.net and other musings

I’m back and badder than ever. This time with even more poorly punctuated ramblings. So what have I been up to I hear you all (not) asking?

• Working on a couple of small ruby on rails gigs.
• Adding features to my very own top-secret sideline gig (hush hush!)
• Some .net bits with the Castle framework but of course.
• Helping a friend with a hosting startup. Purchasing and configuring various doses of servers, firewalls, switches, DNS, reverse proxies… I’ve certainly learnt a lot the last few months.

Not to mention I have a few interesting happenings coming down the pipeline so do stay tuned!

Sweet, use Sopcast to stream live premier & champions league football games (among other things) for free. Handy if you don’t have satellite or cable TV!

If you’re reading this via the  browser not the RSS feed you’ve probably noticed i’ve changed the theme. No great shakes just fancied something different

I’ve been trying to optimise a site for a friend’s driver training company recently, having never done much search engine optimisation before its been an interesting learning curve. I’ve been mainly optimising for Google seeing as though they drive the most traffic nowadays and the main points from my minimal understanding are as follows:

1. Being externally linked from other high ranking sites
2. Good page names and titles
3. Keywords appearing in the page content (sounds obvious I know)
4. Relevant (and not abused!) ALT tags
5. Content of hyperlink anchor tags being relevant keywords

I’ve added them in order of preference as far as I can tell. Anyone got any other tips for a quick win regarding SEO?

BTW: This post wasn’t just a needless ramble to justify linking the site from a (fairly) well ranking site

Check out this nifty little tool which displays previews of window contents when you hover over the corresponding button in the taskbar.

This is my first post from Ubuntu land! I'm currently running the Ubuntu Dapper Drake beta 6.06 Desktop CD inside VMWare Player. The beta is due for release around June time this year.

Have to say i'm very impressed by the whole LiveCD experience. Especially for evaluation purposes and when combined with the excellent (and free!) VMWare Player. I'll definitely install the full release OS on a spare partition when the time comes.

Copy the content below and save as a VMX file alongside the LiveCD ISO to run in VMWare Player.

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
memsize = "512"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-6.06-beta2-live-i386.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "LiveCD"
guestOS = "ubuntu"
nvram = "ubuntu.nvram"

workingDir = "."