Continue Reading »

Before saying anything else:
Avoid Orange Home Broadband service like the plague if you use either Microsoft Outlook or Windows Vista.

Having spent the last 3 hours on the phone with OrangeHome (0870 010 2462), with 5 different Technical representatives, 1 hour with my techie (Web Host) and untold combinations in the effort to get my mail to send from Outlook on the Windows Vista platform, I have finally given up. It seems to be a lost cause.

Not only is my outgoing mail being blocked at Orange (built on Wanadoo), but they insist that the problem lies with everyone else. Interresting seeing as my set-up was working absolutely fine on Outlook from my laptop running XP (Service Pack 2) until I switched to Orange Broadband - ‘Unlimited’ (yes, you may now laugh. I am.)

So, No mail from either my Vista Desktop or my XP laptop; in fact the only way that I can send any mail at all is using WebMail or the mail account provided to me by OrangeHome. It would only be fair to say that the e-mail account Orange provied me with will send mail from Outlook Express though. Unfortunately the only way that I can send e-mail through my 12 other accounts is now via a web browser at my host’s WebMail service.
It goes without saying that I will be switching ASAP.

Be warned, Orange Broadband, ‘unlimited’ has provided in my opinion, not only the worst internet service ever in the UK, but also the worst customer service I have ever experienced.

ClaraNet, here I come ;)

OK, so the search engines cannot read any of the content embeded in flash… so you have 2 options:
Continue Reading »

I had some problems embedding Youtube and Google Video to this site, but eventually worked out a simple solution for both. Paste the following into your editor (ensuring the rich editor is turned off, or alternative temporarily disable javascript if you are using Firefox with the ‘NoScript’ extension)

<embed style=”width: 212px; height: 257px;” id=”VideoPlayback” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” xsrc=”web-address-of-the-video-you-want-to-view” mce_src=”web-address-of-the-video-you-want-to-view” flashvars=”">

That’s it… Simply replace ‘web-address-of-the-video-you-want-to-view’ with either youTube or Google Video url and set the appropriate video dimensions.

htaccess is an Apache thing, not an NT thing. There are similar capabilities for NT servers, though in my professional experience and personal opinion, Apache is best. But that’s not what we’re here for.

htaccess files must be uploaded as ASCII mode, not BINARY. You may need to CHMOD the htaccess file to 644 or (RW-R–R–). This makes the file usable by the server, but prevents it from being read by a browser, which can seriously compromise your security. htaccess files affect the directory they are placed in and all sub-directories, that is an htaccess file located in your root directory (yoursite.com) would affect yoursite.com/content, yoursite.com/content/contents, etc. Continue Reading »

Ok, so a mate of mine asked me just yesterday if having a lot of outbound links on his website would help him rank. The hard and fast answer is no. The discussion continued and he went on to point out directory pages that ranked well for his marketplace. The relevancy here was that he had often been approached by some of these directory companies asking him if he would be interested in buying a listing on their directory site. He thought it would be a good idea to create such a site as a way of earning some extra

Continue Reading »

I was surprised to hear that YPN were giving away $50 to new subscribers of the network and thought I’d take a look even though I’m based in the UK. As far as I was aware, they had not yet launched the Yahoo Publisher Network in the UK, so it was a surprise for me to find that following the link to the US publisher registration page and editing the url to a .co.uk extention allowed me to register from the UK, thanks to a friendly redirect. Not only was it available to the UK, but they were also giving away a whopping £100 in click-credit! Continue Reading »

They are by far the worst hosting company. They make it impossible cancel and account, and if you don’t do it correctly they will keep billing you. Think you’ll be ok when your credit card expires don’t worry they will keep billing you and eventually refer you to collections. When you call to speak to a supervisor and tell them to cancel an account you aren’t using anymore and is in collections, they still won’t cancel it. They will however keep sending you an email to an address that no longer is in existence and refer you to their online web form. Continue Reading »