Steve Hicks Online

An adventure into all things IT

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GoogleRankings.com - Investigate your Sites SEO Potential

18 June, 2007 (21:58) | Recommended Sites, Useful Resources | By: Steve

While searching the web today, I came across a great site for analysing the SEO potential of your site - GoogleRankings.com.

Google Rankings

By entering the URL of your website and creating a Web Diagnostics panel, you can see a whole range of analysis for your sites based upon the results received from the major search engines.

Included within the results are:

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Apple Releases the Safari Internet Browser for the Windows Platform

15 June, 2007 (22:53) | News and Views | By: Steve

The release of the Safari Internet Browser for the Windows platform, is a major bonus for web designers who are trying to design sites that are compatible with many different browsers.

Apple Safari Internet Browser

Anyone who has had any experience with web design knows that web pages all display differently when opened in different browsers, and up until now, designers using Windows had to be careful of how their sites looked on a Mac.

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Alcohol 120% - Adding Virtual Disc Drives to your PC

12 June, 2007 (22:59) | Useful Resources | By: Steve

Alcohol 120For any product developers out there, if you’re creating products on DVD or CD, then you really need to invest in Alcohol 120% to make testing your products much easier, and to save on the digital media you waste during the testing process.

Alcohol 120% is an application which allows you to create virtual disc drives on your PC. If you then create disc images of your projects, such as ISO or NRG images, you can then mount them on the virtual drives and play them as if your products had been burnt to proper discs.

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Hosting Lots of Videos on your Site? Amazon S3 Could be the Answer

9 June, 2007 (23:34) | Recommended Sites, Useful Resources | By: Steve

Amazon Web Services S3If you’re hosting large amounts of video on your site, which requires large amounts of bandwidth, then you should really check out Amazon S3 as an option for your online storage.

Amazon S3 allows you to upload any type of file to their servers, which you can then call to your site and add to your pages as you wish.

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Sony ArcCos - The Sales Prevention Officer of the Movie World

8 June, 2007 (21:22) | News and Views | By: Steve


Sony ArcCos - The Sales Prevention Officer of the Movie World

Unfortunately, it’s time for a moan … so I apologise in advance. The source of my moan? None other than Sony … one of the largest corporations on earth. And what have they done? They’ve gone copy protection mad, and prevented thousands of users watching DVDs and listening to CDs that have been purchased legally.

Let me explain. I have recently purchased two DVDs produced by Sony, The Pursuit of Happyness (Widescreen Edition), and The Longest Yard (Widescreen Edition), only to get home and try playing them on my PC to find the picture completely scrambled and unwatchable. A bad batch of DVDs from Sony … or so I thought.

So, the next day, back to the store I go to get replacements. Again, I get home to try playing them in my PC to find the exact same result. It was then that I started to think along the lines of faulty hardware, so began searching the internet for updated drivers and firmware for all my hardware …. motherboard, DVD drives, the lot. Still no luck. I was beginning to tear my hair out.

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GMail - The Only Email Account You’ll Ever Need

6 June, 2007 (21:57) | Useful Resources | By: Steve

Google Mail

Google’s online email service, better known as GMail is a must have for anyone who sends a lot of emails, and once you’ve started using it, you’ll appreciate that it’s the only email account you’ll ever need.

Currently offering a whopping 2.8 Gb of space to every user, it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to delete an email ever again. I receive literally hundreds of emails in the course of my job, and many of those come with large attachments … and still i’m not even close to using half of my allowance.

Google Mail

The best thing about GMail however, is that all your emails are stored online … meaning you can access them from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection.

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Screencast Central

5 June, 2007 (23:23) | Projects, Recommended Sites | By: Steve

In a previous post, I explained to you exactly what screencasting was, and why it’s going to be the thing of the future - so now seemed like a good time to introduce another one of our main projects, which is the site ScreencastCentral.

Screencast Central

ScreencastCentral is a site we started in Novemeber 2006, with one main aim … to introduce screencasting to the world.

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ColdFusion Membership Script … Nearing Completion

5 June, 2007 (22:53) | Projects | By: Steve

Today I’ve been working on the website for one of our major projects of the summer. I can’t divulge quite what it is exactly just yet, but hopefully in the next couple of weeks it should be finished and ready to launch.

One of the major parts of the project, was to create a website where users had to create accounts in order to store their own details and settings. This part of the project is now nearing completion, which means I can move onto the site content and functionality … which will hopefully be in the next couple of days.

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Amazon S3 REST Wrapper with Added ACL

4 June, 2007 (22:23) | Projects, Useful Resources | By: Steve

One of the projects I have been working on recently, involved adding files to Amazon S3. Programming in ColdFusion, there was no help for me on the Amazon Developers site, and instead I was directed towards the Amazon S3 REST Wrapper by Joe Danziger.

Now this is a great script and did most of what I needed it to do, except control the ACL of the buckets that you can create on your account at Amazon, which was an integral part of my project.

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So You’ve Got a Blog … How Do You Kick Start the Traffic Flow?

4 June, 2007 (21:46) | Tips & Tricks | By: Steve

I’ve now been working on my blog for a couple of days, and as yet … I’ve had a grand total of 0 visitors, as you can see from the Google Analytics screenshot below.

Google Anayltics

So, the question is, how do you start getting traffic to come to your site?

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