Category: Ranting

  • Stupid 123 Reg Web Forwarding FAIL

    We use 123 reg for our domains as we have so many and they are the cheapest UK based domain name registrar! However the saying “you get what you pay for” really comes into play as the control panel and general support you get from them is dogshit.

    I wrote a very popular post back in 2008 about their domain name auto renewal shambles – now, its the web forwarding that is gonna take a beating.

    I have a customer who has collected a few domains along their business life, and only one of them is active – so he wanted to (in a search engine friendly way) redirect all his spare domain names to his main site so they were not wasted. Initially, its quite confusing as the control panel will let you set the forwarder and appear like its all set up and working even if the nameservers of the domain are set externally – so the 123 reg forwarding isnt even being factored into the equasion at this point.

    After finally reading some instructions (im a man, i dont do instructions) i realised you needed to reset the nameservers to 123-reg’s nameservers, so that the local settings would take effect. I did this, and left it a few days so DNS could properly do its thing – checked them all this morning, and they are resolve to a 123reg page – none of them forward.

    Ok – now im starting to get pissed off.

    I re-checked all domains, all nameservers were reset and all were set to forward to the main website – so what was the problem?

    I figured the best thing to do would be to properly read the instructions (im a man, when forced to read instructions i skim read) and noticed a little line in it that had until now evaded my sight…

    Don't nobody read stuff that small...

    So wait…

    I have to reset nameservers, create the redirect, THEN edit the DNS and add in some IP address?

    Would you like to make things any more confusing? I mean im OK editing DNS I do it a lot, but if my mum wanted to forward a domain she would be up shit creek – not good, 123reg!

    I’ve since gone in and edited this IP address – but if you are having problems like I did, then make sure you actually read everything as, despite it being totally retarded – there are guides to help you through the shambles.

  • Kelly Rowland Forgot Her Lyrics – Cover-up?

    At work, we do something called SEO and we’ve just started doing what we call Reputation Management which is basically the reverse of SEO – they both use similar techniques and are both becoming something we are being asked more and more for by our customers.

    Anyway……. a few years ago i was watching the MoBo awards, and Kelly Rowland and David Guetta performed their track “When love takes over” live to the crowd and to everyone watching at home on TV.

    From the word go, the lyrics were off – she started in the wrong place and basically totally screwed up the first part of the song… Some would say that she forgot her lyrics… Some may say there was a sound problem – either way it didn’t paint a good picture of the singer as (IIRC) she was just starting out her solo career (or at least its the first time i’d heard from her since DC)

    A year or so later i decided to try and find the video as a friend of mine didn’t believe me that it happened…. And i couldn’t find.. anything! At the time i had forgotten what live performance she had sung at when she’d fluffed the lyrics – i actually thought it was an MTV Music Awards, but despite that we could not find a video that proved it! There was no talk of it on forums, blogs…. it was like someone had been paid to completely remove it from the Internet. I was using terms like kelly rowland forgot lyrics and many, many variations of that… still found nothing.

    The track then came on the radio this morning – and as normal it set me off looking for the proof when i happened to change my search keywords to something (as a stab in the dark) and got lucky… i found this website.

    The website confirmed my statement;

    Kelly Rowland recently tried to sing at the MOBO awards in Glasgow, England. The former Destiny’s Child singer momentarily stopped at the beginning of her performance of the track – a collaboration with David Guetta.

    And there was an embedded video…. :O

    Ok, so the plot is definitely thickening and it is looking more and more like someone has been actively removing traces of this happening from the web! However, the site I found did enlighten me to the name of the event where she messed up – it was the MoBo’s in 2009 – this then lead me into a corner of YouTube lined with all sorts of dodgy videos of the event and her performance…. but they all have one thing in common..

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuENNqZEQzU

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaqFtCoSpgc

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGq9-zG5VL4

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMaqBnxNbfM

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2-Z7VXlcoo

    They are all the same performance – but either the sound is dodgy, they start just after the fail, OR they seem to have been edited to kind of mask the error – i have alarm bells ringing here.. It now seems that not only has someone cleverly concealed a lot of this info from the net – they seem to have edited/scrambled some of these videos to further hide her screw-up!

    The only actual video that i found that 100% truly shows the singer messing up is this one;

    http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhP0RHG51aYnaSUCt7

    Which happens to be one of the only decent videos i could find that was not on youtube!

    So whats the deal then, Google? Have Miss Rowlands People paid you to block or “filter” anyone searching for this? Can money really buy you that kinda power? Or have some Rep Management peeps been paid a ton of cash to work like the clappers to get it removed from the net as best they can?

    You hear about people trying to cover stuff up all the time now, injunctions and all that shite –  but this happened a few years ago, when the Internet was a bit younger and things like Internet censorship were things only the paranoid web-geeks amongst us used to worry about.

    This kinda thing also makes me really angry – as if this is something that has been done by Google to protect her “image” or whatever, then why couldnt the same have been done for Ruth Jeffreys as she was definitely more deserving of such treatment. Even after the TV show about Ruths problems aired, you could still find pics of her! (very easily too, although they do seem to mostly be gone now)

    So in a nutshell i guess im trying to say that sometimes people can talk dirt about you online, and if this is an incorrect statement and its causing damage to you or your brand, then people like us can help get it pushed so far down google its like it never existed – but if you are a rich celeb and mess up your lyrics live on stage, its not fair that you can just ring google and pay a shed load of cash to remove it.

  • Human Target – Season 3…. Hopefully

    During our last holiday to Rhodes (I’ve just realised i haven’t blogged about that!) we discovered a TV show called Human Target – its kind of a cross between the A Team, and James Bond.. With a bit of all the other action type dudes thrown in for good measure.

    It did at times come with a side order of cheddar, but all in all I loved it – so much so when I got home I watched the two seasons that were available -and I thought every episode was awesome, it even had some interesting co-stars popping up from time to time!

    After i’d watched them all I started looking into why the show had been dropped – and it appears that due to some bad episode scheduling (showing the episodes the same time as shows like American iDul) the show was simply cancelled to make way for something else. I found this really confusing to be honest as the show was ace and after some searching I found that it has a lot of great reviews dotted around the web too – which means a lot of people clearly enjoyed it!

    Then it kinda left my mind for a while due to there being no new episodes (and general getting on with life junk) until earlier today when I decided to look for any info that might suggest a season 3 – but the news literally stops shortly after it was cancelled only to be mentioned again in some other article about some other (not as awesome) shows doing really well (strangely enough the article mentions Human Target being a “highest rated drama”)

    So I figured I would do a blog post to see if I could get any Human Target fans to sound their trumpets and maybe make someone who can do something about it open their eyes to a TV series that with a few tweaks could be brought right back into shape and once again entertain millions of people (but mostly me)

    Also FOX needs to make a Human Target Season 3 as the only other series on TV I like is Spartacus, which coincidentally has just started the 3rd (well, 2nd, as the physical 2nd one was technically season 0 – coming before season 1) so I have lots of spare viewing time that could be filled with Human Target Goodness!!

  • Tidying up my online life

    It dawned on me a few weeks ago, that i have far too much junk littered about the internet. I set things up, forget about them, and then set some more shit up – and its gotten to the stage where I’m using a shit load of web-space, and not really doing anything with it.

    So i started by pruning my Facebook friends list first – removing anyone who I didn’t actually know, and i was amazed at how many people were on there that id never met, never spoken to and never even heard of!

    I’ve also been thinking a lot about who i am on the internet, or more like – what I’m referred to.

    I want to standardise my “Handles” on the internet, but do i choose Olly, or olstar?

    Here’s what’s standing in my way;

    Twitter – I love twitter, and despite not using it that much over the last few weeks i still love using it and love how it works etc. However, I’ve had to create a new “persona” on there as my usual names were all taken.

    I’d love the @olly twitter account as no one actually uses it – I’d even settle for @olstar which is also not used! In fact, nearly all the decent twitter aliases for people with my name are gone, and un-used! I wish the twitter peeps would sort it out and re-release all the inactive and unused names – IF YOU ARE READING THIS PLEASE SORT IT OUT!

    Domain Names – Now, for ages i’ve been totally happy with my domain name – i mean, 0lly.uk? It couldn’t get much better, could it?

    Well im afraid it could – thanks to the twitter generation, short domains and url shorteners have become a massive deal and some of them are tt.ly cool! (haha, see what I did there?) and it got me thinking about my name and my aliases and how I could use a international domain name to spell something cool.

    I decided that I needed http://ol.ly as it was the shortest and coolest domain name any Olly in the world would be proud to have, so i looked into it and it was owned by a guy called Ollie (yea, obvious i know) However – he didn’t spell his name with a LY he spelt it with an IE…

    So I started looking at it from a different perspective – What if I bought oll.ie, and swapped it with this guy who owned ol.ly?

    I contacted him, he agreed – so now i’m trying to secure oll.ie – and you would not believe the hoops i’m having to jump through to get it!

    Decisions, Decisions…

    My conclusion is that i need to get everything in one place, on one domain name, and all tied up with cherries on top. Im not too fussed about having all my images and photos on the net – in fact some of them are probably quite damaging to my character, and in all fairness could land me in a lot of trouble.

    So do i move everything over to olstar?

    Do i pursue my quest to get ol.ly? Or will using a Libyan Domain Name balls up my placement in the UK search results?

    Do i quit whining, leave everything on here and just forward my other domains to this one? (safely, of course  ;))

    Footnote: I do have olstar.co.uk – and it would probably make sense to just try and get that twitter name then im sorted.

    Ahhh dammit…