In December I setup a SEO (search engine optimization service) called Budgetseo.org with the aim of getting websites found on google for a phrase, significantly cheaper than other seo services.

Of course, being a SEO site, getting found is just as important for my business website, so I had to do my magic on my own site (known as “Eating your own doig food”) for the phrase budget seo (clicking this will take you to that search in google.com), it’s on the first page results out of nearly 70 million. Result!

I work for a large organisation that is a bit paranoid about its network. We have internet but it’s pre-screened by Websense and many sites are blocked including links via url shorteners such as bit.ly and wired.com context.ly. Now when even Microsoft.com is using url shorteners, it’s going to diminish teh usefullness of

Having trouble upgrading your Nuget Package Manager? If you get the error described in Microsoft’s explanation, their advice isn’t enough. After uninstalling it from the control panel, it is still present (yup!) and still won’t let you upgrade. “Zombie like it still exerts a malign influence even after death…”

Here’s what you need Close down Visual Studio. Look for C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0Common7IDEExtensionsMicrosoft CorporationNuGet Package Manager
and you’ll see the folder for the older Nuget version; something like 1.5.20902.9026. Just delete it. Now you can upgrade. Simples!

In boardgames the phrase horizontally or vertically but not diagonally crops up frequently. As in “these pieces can move” or the “squares are connected. “, so I’ve taken the latin for connected asnd sideways aptus and oblique, portmanteau’d them and shortened them to aptoblique. So if two pieces can move aptobliquely they can move horizontally or vertically but not diagonally.

This is a genuine screen shot of the first page of results showing it in 2nd place.

Out of curiosity I searched for the phrase writers q & a on Google.com yesterday. (Tuesday November 10th 2010). This is the writers.im domain I had registered on Friday 5th November 2010 and setup Q2A over the weekend. Depending on which PC or iPhone I look on, it ranges from 1st to 9th (i.e. on the first page) out of 17 million.

Try it yourself- search on Google (or just click writers q and a).

Of course realistically it doesn’t matter where it comes in search results if those results aren’t what people are searching for. For instance if I search Google for writers then http://writers.im does not appear in the first ten pages. I wasn’t expecting it to. I was just amazed that a new domain/website could get a very high search result in 5 days especially for a .im domain.

Thanks to ShoeString Laces Ltd for a very fast turnround. I ordered two pairs of shoelaces on Thursday and they arrived today. If you need shoelaces, I recommended them. From a happy customer!

Before getting an iPhone 4 I upgraded my 3G to IOS 4 and used it for several weeks and noticed that sometimes when charging it, the battery indicator didn’t update, even after a couple of hours or all night. This seems to happen when charging from the mains.

It’s either a bug with the IOS 4 software particular to 3G or there’s something not right between chargers.

How to Correct the Indicator
(1) Reset the iPhone. i.e. hold both buttons down until the “slide to power off” swipe appears and then switch it off and restart.

or

(2) Plug it into a Computer with iTunes and charge it.

I saw an article on the Home Office website about why we need them, the truth is we don’t (or the National Identity Register either) so I wrote an article about Why we need ID cards – We don’t. The idea is to try and knock the Home Office article off the top spot for the phrase why do we need id cards. Feel free to link to my article, if you do please include that phrase in the link.

This is the linking html you can use.

Why we need ID cards