I got a bit of a shock this morning when I realised google had gone black. I seriously thought that something was wrong with my computer, maybe a weird insternal style sheet or something! Well as it turns out its Earth Hour later today – from 8pm local time, when we should all turn out lights of to save electricity and raise awareness of global warming. google one Google!

Interestingly the UK version of this site has the following information not shown on the US version:

How green can you be? The UK’s carbon footprint is over 500 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Individuals account for 45% of this. Calculate your carbon footprint and find out how you can reduce it by turning off unused lights and other carbon-reducing actions.

Indeed, on the US version there is no link to the carbon foot print calculator, I wonder why? National politics maybe?

Well here is something I was sure was impossible until the other day. I managed to use a remotely hosted include file in one of my pages. The reason I did this was because all of the coding needed to connect to a database on another site. I think the only reason it worked though is because although the code was on another site, it is on the same server. Still, it worked for me!

Have you tested your data backup recently? No, chances are that you and most other computer users don’t even back up, let alone test the backup.

While computer speeds and raw processing power increase almost exponentially along with storage capacity, scant or little regard as to the data that is actually stored, created and edited on the computer are thought about.

In fact approximately 94% of all data loss situations are avoidable with little investment required.

How to avoid data loss

1. Backup.
Hard drive storage capacities have increased hugely over recent years, so finding a storage capacity that will fit with your requirements is rarely a problem, however the manufacturer of the media plays a significant role within the longevity and reliability, and as such Xytron recommend Seagate storage as the most reliable media today, this statement is based on actual data recovery jobs based on may years of analysis of all jobs received from all manufacturers. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi and Welcome

Apparently in 2007 blogs are going to peak, meaning after that they will decline. As a web designer I have decided I don’t want to miss out and have decided to build up a blogging empire! I have 4 main objectives in writing these blogs as listed below:

1. As another creative outlet and a means to share ideas with other people

2. To generate traffic to help boost all of the other sites I build

3. To possibly generate some revenue through google adsense and other advertising

As this is the first post, probably no one will be reading this except myself and possibly few search engines, but over the course of the next couple of months I am going to employ various techniques and strategies to boost the amount of traffic. I will be listing these techniques and ideas here in the hope that someone else will find them useful.

In this post I want to talk about something I only found out about the other day, dynamic sub domains. As you probably know, this site itself is hosted on a sub domain, http://blog.voodoochilli.com. The actual domain www.voodoochilli.com is my company website and the blog part is the sub domain. I know from experience that sub domains can rate very highly search engine wise, and they are a very cheap alternative to buying a fully qualified domain as there are no extra registration costs (although your hosting company may charge you a set up for a sub domain)

Dynamic sub domains means that you can generate these on the fly using a .htaccess file. First though you have to make sure you have wildcard dns turned on for your domain. You can test this by typing anything.yourdomainname.com and if you don’t get a 404 page the chances are this is already set up. Once you have this in place you need to look into .htaccess.

Heres an example of a .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourwebsite.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([^.]+)\.yourwebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /path_to_your_site/httpdocs/work_out.php?url=%1

Remember: This file must be called .htaccess exactly, with no file extension; when you upload it to your server it will probably be invisible so keep a backup!

The .htaccess file will then send the variable $url with the sub domain, so for example if you type in:

http://test.yourwebsite.com

This will translate to (but not be visible as)

http://www.yourwebsite.com/work_out.php?url=test

On one of my sites the work out page checks the MYSQL database for the username and simply brings up the profile for that person. As far as a visitor is concerned we are actually at http://test.yourwebsite.com. There are other ways of doing this, but after looking it up this seems the easiest.

After doing a bit of search engine performance research I have found out that the first ever post, the one about creating dynamic sub-domains is bringing in the most visitors. This makes sense to me as its a technical query, the sort of thing I myself might look for on the web.

This has made me realise that for this blog to be successful I really need to concentrate on content. Ok this might not be the prettiest blog on the planet, but I think a fresh new design can wait while I build on serving better content and getting in more visitors.

I am going to have a little think now on what I can write up that might be useful to someone.