My laptop was running windows vista, after running into a virus which hijacked urls which led to the corruption of sytem files I was left with a laptop that no longer booted. As with most modern laptops the os cd was not included.

As It is new years and delivery of a vista cd would take up to a week or two, Iv’e decided to go linux. I already have a web server on cent-os and have been using yellow dog linux on my ps3 for some time. My first choice would be ydl again for familiarity however to better suit the hardware I went with ubuntu.

In under one hour I’ve managed to install ubantu, ftp, bluefish, ies4linux, mplayer, vlc and wireless hardware drivers. Much easier than any other install of linux I’ve used.

Thanks to Ubantu I’m not feeling so down, as my laptop is back up and running with only a few bits and bobs of work missing.

Key benefits are:

ram usage is never above 512mb (vista went up to 2GB)

Key disadvatages are:

no dbase, mssql server 2005, rosetta stone.

It’s super user friendly and boast a user control panel that exceeds that of any other open source project blog, cms or cart. Before using wordpress I was a little sceptical due to some of the reviews regarding resource munching / security. However upon my own review and use, the base code is far superior to many open source projects, the base source validates and is easily customisable.

The only downfall I have come across of Wordpress so far is the hard coded menu attributes, but these can be easily surpassed with very basic knowledge of php.

I give the new wordpress 10/10.

I just noticed google’s logo:

Google do this to reduce http requests to the webserver, speeding up loadtime. What a great Idea, time to edit my background images :).

Alexa have removed the developer api, I’ll be leaving the test in the sakui web validator for now, but if it becomes s a pay only service I’ll have to remove it.

Update: http://aws.amazon.com/awis/

The alexa rank data is now a pay only service, I might build a socket connection to attain the data from the main website or depreciate this test. I’ll have to think about this, providing a free validation service means I will not be paying to retrieve Alexa rankings. I’m leaning towards depreciating this test as the use of the sakui web validator is for developing web standards (not Alexa info).

My latest work has been building off Zen Cart, an open source ecommerce solution. My overall rating of this system is 8/10. It requires a lot of development to maintain a standards compliant website, although the easy of use after setup is great.

Once I’ve finished this work i’m thinking of publishing source changes, or an empty template that is standards compliant.

I made the ads avalible on article, tools and forum pages but not comercial pages. This way I reap the benefits of fast loading pages for potential customers whilst still maitaining a decent number of hits / views for the ads.

I have been wary of project wonderful (Banner Ads) slowing down one of my websites for some time. I took a look at the code and decided to download the javascript file and test running it from my server. An initial test at pingdom shows improvement but I’ll have to wait and see.

At least now it uses only one http request to their server instead of two.

I redesigned mikejonesey.co.uk as I didn’t find it very readable. I’ll be update the rest of the pages with the new design and getting rid of some pages over the next few days (when I have time).

The tutorials on this website are years old, but I think I’ll keep a few of them for historical purposes, and they still have page rank :).

I Hope the reading is easyer now.

The interesting little google voting blobs are back,
I’ve voted a few sites

You can logout to view search results in their naturat state anyway.

Update: I found out that if you add &swm=2 to the end of a google search url you can see more info.

Here are two urls for more info:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7740815.stm

One of my clients asked for a website that could be in two languages (french and english). Easy peasy with many methods to choosefrom, I chose to design the site defaulting in french (the clients first language), however if the http request includes a preference for English, the default becomes English.

On top of this I included a toggle link to alow the user to be in control.

Great so, the next step was to include this class in Wordpress. I was at first at first a little wary of this task, however it was incredibly easy. in the wp-config.php file I simply included my class and selected a different table prefix dependant on the language.

I’ll be creating a tutorial article on sakui web for this one.

Update done:

http://www.sakuiweb.com/articles/wordpress_language/