Archive for the 'Web' Category:

As part of Google’s 10th Birthday celebrations, they’ve re-instated their oldest search index from 2001.

It’s interesting to see how both search engine algorithms and the internet has evolved in the few years since.

So far, I’ve found that I didn’t exist on the Internet in 2001, facebook was unheard of and wikipedia didn’t feature as highly in the search results as today.

Google’s open source Chrome browser has been released!

Naturally, being a web developer I was itching to get my hands on the new browser, mainly to see how it performs compared to the other popular browsers available and more importantly to see if my sites worked well enough to not warrant more browser snagging.

Although the browser is in the beta stage (isn’t everything these days?), its performance exceeds IE7, Opera and Firefox on many tasks. Javascript is the most noticable improvement - with Google Mail and Reader zipping along 50+ times faster than IE7.

Chrome does have a few flaws, to be expected with a new release - such as the lack of a Google Toolbar, poor accessibility and numerous bugs already spotted by bloggers across the ‘net. But, its simplicity and forward thinking more than makes up for it.

Something that Mozilla, Microsoft and the likes are probably kicking themselves about right now, is that Google’s Chrome handles tabs independantly - each within its own process. For those of us using 10’s (even 100’s) of tabs simultaneously, we’ll appreciate this feature the most. Ever had numerous pages open at once, only to have one of the tabs crash on you, bringing down the whole browser as it does so? Chrome solves this along with other single-threaded/process issues.

Time will tell if Chrome will build up a user-base to rival IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. I’m currently using it alongside Firefox/IE7 at home and may end up replacing the latter permanently if Chrome meets all my browsing needs.

For other developers out there, you’ll also be pleased to hear that it uses an existing rendering engine behind the scenes - WebKit (as used by Apple’s Safari), which should mean that if you’ve already checked your site(s) in Safari, then you shouldn’t need to alter much else to be Chrome compliant.

Let me know if you’re trying out Chrome and if you’ll be using it long-term…

Today we upgraded our L 10MB Virgin Media Cable Broadband to their XL package, with speeds up to 20MB! We also opted for the XL phone and also XL TV packages, all for £56!

Thinking we’d be waiting a few days until the upgrade, I continued surfing the ‘net as normal. However, after another trip to Speedtest.net, I found that the speed hike had already taken place:

Bearing in mind before it hit around the 8MB[500kb/s] mark (10MB package), the extra throughput is instantly recognisable. Everything is instant, no lag, no delays. So, slickhouse.com (and other sites hosted here) will reach you even quicker.

Virgin Media have come on leaps and bounds since the NTL days; whereas the latter’s customer services left a lot to be desired, Virgin Media are fantastic and very helpful. Also, the fact that Samuel L. Jackson regularly fronts their TV ads also helps. Fibre Optic broadband is super fly.

I’ll no doubt be posting again in the coming weeks, regarding Virgin Media - as our V+ box is to be installed soon. It’ll allow us to record 2 channels, whilst watching the third, all in HD-goodness. About time too - as we regularly miss our favourites.

I knew it was coming, but didn’t know exactly when…

Virgin Media are in the process of transferring the account to myself, part of which involves temporarily switching off the broadband connection, whilst they then setup a new connection in the new account holder’s name.

Fortunately their Customer Services are very helpful and knowledgeable - who during the first call confirmed that the broadband had been disconnected. The second call involved them updating the information for the cable modem, which required the MAC address.

So, everything is up and running again and the back-log of my emails are slowly creeping in. We’re going to upgrade the account soon to the triple XL, which includes 20MB broadband amongst others. I’ll let you know if doubling the speed makes any noticable difference.

Users of WordPress who have recently upgraded to version 2.5.1 should double check their RSS feeds! It’s taken me nearly 6 weeks to spot that my Google Reader hadn’t updated with the latest entries/comments from slickhouse.com!

Knowing that plenty of comments and a handful of posts had been made after May 1st, I started looking for the cause of the problem. Initially I thought it was due to the move from my shared Linux hosting to dedicated Windows hosting (at slickhouse). However, trawling through server logs showed that slickhouse had migrated long before then.

The next step was to work out what files (if any) had changed. Unfortunately 4 things occured at the start of May - upgrading to the version 8 theme; moving MySQL to another dedicated server; updating the permalinks within the database and upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1

A few Google searches later (after exhausting the first 3 things) found that many others had experienced problems with their RSS feeds after upgrading to version 2.5.1 - a bug that to this day still appears to be un-fixed.

However, there is a solution. You need to update all links to your RSS feed from /wp-rss2.php to /feed/. For the comments, /wp-commentsrss2.php becomes /comments/feed/ - much friendlier! If you’re using Feedburner (highly recommended) then you’ll also need to update the URL to your feeds within your account.

Within the WordPress PHP theme code, you can call these links using:

<? php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>
<? php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>

This is a temporary solution until the WordPress development team come up with a fix to the bug, however many may switch to these URLs permanently for their RSS feeds, or at least until they break again. Let me know if you too have encountered empty feeds. And for those wanting to subscribe to the slickhouse.com feeds - links are in the top-right (hover your mouse over the RSS icon).