I figured the issues surrounding Google right now, and the problem with the site: operator where publicised enough not to warrant me reiterating the problems. Right now it doesn't seem like anyone knows what's going on with this chaos. Matt Cutts says there's not a problem, yet a lot of people seem to be having problems. I've had redesigns of sites go live and their rankings disappear, I've had another site, with a hypen in the domain, drop 2000+ pages to just 2 and now 1 page, I've had clients asking why their new pages aren't being indexed. So in my opinion there's still a big problem going on.

However today I came across a bizarre issue. I know the site: operator isn't working too well on hyphenated domains or domains with a trailing forwardslash. However I've recently moved my osCommerce Templates site to my UK hosting server to get it into the localised results for the UK too. Today I thought I'd check in Google UK for the site, to see if it was indexed. The first page showed up. So I clicked the "Find web pages from the site www.oscommercetemplates.net" and the result was

Your search – site:www.oscommercetemplates.net – did not match any documents.

That's strange, as I just found the domain in the UK search results!

So now that I've syndicated all four of my blogs into one page at http://www.sarahfreelance.co.uk, I've now also created the RSS feed for all of these, so that if you want to subscribe to the feed for all 4 you can do with one single file at http://www.sarahfreelance.co.uk/feed.php.

The only issue I've got is that when you view the RSS feed in a browser it doesn't display like RSS feeds usually do. But it does work as I've tested it. If anyone can shed any light on the RSS display issue I'd appreciate it

Matt's been busy today and tagged me.

I AM: very daft at times
I WANT: a quiet life
I HATE: mushrooms, they're everywhere
I MISS: my friends and family
I FEAR: death
I HEAR: everything
I WONDER: if it gets easier
I REGRET: nothing, I wouldn't be where I am now if I didn't have my past
I AM NOT: a machine, do clients not realise this?
I DANCE: very badly
I SING: to my favourite tunes, or in the car alone
I SEE: trees of green, red roses too
I CRY: very easily. Especially at sad parts in movies/tv
I AM NOT ALWAYS: up to it
I MAKE WITH MY HANDS: lots of words appear on the screen
I WRITE: long posts apparently
I CONFUSE: myself more than others
I NEED: an assistant
I SHOULD: be exercising daily
I START: too many websites
I FINISH: around midnight

And to pass on to 3 randomly pulled from my feedreader (sorry guys)

Chris H
Sam
Alex

Matt's been lucky enough to have a demo of the new Samsung Q1 tablet and has written up his Review on it.

I have to admit I'm still tempted to get a mini laptop or tablet. Just because my own laptop is very heavy and the battery life isn't great either. Something that I could use to remotely access my laptop (within the house of course), so that if I'm upstairs or sitting on the couch I can use something a lot more lightweight.

However I should really start making a profit this year first!

Today I was helping out a friend, looking into why his bandwidth had shot up since March, when there's been no difference in visitors, page views and hits. After a lot of trawling through AWStats I discovered 17GB worth of images being transferred, but I couldn't pinpoint which ones were causing the problem until I opened Webalizer.

Now I'm not a fan of Webalizer usually, the stats it reports seem inaccurate, it's very hard to read, it doesn't give you the good information that AWStats does, however for once it gave me exactly what I needed. After a quick look I found the top 10 URLs by KBytes, and this showed me the top bandwidth using file (at a massive 14GB) was an animated gif of 881kb! Change it to a static image and save it as optimised and that would reduce to around 20kb max, just 350MB bandwidth.

That's a big saving when it comes to bandwidth costs.

So Webalizer isn't totally useless.