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Wednesday, 02 July 2008 19:24 |
It almost feels personal, after having a web site at this location in one form or another for nearly two years, that Google last indexed me 2 months and 2 weeks ago. Don’t they know this is the epicentre of Kelsall, or that at least two of my buddies visit the site when I force them to? Do they not know that I update the content at least weekly with new photo collections and daily with fresh commentary?
I thought not.
So I put on my Dick Tracey style raincoat and hat, and went out on the investigative trail to discover why some huge American organisation didn’t take me too seriously.
It turns out that you need to do a few things to get noticed. Hiding text in documents and creating loads of meta tags buried within the confines of HTML (that’s the language of the web browser to you and me) is frowned upon and not the ‘correct’ way to do things. No it isnt.
 So over the last few weeks I diligently resubmitted the site toGoogle. Can you believe my despair when a week later I hadn’t been re scanned? How could all those people around the world find me in their favourite search engine? Who would know that I’d seen motorbikes at Oulton Park or had published an amazingly uninteresting selection of watery butterfly images from Colwyn Bay?
This was personal!
I signed up for Google Analytics, pasted the code they gave me into the web pages and sat back while the hits rolled in and googlebot trawled my site.
… and I waited …
… and I waited some more …
… then I gave up and went home.
This strategy wasn’t working for me. Another trawl over Google’s webmaster tips took me to the Google webmaster tools. Here I could see exactly when I was last scanned, and (so I thought) with a bit of prodding get scanned again.
Nope.
During my investigations I kept coming across this thing called a sitemap. I’d written it off as a map of the site for users to access so didn’t bother with it. I was wrong. Seems it’s important as it tells Google the layout of the web site, how often each component of it changes and when. All I had to do was go and create one of these in XML format and have Google look at it, and they’ll realise how important we really are.
Well they did. So far Google have seen my sitemap at least 24 times and been informed of changes to this web site on at least 10 occasions.
I still haven’t been scanned.
People of the world still don’t know that I went for a walk in Delamere Forest and took some pictures, or that I hid on a rooftop and took photographs of the Grand National crowds leaving Aintree. This was a disaster of gargantuan proportions!
Then my cunning plan was hatched…
So I signed up for context sensitive (that’s site relevant to you and me) advertising from Google. Heh, they’ll have to rescan me now to get the right context.
Google turned down my application because they didn’t like my address. Bah, foiled again.
A quick resubmit on the forms yielded a success email from my favourite web space advertisers a few hours later and I was in business. I cunningly placed some of Google’s advertising code at the bottom of two pages (of which this is one) and waited at the front door for googlebot to arrive. Then I waited some more, … and finally went to bed.
Well it’s now the following morning and I haven’t been scanned, indexed or … whatever.
So much for high speed computing!
Gone out to take some pictures…
Dave
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Wednesday, 02 July 2008 14:18 |
Had my first driving lesson yesterday. Well, it wasn’t really my driving lesson in the strictest sense, though I suspect that I learnt more than the driver under instruction.
So after my son had is first lesson with a ‘proper’ driving instructor I decided to throw caution to the wind and take him out on the road for some experience.
Holy shit! I learnt a lot.
Lesson #1: Right turns are harder then left turns.
Yep. I forgot this. Guess which way we turned on our first junction?
Lesson #2: Even the slightest incline is a huge hill to a learner.
Not only did I cover lesson #1 on the first junction, but it was ever so slightly up hill as well. Just not enough up hill for a regular driver to notice.
Lesson #3: Avoid the rush hour traffic.
This isn’t so much because there’s more traffic on the roads, but that everyone is in a hurry to get home.
Yep, so I learnt fast. My wife could tell I’d been on a roller coaster because I was apparently white when I got back. I’m pretty sure I’d aged quite a bit as well.
We also managed to educate some of the other road users as well. Like the time when we were trundling down a major A road at 40 miles per hour, and my lad asked why was that big truck so close to us, can’t he see our ‘L’ plates, and what should he do about it. He changed from 4th to 5th gear, but somehow missed and ended up in third gear with the car lurching suddenly. Next look in the mirror saw a bunch of traffic behind us by at least 20 meters. They stayed there for the rest of the time we were all on the road. Chalk up one victory to a learner.
The next task was the impending roundabout. “I only go left on roundabouts” he said. So we went left. That is, left towards a major crossroads that left us in front at the red light on a slight upward incline.
So I instructed my laddo in the art of moving ourselves off when the lights changed and after our searches to the left and right. Plenty of revs and let the clutch out purposefully.
We launched across the junction with a nice wheel spin that any drug dealing pimped up driver would have been proud of. All we had to do was to miss the cars opposite us and we were away.
This brought us to the next set of lights, and I thought, let’s get him onto the small country lanes where we can do less damage.
Wrong! I had the hedges coming in through my opened door window, then we had issues with oncoming traffic and narrow lanes, sharp left and right bends, more right hand corners, sweeping rolling roads and debris.
Well, we did arrive home in on piece.
And lesson number #4?
Driving instructors are worth the money!
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Sunday, 25 May 2008 00:00 |
I’m just wondering how many people can actually fit a modern saloon car into their garage?
I’m wondering this because I have never ever managed to get my car into a garage at home.
I believe that domestic garages have similarities to hard disks on a PC. No matter how big they are, you’ll always expand to fill all of the available space.
Take my PC at home. I built this last year to store my beloved photo collection on. Maybe I sized the internal hard disk wrong, because after about 6 months the drive was full. This necessitated the appropriate upgrade and the 60 GB drive was replaced with a whopping 120 GB unit.
What was I going to do with all this space?
I bloody grew in to it, that’s what happened!
Over the last year I’d somehow managed to loose some of the photographs I’d so diligently collected, probably during a machine rebuild forced on me when Windows began it’s annual slow down (something that seems to happen to me once a year), and I vowed that I’d never loose another digital image again.
So with this new 120 GB hard disk I was set to collect more and more images, good enough for a couple of years … or so I thought.
Two months ago the bloody thing filled up again.
Back onto Ebay and I’d acquired a nice looking 500 GB SATA 2 internal drive. Instead of replacing the current 120 Gb unit, I added this and it’s now just for photo storage.
The flippin things 40% full already!
So what am I doing wrong?
I revisited my workflow to see where the storage was going.
I’m shooting raw images at 13 Mb each. I shot 14,000 images over the last 2 months (sporting events, up to 1,000 a day) and deleted about a third of them. That computes to about 122 Gb, plus all the other images I already had.
That’s half a Terabyte of disk and I’m already halfway through it.
Maybe I need to get tougher and delete more images? At the moment I’m deleting blurred, out of frame (subject) or incorrectly exposed photographs, but with my current gear the success rate is very high, so I have more keeps…
 … and then I realised that my garage was the same!
It’s absolutely full of stuff that we need (yeah rite) to keep. It’s so bad that you can’t safely walk from one end to the other.
What’s worse, I’ve helped educate my kids and wife as well, and all their crap is in the garage.
And the solution?
I’ve ordered a skip, and it’ll be delivered on my driveway today:)
Dave
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Tuesday, 07 August 2007 00:00 |
It had to happen sooner or later. Eventually I’d get around to global warming and it’s effects on me. That is, if you believe all you hea.
I like to play outdoors and I love the summer. When it’s nice and warm, with a gentle breeze or still air I can go and get one of my model planes out and fly around. My newest additions to the fleet are park flyers. These are foam aircraft built with very light wing loadings. They fly slow and are very sensitive to turbulence. They are just so perfect for the lazy summer evenings that used to abound.
This year of course they haven’t seen the light of day. So it’s pissed down daily. We have new records for rainfall in the summer, and it’s all down to global warming.
Just cast your mind back a few thousand years. Can you hear the cries? “The lack of fires is causing global cooling”. “We need to burn more oil.” How were they to know that the ice age was coming and that it wasn’t Neolithic mans fault? What could they have done to prevent it? How did they cause it?
It seems to me as a reasonably intelligent member of the local community that we live on a planet, and that planet operates in cycles. We have the cycle of day and night, the cycle of seasons, the annual cycle. Forensic archaeologists (did I just make that up?) tell us that the planet has suffered in the past from both heat and cold.
So is it so unreasonable to assume that the planet heats up and warms down every now and then as well (unless you believe in creationism, in which case you’re on a different planet).
 I remember from my physics days at school a few choice phrases. Stuff like “for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction”, or that energy is not made, it is simply converted from one form to another. So as my small mind analyses this, I can understand that there is some price to pay for running a central heating boiler, switching on three bars of an electric heater or driving to work every day. Somehow, somewhere we must be paying for all that, but I’m just not sure it’s enough to plunge the planet into disarray, yet. I’d go so far to say that we’re probably just the cancer on the planet, and we may make things just a little bit worse than they might be, but not necessarily be totally responsible for everything, not all the time.
From what I can gather, the science of measuring global warming (or that big ice age) is a little immature at the moment. I have no doubt that it will improve in terms of accuracy and continue to gather momentum as time passes, but I can’t help but feel that were all being manipulated by some strange force out there.
Now who could possibly gain from all this?
I’m taxed to death. The nanny state has more involvement in my life that any other country. More laws are produced than ever before. We live in a surveillance society and have more cameras per citizen than any other country (don’t look at the aircam project; it’s exempt and just for fun), and we are about to bring in a new national ID card system. Well that’s all our problems solved isn’t it.
Footnote to employers: In order to help reduce my carbon footprint I am prepared and offering to work from home with immediate effect, right now and forever. That means that you won’t see me, and I wont have to look at you.
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