July 2010 Archives

SEO Seminar at RMT by Silverbean

I attended the SEO seminar by Silverbean this afternoon... It was at the RMT (the accountants) offices. It was pretty good, and did go into some detail about keyword densities and anchor text. But of course it wasn't as technical as it might have been (they do have a service to sell). Learn't some useful stuff about the layout and copy needed for good landing pages. I'm also going to sign up for … [Read more...]

Ooops I broke my WordPress RSS feed

I had edited the functions.php file to add a 'read-more' link to the end of post snippets instead of the [...] text. Inadvertently I had added a newline outside of the php closing tag at the end of the file. As this file is included when rendering RSS feeds it created a blank line before the opening RSS tag - and any whitespace before the opening tag renders the XML document invalid... doh. … [Read more...]

Cobbles visible on Eilansgate – Hexham

Nice to see. And they don't look half as rough on the tyres compared to the old patch-ridden surface. It'll be a shame to cover them up with tarmac again. It looks like the council hasn't taken the opportunity to widen the woefully narrow footpath though.... And the primary school tries to promote walking to school (this is our route). It's barely wide enough for a pram and is a popular lorry … [Read more...]

Custom Magento Canonical Tags

I've just done some modifications to a magento install which I administer to allow custom canonical tags to be specified in the "Custom Layout Update" field of product items and categories. Magento is notoriously bad for url canonicalisation out of the box, as it generates at least 4 urls for each product, all with almost identical content. So I copied head.php from … [Read more...]

GMail offers per-address rich-text signatures

This has been long awaited and is is a much appreciated addition to the gmail service. If you use GMail check out your settings page. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7881493/Google-adds-rich-text-signatures-to-Gmail.html … [Read more...]

Magento and WordPress

'Embedded' was probably too strong a term for the merging of a blogger blog into the Pro Hair Biosystems magento store site. Aligning the styling is probably a better way of describing it. The export/import process was pretty easy and fixing up the categories/tags switch up just required a simple plugin. It's probably better for SEO that the blog and store site sit in separate url silo's. There … [Read more...]

WordPress loopy

I've gone completely WordPress (3.0) loopy. I am currently also working on embedding a WordPress blog into a Magento e-commerce site. Getting a dab hand at it, and will post the link when its complete. I've decided to keep the database and file hierarchy separate for security reasons. Doing this sacrifices the sophisticated caching mechanism available in Magento. I will therefore need to look at … [Read more...]

Posterous post

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So I'm posting this image via posterous. It is going (in theory) to my blog, to linked-in and to flickr. It is an image of Ella soon after collecting her pink Barbie bike from freecycle. … [Read more...]

Development Consultancy

Peter Davies has been developing software since the age of eleven. Please read on to discover why he has skills to add value to your project. Over the years he has occupied the following positions: software developer and architect, team leader, internal project manager, manager of subcontractors, consultant. Been involved in computer game development, tools, software applications, websites, … [Read more...]