Dominic "The Hodge" Hodgson» Technology

Vista Hates Drobo’s

Dominic Hodgson — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:28:08 +0000

We are having a bit of fun at the moment and its all down to vista…. I Think..Caius and I have a lot of stuff on the drobo, its currently floating at around 2TB of data, we recently formatted it, when you format a drobo you can select the filesize that you intend to reach, the max being… 16TB, we intend to get more storage whenever possible so 16TB was selected.. this worked fine for about 3 days… until it just died.

Whenever we plug it into a vista computer it panics… says theres a disk and then decides there isn’t and crashes “my computer”…

Mac OSX and Windows 7 do a better job but every now and then the filesystem refuses to be written to and a reboot is needed. We’ve just got a new drobo today (a replacement) so we will see if it works

Portable Virtualisation (via USB or SD Cards) I’m testing out strategies at the moment for running several...

Things To Do After You’ve Installed WordPress

Dominic Hodgson — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:20:02 +0000

I don’t consider myself an expert but I must have installed wordpress a couple of hundred times, there are some things that I do everytime, plugins I install and settings I follow, hopefully these will help some people.

Permalinks – I wish wordpress would do permalinks from the get go but I understand because of the multitude of servers they go on, they don’t work on all of them.

Recommended Permalink Structure : /%category%/%postname%/
(However if you think your blog should be in google news, use this one /%category%/%postname%-%year%%post_id%)

Feeds – Activate feedburner / feedproxy / whatever google feels like calling it this week, but activate it with mybrand, I’ve outlined how and why to use mybrand before but its a great way to keep track of your subscriber levels and find out a bit more about them.

Plugins -Wordpress now has this great ability to install plugins without going to the wp.org site, which means I don’t have to link to the plugin pages anymore I can just give you the name to search for in your installation, but because i’m a proper blogger now, I will .

Headspace2 - I used to use all in one SEO but I was recommended Headspace2 and switched immedialy, not only does it do the correct title tags, it also has some get extras like connection to the yahoo term extractor for tagging.

Feedburner Feedsmith – Handles all the redirection for you to feedburner, even works with mybrand

Twitpress – Automatically posts a New Blog Post message to twitter once, you’ve published

YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, the best related posts plugin I’ve seen so far to be honest

Subscribe to comments – this is a great plugin that allows people to get a notification when someone responds to a comment on a post, get to build up a bit of dialog

RSS Footer – Sticks your blog url on the bottom of each post in the RSS feed, perfect for defending against scrapers.

Permalink Redirect – redirects all the urls with funny shite at the end ?&= to the proper urls

Google XML Sitemaps - not 100% convinced but it can’t hurt

Thats it for now, I’m sure I`ll come back to this post and update it but is there anything that you do? any plugins you recommend, do you agree or disagree?… let me know

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Sheffield People

Dominic Hodgson — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:18:50 +0000

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9rDmGtCR_k 150 150] Yorkshire forward are have a competition with barcampsheffield to promotion sheffield.. you have to make a webpage / video or do something fun to promotion Sheffield.. here’s my entry, Related posts:Some People Have WAYYY Too Much Time [youtube:>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTo-wFfIXKo]... Related posts:

Some People Have WAYYY Too Much Time [youtube:>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTo-wFfIXKo]...

Version Control… Shouldn’t It Be Easier?

Dominic Hodgson — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 10:58:08 +0000

So i’ve recently drunk the Kool-Aid for version control, I’ve started using it for everything, thanks to the great guys at Slicehost, (help out the hodge by putting dominichodgson@gmail.com as your referral id) they’ve got some awesome subversion tutorials, but its just ….not streamline enough.

I’ve seen many web interfaces to subversion but there is just too much complexity there, heres what I want

To Update My Subversion Repo on each commit.
The server that my repo is on has a web server and that updates with the latest version
To have a decent web interface, where I can view the commits and differences online
To have a little button that says deploy that will automatically export the latest copy of the “trunk” to the live server

Heres where I am at the moment,

To Update My Subversion Repo on each commit.

But I’ve not found a tutorial that is

not out of date
not half finished
not too bloody complex and expect me to know everything about hooks, linux and monkey’s mating habits

So Blog readers, what’s the solution?, HELP!

On another note I love tortoise SVN, I honestly wouldn’t have taken to it so quickly without that program.

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Control Your RSS + Feedburner Feed

Dominic Hodgson — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:02:13 +0000

We’ve been running NorthPack for a couple of days now and I’m really happy with the progress, I have to say I’m quite suprised at the amount of people running feedburner (not that theres anything wrong with that) but its so…. visable

in a default feedburner set you your feed is at feeds.feedburner.com/yourFeedName, thats all well and good but what if you want to leave feedburner at a later date, maybe you’ve developed your own feedtracking service or you’ve decided to go without… you carn’t change that feed and you’ve lost all those subscribers…

When Google bought feedburner they made all the “pro” features completely free the best one of these has to be myBrand with a simple DNS entry you can have feeds.yourdomain.com/yourFeedName and have complete control over the links and the subscribers and if you feel at a later date you want to leave… you just create that subdomain and 301 people to the new url (which I also hope is on your domain name)

The Google Curse? Google has a habit of buying companies and trashing them…...
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Prelaunching Northcast… It’s Done!

Dominic Hodgson — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:13:16 +0000

Yesterday we (pre)launched Northcast, a podcast dedicated to the North tech industry, at the moemnt its just three of us sat around a table talking about what tech stories intrested us the most that week, but we have a lot of things in the pipeline for this…

The We I mention are Paul Stanton, Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett and of course ME!..

We had a good response yesterday from the preshow which was just to get Stanton and Taylor used to talking via a podcast and will be recording the next one… soonish

The real one launches in Jan with lots and lots of shiney (read: crappy) video until we can afford some decent stuff

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I Hate This Time Of Year

Dominic Hodgson — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:35:32 +0000

Seriously, It’s about a week or so before my birthday and a month or so before christmas and heather BANS me from buying anything incase she or someone she’s told has bought me it… but there’s SOO many goodies coming out in the next few weeks (or already out), of course theres the iPhone and iPod touch and the acer eee about there are about 10 product launches a day that tickle my fancy and at the moment, I carn’t have any (ok so I wasn’t going to fork out for an iPhone or touch anyway but thats not the point!)

At the moment theres a lot of stuff happening around here, I have a lot of personal sites that really need some attention and work has started to get really busy, I’ve tried not to talk about Stickyeyes on here much because I know the boss and other staff members take a peek every now and then and really didn’t want to put my foot in it (and I came close with my silly seo post ), but when the new site finally launches there might be some of the things I would publish on here going onto there, (I’m writing a post at the moment on the best wordpress SEO plugins that I use).

I’m at this point when I get home that I have so many things to do that I’m not quite sure what to work on first, I’m looking at starting a new podcast, I have 3 site ideas that are underway but need some cash to get coded and tarted up and a fe w other bits and bobs to do, I am hopeful that my order of two flat screen 17″ monitors will arrive tomorrow and they will be great to do work on, (dual monitors increase productivity, I know your reading this Craig )

See you at Paypal Innovate 2009! Well i’m home after a fantastic Manchester geek girl dinner...
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Silly SEO

Dominic Hodgson — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:31:37 +0000

I’ve been writing SEO Reports for the past few days for our prospect clients, it involves me looking at there site and writing what they are doing right and wrong, looking at the keywords they target an seeing how they rank compared to there competitors and a few other secret things I won’t tell you…

I’ve been writing this last one for an hour, I’m on tot he bit where I look at there site and make suggestions as to why they are having problems or how they can improve, these thoughts are stuck in a document which is “sales up” by our sales executive and sent off to the client…

I’ve been thinking, some clients have no idea what SEO is or anything about it, so they are taking my word as..well bible… I could probably write whatever I want in here and they would believe it to a certain extent, I wouldn’t do that of course but it was a funny thought ; I had a few ideas though

Google has taking a disliking to the letter L this month, if you have more than 4 occurances of the letter L this will hurt your rankings, for visibility we recommend using the capital I and the underscore for that effect I_, we are assured by Google this is only a temporary measure to stop spam
MSN and Yahoo have both given indications that if you link to them without linking to Google they will give you a slightly higher ranking than you had before as a way of saying thank you.
The terms you are trying to rank for only have a small amount of search traffic going towards them, try creating pages that optimise for such terms as “sex”, “viagra” and “rock and roll” whilst these search terms are unrelated you will bring in lots of traffic and are sure to convert at least some of them.

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Announcing The Development Of A New Site

Dominic Hodgson — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:57:19 +0000

www.searchosphere.net, a collection of resources to help you learn about search engines, SEO, SEM, social marketing, web opmisation and a few other things..

I’m looking for ideas and links to add to the site so if you have any then feel free to reply to this post.

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