However over the past 10 years the term “SEO” has been aimed at the wrong target, and thus spawned the “SEO Guy” Job, I’ll explain what I mean.

These “SEO Gurus” are the guys who hack the page to get the poor search engines to list the content top and not for the benefit of the users, So 7 times out of 10 the content is probably not even relavent! This I have always seen this method of SEO “hacking” as wrong and Google too now agree’s.

Infact Google wants the users to be the targets of the terms and content and not the search engines algorithm. This in my opinion is where it should have always been aimed its just alot of people have been so caught up with the play of the “SEO” buzz word that they’ve missed the point entirely!

To anyone that knows me personally my theory has always been if you can’t write some good informative content, then your site won’t rank as well as you need it to, but if you do write good content and you include the correct tags for this content and it’s correctly coded from day one, you won’t ever need to buy SEO services from anyone EVER, as it will ranks correctly for the content you have hosted!

Now Google has released a video with the way in which they are now looking for genuine content and exactly as I have described above they’ve backed up everything I’ve been saying for the last serveral years. God bless Google!

Anyway have a watch I’ve embedded the video below. Enjoy

Editors Note: My intentions of this post is not to offend anyone who is in the SEO, or Marketing Profession as this is just an opinion that I’ve had for well over 6 years now. However if you do feel you need to comment to air your views and/or defence (and I always love to hear other peoples opinions), then please do so in the comments below.

Thanks, Dan Cunningham

I so very much really want one of these, and Im sure you will too when you see the pictures below.

It looks just like the classic amp, but the Marshall Fridge is a 4.4 cubic foot refrigerator/freezer perfect for keeping your beer and pop on ice.

Promotional Video

So how many of you want to rock out your office with one of these? I know I do!

I took it upon myself (with some advice from a few friends) to actually write some new code and create this archive. At the top of this page you will see a “Resources” link. Inside that page is an archive of everything I’ve tweeted with a preview of the site I found it upon. If you click the URL or the Preview then you will go directly through to the original resource. So for those who follow me on Twitter, you can just visit that page from now on rather than having to favourite every tweet.

How it works…

It’s really self explainatry, but basically I make tweets to other design and development resources that I find and read daily online.

I Tweet said resource:-

After the tweet has been made, My site instantly creates the page of the URL I tweeted, giving you a preview of the said resource origin page.

Then just click the link or the preview shot of the resource site and you’ll get the original resource.

I hope that helps everyone!

“Can You Feature My Resource?”

Sure, If you’ve created something cool, possibly unique or even free, Let let me know! I always love to see new things so I’ll definately take a look. If it meets the critera I’ll tweet it and feature it in the resources archive too.

So drop me a message either on twitter or via the contact link in the header of this page.

Regards,
Dan.

I’ve been a user of the beautiful website dropbox.com for a good 3 or 4 years now, and Its by far the best sort of service in its so great I was rocking out my account at 95% full! Now they only give you 2Gb of space for free and I’d managed to fill 1.95gb of that with backups of work and websites from my development server.

So I popped on over to the Dropbox site and looked at the packages in which they do and the next one up was £9.99 a month. Yikes! I already pay enough in my own dedicated servers, ow wait… They do a referal scheme! Brilliant!

So i read through the referal FAQ, and they give you 250Mb more space for every referal you get that signs up, and completely installs the dropbox software. There is a limit currently set at 8Gb max of referal. So this got my thinking…

I have 2Gb and They allow another 8Gb of referal space, so I need 32 referals. Where am I going to get 32 referals from! *brainwave!*
So i popped down to the shop, Looks for a web designer magazine that was rocking a Google Adwords voucher, Bought the mag for a tidy £4ish I then got home and set about using the £75 adwords voucher that I had got from the said magazine.

I’ve since found out that you can request said vouchers directly from google, here. However I didnt want to wait!

Here’s the steps I used to generate over 45+ refereal leads (I only needed 32).

Let’s get going!

• Sign in to Google AdWords, and select Billing Preferences (under the Billing tab.)
• Walk through the setup process and provide your location, address, and your credit card number (don’t worry, you won’t be charged.)
• After your billing preferences are set up, you’ll be returned to the Billing Summary page. Click “More Actions” to see the option to apply a promotional code to your account.
• Paste in the promotional code Google (or your web host) sent you.
• Now your AdWords credit is applied, and you’re ready to start building ads.
• Click “Campaigns,” and select “New Campaign.”
• Give the campaign a name. “Dropbox1″ will do.
• Specify your locations and languages. When I created my ads, I went with All Countries and Territories, and selected English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish as my languages These are all the default ones specified.
• Under Networks and Devices, leave “All available sites” and “All available devices” selected.
• Under Bidding and Budget set a budget for yourself of something like £20 a day. This will keep your advertisement from running out of control!
• Leave all of the remaining fields blank or set to their defaults, and click “Save and Continue.”

Now it’s time to specify the text you want in your ads. Go back to your Dropbox account and copy your referral URL from your account settings, this is the link you will need to put into your Advert, however the “Display” link can be “www.dropbox.com” Nifty eh! So next add your Dropbox referral link in the “Destination URL” field.

The advert itself wants to say something like this:-

Next, specify your keywords. I found that “dropbox, storage, free online storage” worked well for me. However I did change them a little. Try to only go after 4 to 5 keyword phrases as Google will ban accounts that are spamfull.

These are the keywords I ended up using in the end:-

Now you have to await for Google

So now you have to await Googles approval of your URL, and this can take 30 minuts or so to do. That’s no problem though, however you do need to be ready for when it gets going, so quickly, go make a brew and meet me back here to continue in 5 mins.

Be ready for the first referal

So with cup in hand, and at the ready, you need to see if the ad is good to go. Click the status of the ad. In most cases its the “Eligible” link on your adsense campaign. If its good to go, you’ll see the following.

So with everything being “OK” with no issues, open up your referals page on dropbox. What you need to do is now keep pressing F5 every minute of to, as this is the only way you can really monitor the speed of people singing up. Google does monitor this however is very slow and around 3 hours delayed. So watching the Dropbox referals page is by far the best way.

Referals

Here’s what you will start to see:

As you can see they fly in at least 1 every 1~2 minutes. I after I had around 40 referals. I stopped my Adwords, as you need to wait for people to install the software completely to make them a Eligible referal, and for you to get your full 250Mb for them signing up.

Account Overview

Once you’ve got all 40 referals check your account overview, you should see that you’ve now got 10Gb in total, 2Gb from your basic account, and 8Gb from referals.

Be sure to stop your Adwords Campaign

If you dont stop it you will encur charges for advertising with Google, even if you’ve got all your referals! So be sure to pause or delete all campaigns!
Thats said, You should now have all the space you need for a good while now! I hope that helps anyone else, as it sure helped me!

Till next time, Dan.

If you look closey you can see it working on the right hand side of this site. I was also going to release a tutorial on how to do it with a step by step of what each line in the PHP does, but instead of doing a write-up which would be probably been more beneficial for most, I’ve decided to just release the code as a script under the GPL (V3) and then you all can do what you like with it.

Keep in mind that it’s by no means “polished” and there are alot of other better ways to do this, but for those who are interested or just want a quick way to get your tweets from twitter into your own personal MySQL database for archiving then feel free to use this.

Download Tweet2MySQL Here.
Filename : Tweet2MySQL-0.1.zip | Version 0.1 | Download Size 18Kb
Permlink : Tweet2MySQL-0.1 (58) Downloads

For those who are unfamiliar with the issue, Here’sa quick run down.
Some iPhone 4 owners are having issues with their handsets with the errer message “No Sim Card Installed” after they’ve accidently dropped the phone or even had a little moisture from their hand hit the sim card holder. This is getting quite a popular issue now so here’s a quick fix on how to fix the problem.

The error you will get is the same as before on the 3G and 3Gs, however this is for the iPhone 4 only.

So if you’re recieving the above message then give the below video fix a try and see if it helps you, If anyone has any comments or needs help them feel free to leave a comment below, on the youtube video page or even via my twitter. Cheers, Dan.

The Youtube how to…

As normal I’ve thrown together a small video here for you to watch. Or play using the embedded youtube player below.

Photo Location of Sticker

Thanks goes to @Jaseypea on twitter for this twitter mention he sent me, He asked “exactly where do you add the tape”, I’ve also had a couple of people recently ask the exactl same question. So here’s a picture of the location, the tape i’ve used is white with black dots I hope this helps anyone else who is a little confused.

The game runs on both PC and Apple Mac, but I believe they’ve release a mobile version now for Andriod and iOS users. That said there is talk of a possible Playstation and xBox360 version, but we shall have to wait and see for that. I also recommend anyone who loved lego as a child to try minecraft, because it reminds me of the times when I used to build cool stuff with lego, Oh those we’re the days!

Here’s a quick picture of a basic castle built in game.

For those who are still unsure of what Minecraft actually is about then see the below wikipedia ref.

Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, ratchets up the difficulty of surviving and forces the player to delete his or her world upon death. An outdated Classic version is also available for free, although it is no longer being developed. Creative Minecraft resembles Classic, but with many more features.

So I’ve been playing minecraft at least once or twice a week for a few hours at a time for the past year or so (Since around Beta 0.7, The current version is now Full release 1.1), and I must admit Im not bored of it in the slightest! I always find something good to make or an idea to build something cool.

Lately I’ve been building some good objects in the game either on my own or with a couple of friends (Multiplayer building is the best!), and so i’ve decided to create a few videos so others can see these. I’ve also made a few cool break throughs with the game play and so I’ve released a few video tutorials on my findings. If you’re interested on what I’ve built recently then check the embedded video’s below.

This weeks Creative Builds

I’m definately going to release more videos on the things I’ve created in minecraft, as I feel its an art form and agood way to express and possibly inspire others with things to create in the game.

Minecraft Pokemon Pokeball Monster Spawner

This weeks Tutorials

The below video is one that will help loads of you to create MASSIVE castles in the game with out much effort, So i hope to see some cool castles coming out of the wood work from you all rather soon!

Minecraft Fast Castle Building Tutorial

…and you know how we all need to eat in Minecraft, otherwise you die! Well this little creation is a good way to keep your food supplies up. That said its a bit hit and miss but if anyonecan tweak the way it works that would be really helpfull!

Minecraft Cooked Porkchop Machine

Your Comments and Idea’s

So i’ve done a few videos now and I have had a few comments back from these, and they’ve been really positive! What im looking for though is some idea’s from you guys on what I could possibly build next, So if you have one then you can post below in the comments section of this page or even by sending me a twitter mention – My twitter handle is @cun. I look forward to hearing some of your suggestions! Thanks!

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
$ sudo do-release-upgrade

So what i’ll do is walk you through how to update Ubuntu to Lucid and then the “fun” really starts. What you’ll find is when the update manager “apt” throws this message back in your face you’ll be stuck in a void of nothing and won’t be able to update without manually intervening.

Checking for a new ubuntu release
No new release found

I tried various other methods, and then I came across this method again of doing,

$ sudo apt-get dist-update

I thought I was onto a winner as the server started to update, only to find that when I did a lookup at the version my Ubuntu was using it reported that I was still using 9.04!

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=Jaunty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.04"


How annoying this is turning out to be! Right back to the drawing board.
After a good bit of googling, and a bit of intuitive I managed to get the OS to update… Well not to the latest version, but I thought If i go from Jaunty (9.04) to Karmic (9.10) then I could update to Lucid (10.04)+ Which has the LTS (Long Time Support) which in my eyes is needed for LAMP Servers!

This is how I got it to work…

You first of all need to change your /etc/apt/sources.list and inside of that file you need to comment everything out with #’s and add these lines to the very bottom

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-security main restricted universe multiverse


Easiest way on ubuntu to edit said file would be to do:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Once you’ve done that, and saved the file with CTRL + X then hit Y for allowed to Overwrite, and its just a case of running the apt update commands again like so:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Once thats all updated you should be running a most upto date version of Jaunty, after this you need to update to Karmic.
So to do this we need to tell apt-where to look for Karmic update, So its back into the sources to change the url from Jaunty to Karmic

Replace these lines that we added earlier:-
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-security main restricted universe multiverse


With these lines:-
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security main restricted universe multiverse


Then save and overwrite it again, and continue to update in the same way with the following commands:-

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Now we and make sure its updated to Karmic 9.10

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=Karmic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.10"


Note: I managed to get an issue with a package or to, and it would seem that this is a common issue, so if you come into contact with this “/var/cache/apt/archives/kdebase-runtime-data_4%3a4.4.5-0ubuntu1_all.deb” You might want to try this (At your own risk!)

$ sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*
Then once you’ve done that, do the updates again (Sorry it gets boring with writing the update commands, but this is a tutorial so I’m keeping it super easy and simple).
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If that still throws an error, you might want to try this.

$ sudo dpkg -i --force-all /var/cache/apt/archives/kdebase-runtime-data_4%3a4.4.5-0ubuntu1_all.deb
$ sudo apt-get -f install
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

This fixed my issue, so I then moved onto checking my version with the overused command:
$ cat /etc/lsb-release

So you should be currently running Karmic 9.10! Great! You’re half way through this update.

Next time to tell the server to update to 10.04, So again we need to edit our Sources

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Yet this time we’re not looking for an older version so the URL are differnt.

Change this:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security main restricted universe multiverse

to this:
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security main restricted universe multiverse


Then its just a case of rise and repeat with the update commands

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Once thats completed, check your version!
$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04.3
DISTRIB_CODENAME=Lucid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS"


Thats you now running 10.04.3 and you now just need to repeat the exact same process for updating to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) and then to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty).
It’s a lengthy process but I’m sure you’ll all agree keeping these things updated often saves massive future headaches!

I hope that helps anyone who has been struggling updating their server install from a very out dated OS version.
Any issues or questions then please leave a comment below.

Thanks Dan.

What I’ve found with facebook is that, I moved there because origianlly MySapce was “where it was at”, That soon lost its cool vibe when Facebook came along with its sleek looks normal user feel, without being run on the backend of the music scene and lack of adverts. Since then Facebook has grown and grown in size to what we know and see today, but the thing im finding now with facebook is people that I dont know adding me randomly, Im getting spam from other users who are getting “fraped” aka facebook raped, as its globally known as, and people requesting that I play farm ville because they need my help to make there farm better… Now im not sure if you to are in the same mindset as me but I couldn’t really care if Megan Fox added me, and if my nextdoor neigbour is posting a status of “I like man love, ok” or how good of a virtual farmer you are… All i origianlly signed up for with facebook was to see photos of me and my friends and organise the odd party or event!

So in my eyes Facebook has started to turn into Myspace, infact it hasn’t at all… its now worse! This is why Google+ has my vote, you’ll notice that the user interface of Google Plus looks a whole lot like Facebook, but better. The UI is cleaner, crisper and easier to navigate and currently it has zero adverts!

I’m in love with Google Plus maybe because I can follow other tech bloggers and journalists and some Google employees.

Lets just see how this lasts, and how long it is before facebook, or another site counter acts to this new Google Plus Service! I think they’re going to have a hard time matching something as clean and big as a good Google service like this! Its outright, brilliant!

Here’s a short video from the guys over at Google, and you’ll see exactly what I mean after watching this.

Also it’s not available in CentOS repositories so in this article I want to tell you how to installed manually used the tarball

First, download the OpenSSH source tarball from the vendor and unpack it. You can find the tarballs at http://www.openssh.com/portable.html

# wget http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/openssh/portable/openssh-5.8p2.tar.gz

# tar -xvzf openssh-5.8p2.tar.gz

Copy the spec file and tarball:
# cp ./openssh-5.8p2/contrib/redhat/openssh.spec /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
# cp openssh-5.8p1.tar.gz /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/

Let’s make the specified files and do some installing:
# cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
# perl -i.bak -pe 's/^(%define no_(gnome|x11)_askpass)\s+0$/$1 1/' openssh.spec

Build the RPM
# rpmbuild -bb openssh.spec

Now if you go back into /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/ , Navigate into the folder that suits your OS install, (x86 was mine), You should then see three RPMs. Go ahead and install them:
# rpm -Uvh *.rpm

To verify the installed version, just type
# ssh -v localhost

You should get an out put like the following:
OpenSSH_5.8p2 CentOS *, OpenSSL 0.* **********

* = Version numbers so ignore those, as I didn’t want to disclose that information.