Archive for January, 2006

I've finally gotten around to adding an image rotator script for the top header of this blog to rotate through a few different images. I'll be adding more once I've downloaded them off my mobile phone. For anyone who's interested in the PHP code:

$images = array(
   'paris-subway.jpg' => 'The Metro : Paris',
   'cube-houses.jpg' => 'Cube Houses : Rotterdam',
   'snow-trees.jpg' => 'Snow covered trees : Austria',
   'mountain-sunset.jpg' => 'Sunset over the mountains : Austria',
   'paris-sunset.jpg' => 'Sunset on the River : Paris',
   'wales-sunset.jpg' => 'Welsh Sunset'
);
// now shuffle the array items randomly
$filenames = array_keys($images);
shuffle($filenames);
// and pull out 3 images stored in the variables $image0, $image1 and $image2
for ($i = 0; $i < 3; $i++) {
   $thumb = "thumb".$i;
   $altxt = "altxt".$i;
   $$thumb = $filenames[$i];
   $$altxt = $images[$filenames[$i]];
}

Then all you need to do is reference these image variables whereever you want them i.e.

<img src="pics/<?php print $image0; ?>" alt="<?php print $altxt0; ?>" />

Thanks to JasonD on DDN for reminding me about the shuffle() function!

Just a few links to a few new things I've found…

First up is the Omea Reader, a free feed reader. Dave first started using this and was quite impressed. I have to say I prefer the layout far more than feedreader, it can download the comments too (if inline with the post), and it does other various stuff that I don't actually use. The main thing is that it doesn't crash as much as feedreader did, and it just feels nicer.

Whilst wondering around the web recently I came across SEO Refugee which is a site set up by a few SEO enthusiasts, along with a forum that's growing incredibly fast. The users there are very very good with SEO from what I've seen. I try to add a few posts here and there but I doubt my own knowledge compared to theirs so I tend to read more than I post there. But good links are constantly posted for various tools and articles.

And for checking those keywords I now bookmarked the Google Adwords Tool which is freely available (but well hidden). I've not used it yet for anything but I've heard it's results are better than the Overture suggestion tool, so perhaps use these two in combination with each other and then Wordtracker to give more feedback on the phrases found.

I noticed my visitors had risen today and yesterday on the osCommerce Templates site. Google and MSN have both finally indexed my web site and have been sending a few visitors in my direction. It's only indexed one page deep from the front page but at least it's a start.

And as an extra plus my adsense income for the day has risen quite a bit today compared to the past few days. After my major mistake with 4 pages the income had dropped slightly but now it's up higher than the usual daily average, so I'm quite happy with that.

Work has eased off a little. All of my clients are happy, satisfied that things are running according to plan. I seem to have managed to get 3 recruitment sites to redesign, one is for the company who I contract for, the other 2 have just come through recommendations. However it's great from one point of view as the foundations of the site such as the CMS are pretty much the same so I can just write up the code for one site and reuse it on the others with only very slight alterations needed. Dave's now quit his full time job to help me out due to the workload I have. He's already half completed a CSS layout for one site in a matter of hours, the rest will be finished tomorrow apparently! He seems to be settling into working from home at ease, I just have to push him occassionally to actually do some work. It's very easy to waste half a day faffing about on the web – this I know from experience, but right now I'm still very busy and there are plenty of things to do, which is all good.

I happened to find one of Google's many own blogs Buzz and they were talking about a new extension that Google has released for Firefox 1.5. Blogger Web Comments just sits in your status bar and for every page you visit it checks it's own blog search (not just limited to blogger blogs but anything in the blogsearch at Google) to see who else has commented and linked to that page. A great way to pick up on other comments about a particular page, and what I've just discovered… a great way to find out who is copying your content!!

I've found 2 of my posts from yesterday are creating content for other people. They've not tracked back to this site but copied the content off Feedster. Thankfully both posts link to this site at the bottom, and one still keeps the internal links intact however I'm not overly impressed. I don't mind people doing a trackback but not copying the whole content without any real remark of where it's from :x

I'll monitor the situation and decide if it gets any worse. It's only happened to 2 posts so far so we'll see how things go.

But besides that, go download Firefox and then go grab the extension at Google Tools.

Well to the best of my current ability! I've had to install a hack to allow internal category and archive pages display all post titles and not just the set number that is used for the front page (the past week I think). Whilst the main category, Daily Stuff, is a little full I'll try and stop duplicating posts in that to keep the number of posts down!

I've also amended the category pages so that you just see the date, post title and number of comments. I think this is a much better method for older posts to let people see it all in a more index style. I discovered that you can make a category page template seperate to the other pages and WordPress will still pick it up. I'm beginning to wonder if there could be a better way of listing out the typical 'path' taken by people installing and then designing with WP as the site itself doesn't seem to have anything like that and it's search function isn't too accurate for my tastes.

If anyone's more interested let me know and I'll give more details, otherwise I'll leave it at that!

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