June 2nd, 2008 by olstar

We do a fair bit of SEO work for ourselves and also our clients, so we monitor the search engines and check the positions of our clients in the results when searching for their chosen search terms.

We do SEO work for Wheelworx and they wanted to be on the front page of google when someone searched for Alloy Wheels. We have found that the sites move on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day. We have had our client up to position one, then a few weeks later down to position 10.

I checked it today, and on my computer they were at position 3. I told my business parter to check and they were 5th on his computer. How can this be?

We both checked the world wise search, and the UK search on google. And both were 3rd on mine, and 5th on his. How can there be such a difference in the results even though he is literally down the road from me?

It makes it very hard for us to do reports for our clients as we are never sure if when they click on the links in the emails they will see the same results we do!

Anyone got any ideas how all this can be?

March 14th, 2008 by olstar

I thought it was about time to get some kind of p2p application so that i could get the odd track here and there when someone requests it. I use torrents for everything at the moment - and its not the best for single tracks etc.

So i did some browsing and read some forum posts about the best p2p applications around at the mo. The general word seemed to be that eMule was one of the better ones as many had fake files on and spyware etc. So, i downloaded it!

After half a hour of messing about with my netgear router adding shit into it i finally got into the program…. Oh!

You have to connect to servers and then download from them or something? So i tried to connect to some servers and some did let me on. Most wouldnt, and the ones that would didnt seem to allow me to download anything.. that is if the one i connected to actually brought any results up at all!

Im sure there is a perfectly good explanation for this.. im probably doing something wrong. But god damm is that program annoying!

Somebody help me! haha

February 25th, 2008 by olstar

Towards the back end of last year i had a day where i was out and about trying to find wireless internet to use, as gemma was in a training course all day in warwick. It was a lot of fun to be honest, using the internet on my phone to find wireless network hotspots and then using my google maps on my phone to find the location, then sitting outside leaching their bandwidth.

I tried McDonalds in warwick, as all McD’s give out free internet - but i could get it to work for some reason. Today im in sheffield, and gem is on another course for this morning. I came to McDonalds for some breakfast and brought my laptop in just in case i could get it to work this time..

TaDaaaa!

Free wireless! And i have all the food in the world about 2 seconds from where im sitting.. Mmm McD’s breakfasts!

Anyway, gonna do a few bits of work this morning as im not going to be able to do much this week due to the fact i will be in prauge!

February 23rd, 2008 by olstar

I am forever changing maxxd.com, but quite recently i havent really done much to it. I was having to piss about with vbulletin’s really over confusing admin system just to make slight changes to stuff, and everything for it costs money.. I wanted a seo mod, and its like as much as the frickin software!

My other forum (SSDB crew!) runs MyBB and has done for over a year, and its the best forum software i have ever had the privilege if using. I have used EVERYTHING at some point or another, and none are as easy to work with, customise and enjoy as MyBB is!

So, after plucking up the courage for weeks and weeks, i planned to shut the vbulletin forums and start moving the stuff over to the new fresh shiny MyBB installation that i had installed onto a subdomain.

I needed to gather the scripts i needed to perform the merge, i got myself the latest version of phpbb installed, and mybb, and installed easyphp onto my computer.

I got a converter for vbulletin 3.6.7 to phpbb2 from here, and did a bit of swatting up on peoples previous attempts to see if they ran into any problems. I installed phpbb onto my local machine, and started downloading the vbulletin database. The mybb merge system was downloaded from the mybb website

Due to the fact the forum was fairly large, and vB stores attachments in the database, the mysql db was huge! The last time i did something like this the most time consuming task was splitting the database down to workable sizes.

As i was installing it on my local machine i was able to copy the db (once it had finished downloading) to a directory on my local machine and edit a config file so that it was available in a drop down box on the file import screen of phpmyadmin. And although at times i thought it had crashed - it finally finished loading and the db was imported successfully.

I then realised that in order for the vB to phpbb merge to work, all the tables needed to be on one db. Ah shit. So i removed the one i had jsut created, and opened the phpbb db. Did the import again, and it worked.

I then ran the phpbb merge script and followed the instructions on it. I noticed that on the first step it claimed to not have picked up the vB tables in the db. But it actually had! I had to adjust the timeout limit in php.ini as a few of the steps (thread and post conversion) timed out.

Once i had finished, i removed the old vb tables, and removed the mer4ge script so all i had was my forum in phpbb format. I then exported the db from my local machine to a sql file on my desktop. It hadn’t copied the forum permissions, usergroups or attachments, but i wasnt bothered. The lack of attachments meant the db was TINY in comparison.

I then imported the db to my webhost, and started the mybb merge system. I have to say that their merge system is much better than the one i used a few steps ago, much more stable and professional. It didnt take that long to complete apart from the post and thread parts. As i had chosen to only do 200 per page, and there was over 30,000!

After it finished, i was left with all my forums, users, posts, polls and threads. No attachments or PM’s but that was a small price to pay to now be running the best forum software available. One thing i had to do was go into the admin panel and go to the recount & rebuild section in order to rebuild the “Last post” bits on threads and the forum index.

After a day of re-doing the groups and making it look pretty it was done. I have been slowly adding plugins to make ti better, so far i have the latest attachment gallery, the warning system and the SEO plugin. I had the image resizer oen too but it was messing up large images, saying something about hotlinking not allowed. I turned it off and the images work fine now!?

Anyway, i thought i would share this with the world, to maybe try and persuade a few other people to move away from vbulletin to a much better piece of kit. MyBB

January 4th, 2008 by olstar

Ok, so i was looking at new phones, and peeped the nokia N82, which is definatly the phone i will be having upon upgrade time. Then i thought back to the last time i spoke to t-mobile and they told me i had this phone for ages yet - so i got thinking.. How can i update the look of my phone without getting a new one.

I then remembered that Nokia’s come apart fairly easily, so i looked on the net for a guide on how to disassemble a n73. I found one on the nokia blog and i set about taking my n73 apart. I would of probably been able to do it without the help of the Nokia blog, as i only wanted to take the front cover off - i was just a bit scared of snapping any brackets off. Its happened to us all before!

Anyway, i removed the front cover, and found a tin of bright orange matt paint that i had got with a Ferarri Airfix kit i got off Gems parents for xmas. So i set about slapping the paint on, making sure i didn’t get any on the plastic screen cover.

I didnt bother sanding the remaining paint off the phone, i just slapped the paint on nice and thick and then let it dry for ages. And, hey presto!

Maybe the worlds first EVER fluorescent orange Nokia n73! 

Excuse the crappy pic, but my usual picture taking device was having its photo taken

December 26th, 2007 by olstar

A while ago, a friend of mine mentioned to me that when rizla first started their advertising campaign for their new product “The King Size Rizla” they used bill board ad’s that suggested they were “for that special one at the end of the night” etc.

Many years later it got brought up, so i decided to hunt around on the internet for proof of such an occurance.

I started with google of course, and tried a few blatant search terms that - if such billboards existed - would definatly find them. No luck. So i wided the search, and just looked for examples of king size rizla adverts full stop.

I found a few things, most of them about complaints that king size rizla adverts suggested their use was for rolling fat spliffs.

But, no matter how hard i looked, i found nothing about billboards blatently stating they were made for joints. if you really think about it, their is no use what so ever in the world for king size rizlas, apart from for use with biftahs. Why would they make a red king size, and then a silver one that is jsut that little bit bigger? As if anyone in the world smokes silver king size roll up’s. That would be one yellow finger’d pikey.

The above image is a photoshop of what it could of looked like. If you know more then post a comment.

December 23rd, 2007 by olstar

Due to the line of work i am in, SEO is very important to me, and i try to apply SEO techniques to any site i own or run with davros. I have always therefore used certain SEO tricks on this blog, in order to dominate google for such terms as “0lly” (with a zero) and “olstar” (without a zero)

I was just doing a random check, and found that if i searched for 0lly, someone also called 0lly had a blog, and his domain was 0lly.net - Bastard. Why didnt i buy that years ago! The chap seems a little geeky, and could possibly give me a run for my money for that top spot in the search results.

Ill keep my eye on the situation, but due to the age and vast quantity of data on this blog i dont think ill be knocked off the top.

December 4th, 2007 by olstar

You have probably noticed that i have the odd ad on my blog, and on any of my personal sites such as my adidas superstar forum.

I toyed with a few ideas, but settled on using AuctionAds as the content was more interesting than plain text that you get with adsense. It was also quite cool to have bargain adidas superstars linked in my ads on a site that is all ABOUT adidas superstars..

My first beef with AA was when they seemed to stop recording the clicks and page impression’s so that when i went in and did a report- it said 0 where it should of said how ever many thousand page impressions.

I contacted them about it, and they responded (quite rudely) and said that although THEIR system wasn’t recording it, eBays was or something, and that i would still be paid.

True to their word i did get something from the time it wasn’t recording, but its wasn’t very consistent and something didn’t seem right - this was the start of me losing faith.

I then did a yearly report, and cross referenced it with my paypal account, i was paid on the 1st of September and it was like $12 - not a lot but it helps. I then had not been paid since, and it was November.

I contacted them again, after reading their FAQ’s on their site, which had stated that advertisers would be paid on the 1st of every month. Hmm, so where has my money been going? I double checked my auction ads reports, and the money had not been going anywhere incorrectly, it had simply NOT been paid to me AT ALL! The staff member again quite rudely and bluntly said that i would be paid after had reached the $50 threshold. I questioned why i had been paid $12 on the 1st of September - he informed me of a policy change - and yet their own site still had not been updated to reflect these changes.

This was when i started to realise that these people were having problems, probably money problems.. So i got worried, but stuck with it until i had reached $50 so that i could get what i was owed.

Half way thru November, the $50 benchmark was reached and i again contacted them and asked when i would be paid. I had to ARGUE with the guy saying i HAD passed the $50 benchmark - and at one point even sent him a report from THEIR OWN WEBSITE proving that i had indeed passed the threshold.

Then he informed me, that not only did i have to pass$50, i also had to wait till the 1st of December. Even though when i had asked the chap who told me the policy had changed - he told me ALL I HAD TO DO was pass the $50. So what, your own staff don’t know what the score is? How am i supposed to know?

But AGAIN, i left it.. And waited till the 1st to get my $50, so i could pay my ebay bill and list some items i need to sell BADLY.

It is now the 4th of December - and guess what! I STILL HAVE NOT BEEN PAID!

I contacted them last night having a bit of a moan, and was told i would be paid within the hour - that was at least 12 hours ago.

I am trying to hold back going nuts to them, as they owe me MONEY. But as soon as i have what i have earn’t i will remove ALL auction ads off all my sites and look for something else.

If you are reading this and are thinking about using AuctionAds - DO NOT BOTHER! Yes the ads are cool, and the theory behind it is MINT - But you will spend all your life waiting to get paid, and there are better solutions out there.

ShoppingAds is their site too, so i would steer CLEAR away from them.

If auctionads are reading this, then as per my email - you need to start looking after your advertisers as sooner or later more and more people will blog about you and cause your company to shut down.

Sort it out AA!

November 22nd, 2007 by olstar

I have found myself ringing 123-reg a fair few times over this last year, and to be honest it was annoying knowing i was being charged 10p a minute because some clown couldn’t be arsed to put their backside in gear, and answer the phone.

So i used the fab website, www.saynoto0870.com, and found the following number that is EXACTLY the same line as the 10p per minute contact number.

01782 605 399

Do not get stung with a £3 phone call, especially when your on hold for most of it. Use this free number for 123-reg, and utilise your free minutes on your mobile, or your “Evening and weekend” call plan at your home.

As i write this, im actually on hold to 123-reg, as they have had some problems with changing nameservers on .com domain names. Its most annoying, especially as i thought it was something that i had f**ked up!!

Dumbasses!

November 14th, 2007 by olstar

I had been informed of second life by a mate of mine a while back, and i had tried to install it then, with no joy. Im using a Toshiba Satellite S1400-203, and its not the newest laptop in the world but it manages to run pretty much anything i throw at it.

But not second life.

When i install it, and run it, i get the part at the bottom of the screen to log in, and the top part remains blank, where there should be tree’s and second lifey stuff. At first i just presumed it was something to do with the fact my laptop is gettin on a bit, but then i tried it on my girlfriend brand new Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop, that is running vista and runs anything you throw at it better than most..

Still wouldnt work.

After a few google searches, i found that i wasnt the only person having problems getting SL to work on their machines. It appears that even though SL work closely with Intel (the people who make processors and graphics cards and stuff) their game/program is not supported by most Intel graphics cards!

Whats the deal with that??

We can run everything fine on that laptop, Sims2 included.. Yet she cant use SL cos the graphics card used by her brand new laptop, isnt supported.

I wish my blog could reach the people of intel/SL and i wish it would make them recode their application to support all intel chipsets, especially the mobile 965 one I just cant understand how something so huge, doesnt support one of the most common forms of modern graphics cards?!

At least im not the only person in the world that thinks it sucks!