Site Review

Posted on Mon Oct 07
Tagged: General | Leave your comments

About every 4 to 6 months you should get a site review down on your website.

A site review can reveal information on what areas of your website a popular and what areas are not. That way you can get a better picture of what is letting you down and where you should push all of your efforts.

I say every 4 to 6 months simply because that provides enough data for us to review your site visitors usage.

Think of it like a second appraisel at the Gym. The trainer will tell you what areas you need to focus on to get the results you want.

This is of course something you can do yourself if you would like but the results that you can achieve with getting your designer (or us) to do it for you is a priceless exercise. With our knowledge of design trends and how to web works, what can seem like a bunch of urls and numbers is actually like a map to us.

In this day and age the web is to important to fall into the trap of wanting to do everything your self. Don't fall into that trap and get your self a site review as soon as possible. You might be missing out on potential customers.

What is RSS

Posted on Wed Oct 07
Tagged: Blogging | Leave your comments

Time and time again I get asked what is RSS?

There are three types of people the first type don't have a clue. They have never heard about it and chances are it really isn't going to effect their life at all. These people don't use the internet much and only get on for a single purpose of finding information about a certain topic or subject.

The second type of person as heard of RSS. Knows what the icon looks like and knows that most sites these days have an RSS feed somewhere on their site. The might have already subscribed to a few, and can see how it can be quite useful.

Last but not least the internet savvy. These people read a lot on the internet. They used to subscribe to email newsletters, but found that too many email newsletters were getting turned into spam, and not providing the information they wanted. That is when RSS was developed.

RSS means "Really Simple Syndication". Now I could go into the technical details but let's just get into how it can help you.

RSS is a way of getting a quick list of headines from your favourite news site or blog. Think about this if you like to look at say 10 blogs that talk about "photography" you don't want to have to check all 10 blogs to see if they have posted a new story.

So you subscribe to the ten blogs RSS feed and all of these blogs are now easily readable in minutes. So you can see straight away what is new etc... You do however need an RSS reader which is a program that allows you to subscribe to the feeds.

There are so many different RSS readers out there, so here we go. Ok your internet browser (internet explorer 7, firefox, safari, flock, etc...) will have an RSS reader built in. Well it is actually called LiveBook marks but it is the same thing, so that is easy. Now if you want to be able to read your blogs while on the go then you need to look at an online version. Now the ones I have listed are all FREE!

• MyYahoo
• MyMSN
• MyAOL
• MyGoogle

Simply sign up to these and add your feeds. There are so many more FREE RSS readers out there that I would take me quite awhile to list them all.

I suggest you think about subscribing to some RSS feeds as it is the way of the future. Here start with ours.

Bloggers Block

Posted on Tue Oct 07
Tagged: Blogging | Leave your comments

This would have to be a bloggers worst nightmare!

Think about it, the number on rule in blogging is to keep on blogging. So what do you do when the inspiration tank runs out.

The answer isn't really that hard. With so much information on the world wide web today, for someone to actually say they have nothing to blog about would be a blantent lie. In most cases the blogger probably feels un-motivated.

My suggestion would be to simply search the net for someone else's post that is along the same lines as your blogs theme and blog it. Talk about it, give your opinions that sort of thing. Blogs are built on public opinion, in turn this might create a bit of good karma for your blog in the way of linking.

Think of you blog as part of a network, and to give someone your opinion actually will help them and in turn will help you.

Get out there a blog about everything and anything.

Just never forget to post!

MoozelSpider

Posted on Fri Oct 07
Tagged: General | Leave your comments

Today I unleashed the MoozelSpider on the internet. I can happily report that everything seems to be working. It is working its way through the internet indexing as it goes.

We want to bring search engines back to their main focus. All of the major search engines have moved on from just supplying search results. Which begs me to ask the question "where would internet search be if they have spent all their time a resources developing technologies?".

With the launch of the spider it means we are not to far off uploading the search box so it can be used.

With internet search these days people are not just typeing in one word. They are now typeing in phrases. It is these phrases which we are going to use in our algorithum.

For those that are clients of mine or I link to your site from this one your page would have already been indexed.

For those with blogs, remember ensure you use key phrases that people might use to find your post.

Design makes the blog, or does it

Posted on Tue Oct 07
Tagged: Design | Leave your comments

This is true to a certain extent. It would be safer to say that content makes the blog however I personally feel that the design and layout helps for those readers.

It is no secret that the blog world has changed, more and more people are viewing their favourite blogs via RSS. The reasons for this is with the world being a busier place these days the time to load up websites to see if there is something new is just to valuable. With an RSS feed when the update occurs you receive it in either your mail client or feed reader.

In saying that I have not subscribed to any blogs RSS feed if I didn't like the design. The designs of the most popular blogs all have something in common. THEY ARE SIMPLE.

Of course there are some exceptions to the rule but their are very few of them and as the blogosphere grows this sites will have to change their look to win back viewers.

It really is as simple as that!

Get a nice simple design, have some good content, and last but not least never give up.

RSS validation

Posted on Mon Oct 07
Tagged: Blogging | Leave your comments

For those luckly enough to be using the SnowFlake CMS your RSS feeds are now valid.

A simple problem which was overlooked in the initial development of the RSS feeds for those running blogs was fixed and uploaded to all the SnowFlake CMS sites today.

The error was produced via the date field and the format in which is was being extracted from the database.

The Search World

Posted on Thu Oct 07
Tagged: General | Leave your comments

Today I started developing our own Crawler or Spider. Basically a crawler or spider (which is the same thing) is an application that crawls over websites indexing them.

The crawler is in it's final stages of testing at the moment and once that is complete I shall launch the it out into the world wide web to start indexing. The point of all of this is quite simple. I wish to build my own search engine.

I don't expect it to be tackle the Google dominated search market, but I believe that Google has too much market share and if people like myself don't try new things then the internet won't progress.

At the moment there is no name for the search engine. I am hopeing to get teh crawler up and running in the next day or two, unleashing it on my clients sites as a starting block. Hopefully if everything goes to plan it should then proceed to filter through the web and start to generate a large crawl list.

Will it be successful? Well you shall just have to wait and see.

Whats been happening

Posted on Tue Oct 07
Tagged: General | Leave your comments

Among other things we have been displayed on CSSsocial.com Which is a gallery for CSS based websites.

Not sure what a CSS based website is? Well if you have had your site developed by us in the last two months or so your website is most probably a CSS based site. CSS is basically another programing language that allows us as designers to seperate content from layout. It also lends itself to some pretty nifty layouts if you have let me run with it.

So how do you like the new website? I do have plans to change a bit of it and add some more features but at the time being I have to focus on your designs, so that might be a job for the Christmas break.

In saying that I have to get on with it.

Security update

Posted on Mon Oct 07
Tagged: General | Leave your comments

Today all of those running the new SnowFlake CMS have gotten a security update installed.

This won't have any effect on you however it does close down a hole which we discovered in the code.

Anyone experiencing issues please contact us immediately so that we can resolve this a quickly as possible.