Author: Olly

  • Struggling to decide on direction

    My head is literally bursting with opinions and conversations that I feel I need to unload somewhere and I figured it would help me to write some of them down on my faithful blog, but when I start to write I just go on and on and on and on and before long I realise what I’m writing no longer reflects the initial subject I was writing about – and I just save it as a draft and forget about it.

    I just read two of them now and they both end up sounding like the beginnings of some new age scripture written by some crazed anti-society nut.

    Maybe that’s what I am. Hah.

    Anyway, I’m going to attempt to pull bits of them together pretty soon, I probably won’t include so much of the crazy stuff, maybe I’ll post them in the future when my opinions don’t get me into trouble as much.

  • Internet killed the [everything] star

    I often hear people talking about how “the internet has killed the high street” and to be honest, i’m getting really sick of it!

    The internet didn’t kill the highstreet – they did that all by themselves!

    In actual fact the high street could massively benefit from the internet if the town centre businesses started using it more to their advantage! Take Argos for example – they could have quite easily given up when the internet started picking up pace – as no one wanted their catalogs any more! But no, instead, they modified their business model and embraced the internet – now their “Click and Collect” model is being copied by Tesco, Asda and everyone else in-between.

    The internet has also made things like fashion, and the ever changing face of it, more accessible to the world. People know what their favorite celeb is wearing as they see it on twitter, and if the high street stores could react as quick as online stores do – they could still be in with a chance of getting the sale. People still like to try clothes on after all!

    The main issues as i see them are as follows

    • Not enough help from the councils and governments – give people free shops for 3/6/9 months and see if they can make it work. They’re all sat empty, so why not?
    • Business overheads – someone who employs 10 people cant compete with someone who sells from their bedroom – not a lot can be done to fix this apart from the bricks and mortar retailers making their offering better!
    • Being idiots – Making silly choices, bad advertising decisions and generally being crap at running a business. I have friends in business and they all do well – its because my friends are not idiots.

    Financially, the economy is on the rise and things are starting to look peachy again – if you have a business idea, if you want to open a shop selling something and its burning a hole in your head – then just go for it!

    What are you waiting for? 🙂

  • UK Domain Awesomeness (and total Lameness)

    Check it out!

    https://0lly.uk 🙂

    Very excited 😀

    However, i am deeply saddened to find i cant try and purchase olly.uk (o not a zero) until 2019!

    What is the point guys, really?

  • 301 Redirects – How to redirect a website – Lots of Methods!

    301 Redirects

    A 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it can preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option.

    The code “301” mean the page has “moved permanently”.

    Here are some examples;

    IIS Redirect

    • In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
    • Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
    • Enter the redirection page
    • Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
    • Click on ‘Apply’

    ColdFusion Redirect

    <.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
    <.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com”>

    PHP Redirect

    <?
    Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
    Header( “Location: http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com” );
    ?>

    ASP Redirect

    <%@ Language=VBScript %>
    <%
    Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
    Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com/”
    %>

    ASP .NET Redirect

    <script runat=”server”>
    private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
    Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
    Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com”);
    }
    </script>

    JSP (Java) Redirect

    <%
    response.setStatus(301);
    response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com/” );
    response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
    %>

    CGI PERL Redirect

    $q = new CGI;
    print $q->redirect(“http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com/”);

    Ruby on Rails Redirect

    def old_action
    headers[“Status”] = “301 Moved Permanently”
    redirect_to “http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com/”
    end

    Redirect Old domain to New domain using htaccess redirect

    Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
    The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.NEW-URL-HERE.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Please REPLACE www.NEW-URL-HERE.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

    In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

    Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

    Redirect to www using htaccess redirect

    Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.NEW-URL-HERE.com
    The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

    Options +FollowSymlinks
    RewriteEngine on
    rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
    rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

    Please REPLACE domain.com and www.NEW-URL-HERE.com with your actual domain name.

    Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

    How to Redirect HTML

    Please refer to section titled ‘How to Redirect with htaccess’, if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and ‘IIS Redirect’, if your site is hosted on a Windows Server.