Category: Work/Technical

  • New websites new ideas

    We’re always thinking of new ideas and ways to fill our time (hah, what time?) and we have recently been on another domain name purchasing spree which has lead to me sitting down and installing a few blogs so that we can launch a few new websites.

    They are mainly motoring related, and they focus on things such as news, product reviews and online sales for different aspects of the modified and performance car market.

    The first is our site that is aimed at beating the credit crunch and showing the pathway to cheap motoring. It will have info on petrol prices, cheap road tax and links to low tax bracket, cheap cars to buy! Plus many other ways to save money on motoring. The site is called Daily Runabout and has only just been started so bear with us while we start the content flowing.

    The next site is aimed more at the buying of certain modified and performance car parts. Everything from alloy wheels to bodykits, even bonnet pins all displayed in a logical format that guarantees no more than 3 clicks to find the product you require. There will be news and updates posted on there too so be sure to check up regularly! Modified Parts Trader hopes to help you find cheap car parts and help you modify your car for less!

    Our next site is one that is aimed more at the alloy wheel market. Its called Rims4u and was originally (around 2000-2002) an alloy wheel refurb website, but they must of gone bust or something. It is now the source for alloy wheel information. New releases, industry gossip and everything a good rim addict needs to fulfil their needs.

    Nearly there, yes – i have been busy!

    The next website is the final modified car related one. Its taking the online modified car part scene from a totally different angle. Its an auction powered site that is like a car boot sale but just for bits to mod your motor! Eventually we would like to take the idea to a location one day and actually have a car boot sale with just modified cars with old/spare parts that we all have (and we all have at least a shed full) and get some cash back for that old crap! Modified Car Boot Sale has landed! Bear with us while we finish it off though.

    The final site for now is one we have been meaning to set up for a while. 123-reg have been our domain registrar for a very long time. We have had a lot of problems with them over the years and most of these problems have been documented on blogs here there and everywhere. It suddenly dawned on me that these blog posts could warrant there own site, so we made one! 123-reg blog! If you have a 123-reg horror story then please head on over, contact us through the site and we’ll give you access so you can add stuff to your hearts content!

    Thats it for now guys, but we have a few more planned soon – one of them is a biggun! Muhaha!

  • My Email Migration Journey

    Everyone has email. Some people access it via a blackberry, iphone/iphone 3g or other internet capable mobile phone, some people use outlook, thunderbird or one of the other desktop email clients. Then there are those of us who use things like gmail, hotmail so that you can access your mail easily anywhere in the world.

    When i first started using the internet (over ten years ago) i used things like claramail and hotmail – just because they were free and easy to use. I then started actually messing about with the internet, building websites and learning about domain names and pop3 etc. I then took the logical step (at the time) to outlook. I had also started an IT job and needed something more professional that came with calendar sharing options.

    Outlook was good, i had folders and filters set up so that when mail came in it was delivered to the right box and i even had a good spam filter called ihatespam. It seemed to work pretty well at the time from what i can remember.

    I soon grew tired of outlooks limitations, i wanted my mail with me all the time! So i got someone to invite me to gmail – I quickly registered my usual username@ gmail address. I was quite lucky as it was early gmail days so i managed to get the address i wanted.

    I loved gmails interface straight away. They had a totally different approach to how you store your mail, plus you use a google search to find your mail, so looking for things deep and buried (which i often do) became a sinch! I simply forwarded @maxxd email addresses to @gmail then set the @gmail “reply to” address to the @maxxd domain and you have a loop. It worked well until my server was down as it broke the forwarder, but i suppose thats true for most peoples email.

    I used gmail for many years, and ended up with about 10 different addresses for different things, when i suddenly hit a wall when looking for some old emails that i needed to clear a burning question i had in the back of my head. My emails didn’t quite go far back enough, it was literally a few days out. So i looked at ways of extracting my emails from the mail files i had hung on to from the early days.

    I soon located a copy of outlook, set it up then replaced the mail files and hey presto, i had my mail. I had got it into my head that it would be a good idea to copy all that across to thunderbird, and pull all my gmail emails from gmail down to thunderbird too, so i have everything in one place.

    All was good for a while, apart from maxing out my hard drive and having to move the local thunderbird mailfile located. Oh and then, my laptop died. And i was without every single email i had ever received (and kept).

    Bollocks.

    I quickly switched email forwarders back on to how i had them set up when i used gmail previously, in order to catch any new mail i received, and i continued to use it like this while i sorted a new charger unit for my laptop. Once that was sorted i powered the laptop back up and started researching the best way to actually store all this info and have reliable professional email system.

    We decided to go back to google, and try out google apps. We made the changes to the dns so that the domain emails go to googles servers, set the accounts up and cracked on with it. It seems to work really well, and its customisable. The only problem i find is when i need to log in from a random pc i have to piss about as i haven’t set the custom url thingy up yet – but that’s just my fault.

    As i wanted all my emails in one place, i looked to find a way to get emails from thunderbird BACK to gmail! I located a really helpful set of guides here and here that enlightened me on the best way to do this successfully. It works well, but WARNING – DO NOT log in to another gmail account in your browser on that pc until the copy process has completed. I couldn’t figure out why it kept failing at first but it soon dawned on me. Also dont forget gmail has restrictions on attachment sizes so that can always be a reason if it keeps crashing or failing.

    Anyway, im pretty much in the last stages of moving the emails back, im on over 11,000 in one and over 2000 in the other, with emails dating back to 2002.

    The next step is to do some work on the servers to spruce them up a bit. Great stuff.

  • Different google results in different places?

    We do a fair bit of SEO work for ourselves and also our clients, so we monitor the search engines and check the positions of our clients in the results when searching for their chosen search terms.

    We do SEO work for Wheelworx and they wanted to be on the front page of google when someone searched for Alloy Wheels. We have found that the sites move on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day. We have had our client up to position one, then a few weeks later down to position 10.

    I checked it today, and on my computer they were at position 3. I told my business parter to check and they were 5th on his computer. How can this be?

    We both checked the world wise search, and the UK search on google. And both were 3rd on mine, and 5th on his. How can there be such a difference in the results even though he is literally down the road from me?

    It makes it very hard for us to do reports for our clients as we are never sure if when they click on the links in the emails they will see the same results we do!

    Anyone got any ideas how all this can be?

  • How the hell does eMule work then!

    I thought it was about time to get some kind of p2p application so that i could get the odd track here and there when someone requests it. I use torrents for everything at the moment – and its not the best for single tracks etc.

    So i did some browsing and read some forum posts about the best p2p applications around at the mo. The general word seemed to be that eMule was one of the better ones as many had fake files on and spyware etc. So, i downloaded it!

    After half a hour of messing about with my netgear router adding shit into it i finally got into the program…. Oh!

    You have to connect to servers and then download from them or something? So i tried to connect to some servers and some did let me on. Most wouldnt, and the ones that would didnt seem to allow me to download anything.. that is if the one i connected to actually brought any results up at all!

    Im sure there is a perfectly good explanation for this.. im probably doing something wrong. But god damm is that program annoying!

    Somebody help me! haha