Its been rumoured for ages but its finally happened, Yahoo and Microsoft have tied together and obviously the goal is to combine their forces to take on Google.
“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,”
Said Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft.
If you are struggling to connect to your IMAP mailboxes but other machines on the same network are working fine, then chances are you are hitting the rather restrictive max connections per IP setting that is the default with Courier IMAP and Plesk. As standard it is limited to only 4 connections per IP. For me that was taken up by one machine connecting to 2 inboxes and also running a mail notifier system (which of course doubled up the connections).
After nearly tearing my hair out, I stumbled across the following posts:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/259/(dv)+HOWTO:+Raise+Courier-IMAP+Connections
http://blog.makeitcomplete.com/2008/11/increase-the-number-of-connection-for-courier-imap-in-plesk/
And 30 seconds later I’m connected. I’m bound to hit this issue again in the future so I have added this post as a reminder.
vi /etc/courier-imap/imapd
I changed MAXDAEMONS from 40 to 80 and MAXPERIP from 4 to 40.
/etc/init.d/courier-imap stop /etc/init.d/courier-imap start
Sorted
Edmonds Commerce is very pleased to announce the launch of our new link building service.
Any site that wishes to rank well in the search engines for competitive keywords needs to have a link building campaign as an important part of it’s SEO strategy. If you are looking to outsource your link building, it is important that you use a company with a deep understanding of SEO. We can offer this to you.
You need to take care choosing your link building service as there are numerous potential pitfalls and mistakes that can be made with a link building campaign and it is all too easy to waste your money on worthless or even counter productive link building strategies.
It is for this reason we have decided to launch our link building service, offering you peace of mind based on the trust that we have built up as a web development company and with the quality and reliability that our development customers already enjoy.
If you are interested in outsourcing your link building to Edmonds Commerce, simply drop us an email or alternatively give us a call on 0844 357 0201
What’s Involved?
We will ask you for a monthly budget and will work with you to choose some keywords to target. We will then use this budget to build the maximum quantity and quality links possible for you, to the high standards we demand.
What we ask from you as the client is simply a monthly commitment of a set budget to build these links. We strongly believe that a link building campaign should be consistent and permanent rather than a short sharp spike every now and then. For brand new sites there is an argument that an initial burst of link building can be beneficial, primarily to help get the site spidered, but in the longer term a steady stream of new inbound links is much better.
As an initial budget we ask for a minimum of £100 per month. Of course you can spend as much as you want, but its more important that is is sustainable so choose a price that is affordable. If that is a bit too much for you, we suggest you look into link building for yourself. Note we really emphasise that you must be able to sustain this price on a monthly basis for at least 6 months. We do not believe or advise in flash in the pan SEO campaigns and strongly suggest implementing a consistent and long term SEO strategy.
How Quickly Will it Benefit the Site?
SEO is a long term strategy with a delayed gratification. There are short cuts and possibilities to shoot to the top, but these techniques (often referred to as ‘black hat’) are not recommended if you are looking for something reliable and long term. How quickly the new links will start to benefit your site is hard to judge with precision and of course it depends on other factors such as the SEO of the actual site pages themselves and how competitive your particular keywords are. As a general idea though, we would expect to see benefits within a couple of months or so. That said, we are seeing nearly instant benefit to some of our clients who have established sites. It seems they just needed that little extra push for the search engines to really dig into them.
Are there Other Thing’s My Site Needs for SEO?
Yes link building is only one aspect of a successful SEO campaign. More important than link building is ensuring that the site itself is optimised. This is already something that Edmonds Commerce offers as a service. This is kind of SEO comes under the umbrella term of ‘on site’ or ‘on page’ SEO.
Another important factor in SEO is having quality original and keyword rich textual content on your site. Writing search engine friendly text does not require any particular specialist or technical knowledge other than a broad understanding of the principles of SEO and of course a flair for writing helps! We will gladly advise you on how to go about writing optimised content and can give you some pointers on how to improve your content.
If you would be interested in outsourcing your search engine optimised textual content creation do get in touch as we are considering adding this to our portfolio of services at some point in the future.
What is Page Rank?
Often you will hear the term page rank (often abbreviated to PR). This refers to Google’s Page Rank system. This system gives each page on the internet that Google is aware of a score from 0 to 10. The best score is 10 and 0 is of course the lowest. There are some pages that Google is not even aware of.
Very roughly speaking, Google scores these pages in terms of how many links from other sites are linking to the specific page. If there are lots of other pages linking to this page, the page rank for this page will be higher. Also, PR is passed on. So if your page has lots of links from pages that have a high PR then its likely that your page will have a high PR. Conversely if all of the pages linking to your page have a PR of 0, or worse aren’t even known by Google at all, then your PR is likely to be low.
Why does PR Matter?
Generally speaking, if there are two pages about the same subject and they are both equal in terms of their ‘on site’ SEO then the page with the higher page rank will rank higher in the search results than the page with lower page rank. That’s it basically, its a factor in determining which pages should be displayed higher in the results. It is by no means the only factor but it is definitely involved.
How do I Sign Up for the Link Building Service?
If you would like to sign up for the link building service with Edmonds Commerce, simply get in touch with us today and we can discuss. It would be helpful if you could have an idea of the monthly budget you would like to use. We will ask you for an initial commitment of 3 months. We are totally sure that after 3 months you will want to maintain the service as a permanent arrangement, steadily improving your search engine presence as a long term sustainable strategy.
You can either email us or give us a call on 0844 357 0201
One of the really cool and powerful features of Magento compared to other more traditional ecommerce platforms is the way that product information is handled. On a traditional system you will likely have one or a small number of tables to store product information. For each element of product information there is a column on these tables. This might be things like price, weight, model code etc etc.
But lets imagine that you sell T shirts. So you decide that you want to add a new column to your system to store the following bits of info:
size
material
male/female
Ok no problem, you add these columns to your table, modify your administration system and front end to display this extra info. Easy enough. You also decide to modify your search page so that people can search by T shirt size, material or mens/womens so your search is much easier to use.
However, lets say you find a new supplier for footwear. You want to add all these new products to your system but you also want to be able to store the extra information related to shoes, for example:
UK Size
European Size
Upper
Sole
Of course you can go ahead and add a bunch more columns to your table and store this info. However, now you have the issue that you need to edit your front end to only display the shoe related info for shoes and only the T shirt related info for T shirts. You can probably figure out a way to handle this, but I’m sure you can start to see the problem. This approach doesn’t scale well. Lets say instead of 2 main product types you have 200 or even 2000.
In the end what ends up happening is that you only store basic specific information about a product and then all the finer details go into the product description. Thats fine, but its not great. Also you have to lose your nice new search functionality.
Magento deals with this in an entirely different way. Instead of having the traditional spreadsheet like database table relationships (1 row for each product), Magento does things differently and stores 1 item of information per row (over simplified but enough to illustrate my point). This means that there is no limit to how many elements of information can be stored for each product.
Magento Groups these attributes (as it calls them) into attribute sets. An attribute set is simply enough a collection of attributes. There is a default attribute set which you would generally make a copy of and then customise for each kind of product you want to have custom attributes for. So continuing our T shirts and shoes example, you would make a new attribute set called T shirts, based on the Default set, and also one for shoes.
The T shirts attribute set will contain all the standard attributes (such as price, title etc) inherited from the default set, but we can also add in our custom attributes. Same goes for the shoes.
Then when we want to add a new product (lets say a T shirt) we select the T shirts attribute set so that we then have fields to enter information for our custom T shirt attributes.
Want to setup wildcard subdomains on a Plesk box?
http://rackerhacker.com/2007/08/10/using-wildcard-subdomains-in-plesk/
If you are using XAMPP on Ubuntu (or probably other) Linux and are also trying to use the MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser GUI tools available in the repo’s, you have probably hit an error message like this:
Could not connect to host 'localhost'. MySQL Error Nr. 2002 Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)
A nice quick fix for this one. In the terminal run the following two commands and then you should be able to connect fine using localhost as the host and the configured MySQL username and password, probably root and {password}.
sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld/
sudo ln -s /opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
If you develop using Zend Framework you will know that it is sometimes tricky to see exactly whats going on in terms of SQL queries. After trying a few different ideas including subclassing the database classes or other complex systems, the easiest I have found is this:
1. Edit your app.ini config file and add a line:
db_profiling_enabled = false
Then in your development section in your ini file, set the same value to true
2. Add the following lines to your bootstrap.php after the database adapter setup.
// DATABASE ADAPTER - Setup the database adapter
// Zend_Db implements a factory interface that allows developers to pass in an
// adapter name and some parameters that will create an appropriate database
// adapter object. In this instance, we will be using the values found in the
// "database" section of the configuration obj.
$dbAdapter = Zend_Db::factory($configuration->database);
//$dbAdapter = new EC_Db_Mysqli($configuration->database->params);
if($configuration->db_profiling_enabled){
// create a new profiler
$profiler = new Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug('EdmondsCommerce DB Queries Debug');
// enable profiling (this is only recommended in development mode, disable this in production mode)
$profiler->setEnabled(true);
// add the profiler to the database object
$dbAdapter->setProfiler($profiler);
}
Note you may need to move this chunk above the database adapter section:
// CONFIGURATION - Setup the configuration object
// The Zend_Config_Ini component will parse the ini file, and resolve all of
// the values for the given section. Here we will be using the section name
// that corresponds to the APP's Environment
$configuration = new Zend_Config_Ini(
APPLICATION_PATH . '/config/app.ini',
APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT
);
This is based on a modified quickstart layout for a project. If you have decided to use an alternative layout, you should be able to tell where the relevant code should be.
You will need to have the Firebug firefox extension to view this output. If you also install the FirePHP extension for firebug then there are even more cool things that you can do.
It’s always tempting when you are new to a framework or system to just roll your own functionality if the built in functionality is not obvious. I was nearly at that stage with Drupal 6 file uploads. Thankfully before I gave in I found this useful blog post which clearly states how Drupal’s built in file upload functionality works. Sweet 
I read on Ajaxian today that the BBC have released their own javascript library, Glow, as open source. This is a nice move on the part of the BBC and great news for anyone looking to develop a site with some nice AJAX features but with a priority on accessibility and broad browser support.
The core reason that the BBC use their own library instead of one of the existing javascript libraries is one of browser support. As stated on the Glow site:
However, on reviewing the major libraries we found that none met our standards and guidelines, with browser support in particular being a major issue.
Working on a couple of custom Drupal modules at the moment and I have to say I’m really enjoying working with the Drupal forms API. I really feel like I have a wealth of cool features at my disposal without any particular effort or complication. It’s a very logical system that does what it does really quite well.
If only the Zend Framework forms component was this easy to use!
