When I wrote my list of Counties in the UK post I had no idea about the number of hits it would have. Continue Reading →
31 March, 2009
by imaker
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13 January, 2009
by imaker
0 comments
Online photo editors free to use
When I design a new site that has a content management system (cms), the owners seem to have most trouble with images. The problems they have are:
- The images are straight from their camera so are too big to fit the desired format and/or eat away at their bandwidth.
- The image needs cropping.
- The image needs some other changes.
What is needed is a quick and easy way of making the desired changes without having to go to the extent of buying some software to do the job just for their website. If it’s just a few images I don’t mind making the changes, but often the owner wants to do it themselves straight away.
So what do I do, recommend they use an online free editor. Continue Reading →
19 December, 2008
by imaker
45 Comments
List of UK Counties
For a recent web design project I was looking for a list of UK counties. No problem, I thought, the internet is a wonderful place, bound to find something.
How wrong can you be? Lots of lists, but none of them complete and most out of date. Spent far too long looking and eventually had to make my own. I think it’s pretty complete, though, as ever, you probably know better.
I’ve added a text file with just each County name that you can use as you like. You can list UK Counties in your browser or download the UK Counties file.
Please let me know what you think or if there are any missing by adding a comment. I promise I’ll be grateful and will add any missing counties.
Finally if you make use of the list, feel free to link back to this page http://www.imaker.co.uk/blog/list-of-uk-counties/
18 December, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
Upgrade to wordpress 2.7
Astonishingly easy and painless!
For such a major upgrade, giving a totally new look admin, it was much easier that previous releases (2.6) and gave no problems at all.
For such a major upgrade, giving a totally new look admin, it was much easier that previous releases (2.6) and gave no problems at all.17 September, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
Finally getting around to making a squidoo lens
Squidoo has been rattling my cage lately, so finally I’ve gone off, had a look, thought about it, and started a lens. It’s more of a try out and to see what happens so my seo knowledge is going to provide the basis of said page.
21 July, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
wordpress upgrade problem 404 errors
What’s up with WordPress 2.6 upgrade
Upgraded to WordPress version 2.6 today and unfortunately, the blog collapsed giving 404, page not found errors on every post.
The site was hosted on a wind-oze server where .htaccess was not allowed and so I used a custom permalink as in /index.php/%postname%/ as the recommended work around. This is causing the problems with WordPress 2.6 throwing errors since the /index.php/ was “forgotten about (?).
Since I have now moved to Linux hosting and can use htaccess again I decided to abandon the workarounds and get back to htaccess and redirect from my main WordPress directory directly to the posts and remove the /index.php/ workaround.
How to fix it.
WordPress say that if you have blank category base and tag base in your permalinks then setting them to anything will temporarily fix the problem until the next release. Then presumably you have to change them back.
How I fixed it
I decided not to use anymore workarounds and so used the following to get rid of the cause and the problem itself.
First I changed the custom permalink from index.php/%postname%/ to /%postname%/ and saved it. On the permalinks page – near the bottom WordPress then gives you the redirect code for your htaccess file. I copied that and pasted it into the .htaccess file and, guess what, it worked. All my pages are now bearing the new urls and if I use a search engine for one of my blog posts and click it, that gets redirected too, and all without the /index.php/ extra!
In the meantime WordPress are working on release 2.6.1 to fix the problem.
2 July, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
web analytics and statistics
I was recommended to getClicky by a colleague the other day. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and am impressed so far. It’s a great alternative to google analytics, and has some really good features.
You have to register to use it, but it is free to use. You get a 21 day free trial of the full version, but there are several versions available, so it’s well worth a look.
18 June, 2008
by imaker
2 Comments
Browser stats and OS stats
I’ve seen a lot of statistics on the most popular browser and most popular operating system but I thought I’d have a look at the stats I have access too and see is there any differences.
I have several sites with stats and took hits from each to show the percentages of usage across them all. The sites used show a cross section of industries, interests and popularity and represent data from 200,000 hits plus. I used only one months data, that being May 2008. Continue Reading →
13 June, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
Web design services uncached
I have a page that hasn’t been cached for a long while despite changing it regularly and updating the xml site map. It looks like it’s a duplicate content issue that took a while to find, but that I hope I have resolved. Bunging a link in here to the web design services page in the hope of getting it cached. Not had this issue before so don’t quite know how to handle it, so be interested in any results this gets.
12 June, 2008
by imaker
0 comments
Firefox release 3 Download day June 17th
Those nice people at Mozilla, as well as releasing version 3 of the Firefox browser in the next few days are also going to try for the Guinness world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.
I’ll certainly be one of the downloaders, it’s a much better browser than IE. If you feel like committing to the download click the image to register your pledge.