar’s page.
There’s not much more to it than that. Obviously finding where these things are is the hard part. This is why you will find a video below showing you exactly how I transferred a domain from Namecheap to Bluehost. The process may differ slightly depending on what company you are using, but should remain essentially the same.

 

Filed Under: tutorials, website setup

TAC – Theme Authenticity Checker WordPress Plugin

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment


 

If like me and millions of other internet users you use WordPress, you may (at least sometimes) have used free WordPress themes. I mean lets face it, there are a million and one beautiful themes to choose from so you would be mad not to sample them a little. Many people might find their perfect themes by searching Google for something like “free WordPress themes” or close to it. This is a very bad idea! Sure you will find many sites available, offering a multitude of weird and wonderful WordPress sites, but I guarantee you one thing. Most (if not all) of these sites will support their free theme giveaways by adding links and malicious code to their themes. Your new theme!

Now while I understand that developers should get something for their hard work and a link within their free themes is a small price to pay, I do not appreciate the distributing websites adding more links and then very often inserting hidden base 64 code in the footer which links to their own real estate. Then they have the gall to warn consumers that deleting the base 64 code will stop the theme from working…what utter crap. Well now there is a way to test which themes contain malicious code, and the number of links that have been placed inside: Simply download the “TAC” plugin (Theme Authenticity Checker) and once activated it will check all of the themes that you have uploaded to your site and tell you how many links are present, and if any base 64 code has been found.

If you happen to find any base 64 code within your theme I would just trash it without a seconds thought and go find another one from a more reputable dealer – maybe the official WordPress themes store for one. You don’t want to start your new business with a “dirty” theme now do you?

Filed Under: Plugins Tagged With: ,

URL Canonicalization and SEO – Choosing www or not and how to redirect

February 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment


Many people do not realise that search engines can treat www.example.com and example.com as two separate websites even though they may have exactly the same content. This can cause huge problems with both duplicate content and SEO backlinking as link juice may be shared between the two sites.

The best way round this is to choose whether you want to use the www version or the non-www version and stick with it. Then you will need to perform a 301 redirect so that if visitors, links or search engines visit the one you do not want to be seen, they will be automatically redirected to the one you do want them to see. There are other ways to do it, but this is the quickest and most straight forward.

Filed Under: SEO