Harvey Kane

Monster hailstones in Auckland

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Last Friday was a pretty miserable day, and it was raining yet again. Then the hail started, then shortly after the neighbours started throwing rocks at my house.

I stick my head out the window to see what's going on, and it's raining gigantic hailstones (not the neighbours after all).

This may be a normal sized hailstone in many parts of the world, but it's by far the biggest on I have seen in Auckland. Measuring over 1cm in diameter, and certainly large enough to keep your bourbon cold, there were probably plenty larger than the one I grabbed. Luckily these sized hailstones didn't last that long.

Source: Monster hailstones in Auckland

A day of blog silence?

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

People have been suggesting that bloggers take a day of silence in respect of the shootings at Virginia recently. Well, my deeply respectful blog has taken many weeks of silence, but somehow this is not the reason.

So I'm going to share my thoughts on the whole issue.

Gun control

Over here in New Zealand, where we have actual gun control laws, it's somewhat difficult for the average joe to get his hands on a gun. If I woke up one morning, a bit upset and in a good mood for a gun wielding rampage, let's see what I could muster at a moment's notice...

A large piece of 4x2 with rusty nails in it
A well-used crowbar
A squash racquet
An empty bottle of Wild Turkey
I have enough spare pipe in the garage to make a potato gun, but I'd need to go to the shops and get some potatoes
Or, of I felt like a 20 min trip out to see my parents, I could steal a .22 rifle from Dad, a formidable weapon if you are a possum or rabbit.

I haven't even followed this story closely enough to know what sort of weapon the gunman used, but it doesn't really matter. I'll wager it was a semi-auto rifle of sorts, or a pistol with a fair sized clip. Certainly none of the weapons listed above.

With the "constitutional right to bear arms" I understand this makes it fairly easy for anyone to own a semi-automatic weapon or pistol. Or, at least easy to know someone who has one of these weapons.

America is now in the position where Americans need military grade weaponry to protect themselves against other Americans with military grade weaponry. To me, that logic is so totally fucked that I wouldn't know where to start in fixing things. Introducing tighter gun control laws isn't going to prevent this sort of thing happening - there are far too many guns in the wild, and it's going to take generations of propaganda to change the constitutional mindset.

Gun control is not the whole cause of the problem, but it is a part of the problem. A potato-gun-wielding nut job on a rampage is a lot less deadly than a nut job with a semi-auto. The rampages will still happen, but the story will end up as local trivia, not world headlines with 32 casualties.

America needs some strong leadership to see through these major social issues.

Source: A day of blog silence?

PHP Warnings on or off?

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

I managed to break a website yesterday without realising it. This sounds really bad, but in this case breaking things is the first step on the road to fixing things. Let me explain.

What was unusual about this particular incident was that I didn't actually break the site - I just turned on the PHP warnings that said the site was broken.

All of a sudden, the site owner was getting emails from visitors saying his site was broken.

However, the site had been broken all along. The errors were still happening, and whatever data was being saved may have all kinds of errors in it.

PHP error messages

With PHP, you can choose what sort of errors you want displayed on the screen. All, errors, warnings, notices, or none.

If you choose none, then your clients don't get to see any ugly PHP errors on your site.

If you show all errors, then your clients do see all these ugly messages. Changes are you or them will see the error, and then do something about it (fix it).

I consider it much better to have the error visible than to have the site failing silently and alerting nobody that there is a problem.

A better way again is to log the errors to a file, and have the log emailed to your developer every so often. This way, your clients don't get to see the nasty looking messages, but the developer does.

Errors happen all the time, so it's worthwhile to take the time to understand how the error reporting system works, and to ensure that errors don't happen quietly and unnoticed.

Source: PHP Warnings on or off?

PHP Tutor

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +1300

PHP Tutor is a collection of PHP tutorials and articles, covering topics such as security, how-to guides and the like.

The homepage states the site is a place to get started with PHP, and the site offers PHP tutorials, links to PHP discussion forums and information on PHP security.

PHP Tutorials

The PHP tutorials section of the site appears to be a list of tutorials from the PHP Freaks website.
The tutorials themselves seem well written, though I would hardly say they were for beginners.
Interesting to see they have a tutorial on how to write a BBCode parser, something I have spent many many hours doing myself.
I would prefer to see a little more depth in the tutorials section, and perhaps some way of categorising them. Separating out the tutorials by difficulty level or functionality would be a good way of adding value.

PHP Discussion

The PHP discussion section provides hot links to the various discussion threads on popular forums.
DigitalPoint, Webmaster Talk and PHP freaks are listed here, all popular forums for coding and internet marketing and good places to hang out.
The site includes links to the latest topics on these forums.

PHP Security

The section on PHP security covers some of the more common security mistakes new coders make, such as register globals being left on, how to prevent SQL injection and cross site scripting (XSS).

Overall

I really think this site would benefit from more hand-written, unique content.

PHP has a lot to offer, and there are plenty of ways to add value to the community and help new coders to learn PHP.
Tutorials are always a good start, and I spent many days running through tutorials when I started with PHP. I would add more reviews on popular software packages - is VBulletin better than PHPBB? Is Joomla! search engine friendly? etc. Links to coding standards such as Horde would have been something I could have used many years ago - I now spend a lot of time replacing tabs with spaces in all my old code!

It's totally possible to make a successful site based around syndicated content, but it's important to add your own touch to give your site a unique feel.

This article is a sponsored review for PHP Tutor.

Source: PHP Tutor

Local Moa

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Today's post takes a look at Local Moa - a fairly new local search service for finding stuff near you. Local Moa is a New Zealand search facility that brings up the results on a map.

Above: Local Moa - a local search engine with map-based results. And lots of lime green.

Potentially this sort of thing could be quite useful - Google often is no good for finding local bricks and mortar businesses, because they often don't have a website (or don't know how to optimise their website). We have a local Thai food place up the road, which does great Thai food and is well priced. I have been there a dozen times or more, but their branding is so terrible I can't say what they are called.

Local Moa

The first thing that peaks my interest on the site is the design - it's really nice. The graphics are pleasing to the eye, and it's full of web 2.0 goodness such as shaded text inputs and excessive lime green. Great stuff.

I see their mapping is based on Google maps, which is good - a much better idea for anyone who still thinks the Wises website is cool.

The site is broken down into categories to get you started - NZ hotels, NZ restaurants, entertainment etc.

But what's really important here is the search results. Can it bring up anything useful?

Search results

I'll have a look for my Thai takeaway, so I search for "thai" in "henderson". Sure enough, my local Thai place is called "Thai Pylin Restaurant". Cool. I see the Thai Kitchen in Henderson is missing however, which should definitely be there in the results.

I try a few other local businesses I know exist, such as "childcare in henderson" and "music in henderson" and the results seem to be incomplete. Nobody would expect a complete directory of all businesses in NZ, however the site does need *most* of the businesses for it to be useful to the public. With a well filled out set of business listings, I think this site would be very useful for finding bricks and mortar type businesses near you.

SEO

I'm so used to reviewing sites for SEO mistakes, and I couldn't help myself this time. It's good to see the site owner has a SEO strategy in place. The URLs are nice looking eg http://www.localmoa.co.nz/search/thai/near/henderson

Titles include the words "Thai" and "Henderson" and they have been thoughtfully Camel Cased for readability. Better yet, the search results pages have bookmarkable URLs which search engines can find. Often people make their search results pages unindexable, so it's nice to see this being done. To help this along, the homepage includes links to the 5 most recent searches - presumably to give the spiders something to work with?

Cool - I love to see a strategy in place.

Overall

Overall, I'm impressed with the design, the speed of the site, and the overall functionality. I think the results would need to be more complete before I would use this service myself. I didn't see any way of adding a business into the directory, paid or otherwise - perhaps this would help get some traction.

This article is a paid review of LocalMoa - Local search in New Zealand

Source: Local Moa

Environmental NZ

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +1300

I launched a new website for Environmental NZ yesterday. This site serves as a forum for New Zealand environmental engineers, and is owned and operated by a mate of mine.

Yes, I will sometimes design a website for a couple of bottles of wine if you push me long and hard enough :)

It's another CMS based site, and the success of any forum is based on how well the community is established - whether people feel the urge to post useful content, or just another haven for spammers.

The design is simple, and as usual, there is a strong focus on SEO. Most forums today still have ugly looking URLs - often including a session ID, and this is crazy when forums provide a free source of original content for your site. You just need to apply the same on-page SEO rules as you would any other page.

What's with the frogs?

Frogs are especially sensitive to their environment. If there are changes in temperature / radiation / environmental gases etc, chances are the frogs will notice it first.
If you come across a pond full of dead frogs, I wouldn't recommend going for a swim.

Source: Environmental NZ

Sirius Sports

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I launched the re-designed Sirius Sports site on the weekend. The new site takes some great existing content and packages it into a CMS (content management system) with a new design.
This removes the frames and javascript from the old site, and makes managing the content very straightforward.

Sirius Sports supply sporting equipment across New Zealand, in particular softball, baseball, gridiron, soccer and basketball equipment.

www.siriussports.co.nz

Source: Sirius Sports

Wine Photo Shop - Welcome back

Fri, 05 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I have been working on a redesign of an existing site for Wine Photo Shop, a small image library site for Kerr Fram Vineyard in Kumeu. The site serves as a place to display local photography for Kerr Farm owner, Jaison Kerr.

The new Wine Photo Shop design is simple, clean and functional. All images on the site are resized automatically, and care has been taken to ensure the site meets modern web design standards, something that is becoming increasingly important. The site is based on my content management system to make it easy to maintain and search engine friendly.

Visit the site at www.winephotoshop.com for NZ winemaking images.

Source: Wine Photo Shop - Welcome back

How not to steal content

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Stolen content is probably more prevalent on the internet than most people think. It's so easy to steal content by right clicking and "view source" compared with the task of creating your own... Except when someone steals your content....

With the internet being the vast place that it is, and given that digital information is designed to be copied, it's surprising this doesn't happen more often. But I had to laugh when I saw this shamless content theft from one of the sites I developed at work.

Take a look at http://www.nzflowers.co.nz/faq.php - it's my standard database-driven FAQ page module, wrapped up in a nice template.

Now have a look at http://www.flowerstoturkey.com/florist-faq.asp - notice anything similar?

Not only is the content exactly the same, the HTML code is identical as well. A classic case of "view source" then cut-paste into their own site. As if this wasn't bad enough, they were too slack to proof-read the stolen content. The dead giveaway is the sentence beginning with...

Protecting your privacy is important to Iain Stephens Floral Design

That's right - they forgot to change some of the references to Iain Stephens, which they should have replaced with their own name. A simple CTRL-F would have solved this very easily.

I found their site while doing a google search for "iain stephens floral design" - their site had fairly good rankings for this phrase as it appears 3 times on the page.

A more efficient way of finding "borrowed" content on the web is to use the copyscape search engine. This searches the web for pages that contain copied phrases - well worth looking at if you are worried about your content appearing all over the place. The free version looks for stolen content one page at a time, the paid version will scan your whole site and search for any duplicate or stolen content.

Source: How not to steal content

Road slicks better than expected

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1300

I have been riding the bike into work the past few weeks for a bit of exercise and it's all going well so far. I have borrowed a mountain bike, and are using that until I can get my road bike operational again - this may never happen as it needs 2 new wheels which may well cost more than a new bike.

Yesterday I put some road slicks on the bike instead of the knobbly tires. This took my time from 1 hour 10 mins to 55 mins. Just like that, 15 minutes gone from my time. I knew it would make a difference, but I'm quite impressed with this result.

Source: Road slicks better than expected

Ph33r the Kidney Stone

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Right at the top of the list of things you don't want to get has to be Kidney Stones. I managed to get one of these little pirates on Monday.

It all started with a bike ride. All going well afterwards, apart from a slightly sore back. A few hours later, the back pain is getting worse, and I'm at a loss as to where it came from - I did raise the bike seat an extra notch, maybe this caused it?

A few hours later, the pain is just unbearable. Kirstin google's the symtoms and it's looking like Kidney Stones. So off to the doc I go to get it fixed up.
Doc confirms this is the problem, tells me to drink loads of water, and gives me some painkillers via injection. The painkillers removed about half the pain, enough for it to not be sore, but still annoying.

This is all good until 1am, when the painkillers wear off. At this point, the pain is unbearable, I'm munching pills like sweets and it's not helping. I call the hospital to see what I need to do, and they pass me onto the 24 hour healthline. I think the name "24 hour healthline" refers to the amount of time you have to wait in the phone queue before you get to speak to a real person. I waited 25 mins, then gave up, thankful that I wasn't ringing with urgent heart problems.<

So I went to the med centre and got some pethedine, which worked a treat. Next day, I pass the kidney stone in my urine - pain gone.

I definitely don't recommend getting one of these - some people (who have experienced both) liken the pain to childbirth. Kidney stones can be prevented by drinking lots of water, so I guess I'll be doing just that from now on.

Source: Ph33r the Kidney Stone

A good start to the campaign

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

As mentioned in this article, I'm now telling all telemarketers to "please hold" whenever they phone me at home. Then leave them hanging on indefinitely while they decide how long they should stay on the line.

So tonight I get a call at home, the first line being

Marketing parasite: "can I speak to the homeowner who is between 20 and....."
Me(in the friendliest and most genuine voice I can muster): Sure, that's me. Can I just put you on hold for a sec...
[put phone on speaker, check the time, carry on doing what I was doing and wait for the phone to start beeping]

This took a whopping 5 minutes, 20 seconds. Well done marketing scumbag. Looking forward to the next one

Source: A good start to the campaign

Big Schlong

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Whilst taking a look through the visitor logs today, I noticed some odd keywords showing up. In particular, I seem to be getting more visitors for the phrase "big schlong" than I do for web development type keywords. Granted there is less competetion for "big schlong" than there is for "web development", but who would have thought.

I mentioned the phrase "big schlong" once on an article a while ago in the context of deciding if the unborn baby was a boy or a girl. The article no longer mentions this, but I'm still getting a bit of traffic coming through.

I guess this proves that people who use the internet have smutty minds, and a look at the top searched keywords would confirm this.

So, it's possible that I'll rebrand this site as "Harvey Kane Paris Hilton Big Schlong PHP Sex Development" over coming weeks.

1 sex
2 paris hilton
3 hentai
4 google
5 games cheat
6 yahoo
7 ebay
8 boobs
9 jessica simpson
10 games
11 poetry
12 jenna jameson
13 89.com
14 carmen electra
15 mapquest
16 top 100 baby names
17 tits
18 girls
19 dogs
20 pamela anderson
21 lesbians
22 amoxil
23 girls gone wild
24 yahoo.com
25 anime
26 music lyrics
27 literotica
28 britney spears
29 nude
30 playboy
31 playstation 2 cheats
32 googletestad
33 jessica alba
34 tattoos
35 ass
36 teen girls
37 lesbian
38 hilary duff
39 hurricane katrina
40 hotmail
41 dictionary
42 lindsay lohan
43 big tits
44 radio stations
45 lolita
46 angelina jolie
47 thongs
48 funny jokes
49 green day
50 50 cent

Source: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/keywords/

Source: Big Schlong

Search Engine Optimisation

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

Search engine optimisation is the process of engineering your site to achieve better search engine positions. Search engine optimisation can be done in many different ways, this article covers the first steps you should take in search engine optimisation.

Keyword Research

Before starting any search engine optimisation on your site, you should be targeting the right keywords. If it's visitor volume you are after, then you want to optimise for phrases that people actually search for.
Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) is a paid service which has excellent keyword research tools - find the popular search phrases relating to your site, and see how much competetion there is for these phrases.
You want to optimise for the high volume phrases that have the least competetion (as this makes it easier to get a top position).
Create a list of phrases (in order of importance) and use this when optimising the content on your site.

Competetive Analysis

Before getting too far into this search engine optimisation process, it's good to know what you are up against. Enter some of the phrases from your above list, and get a feel for the competetion. Often the same sites will appear near the top, so spend some time checking out what they are doing right - what keywords they are targeting, how good their onsite SEO is, and how many backlinks they have.

Optimising Content

With your shopping list of phrases, target one phrase per page. Use the phrase at the start of your title tag, H1 tag, page URL, and twice in the first paragraph. Use the phrase at least once somewhere else on the page. Always make sure the phrase fits in with the text, and is readable to a human. You need to look professional so your visitors will trust your site.
At this stage, you can optimise for secondary phrases. If your primary phrase is "SEO" then you can easily optimise for "SEO Techniques" as a secondary phrase.

Internal Linking

Link to your content pages using your chosen phrases as the clickable text. Due to space constraints and user considerations (eg "Home" should always be labelled "home" on the main navigation), you may want to include these optimised links in the footer navigation.
This logic will also apply to any external links to the site, which comes later.

Technical considerations

At this stage, you have created your pages and optimised the text. Now you need to ensure that Google can index your site - Search engine optimisation is useless if your site isn't indexed.
Primarily, you need to ensure every page is accessible through links from the homepage - an unlinked page is not going to get found. Use a sitemap on a large site, use footer navigation, and avoid forms, flash or javascript like the plague for your main navigation.
Run Xenu through your site to check for broken links, and ensure Xenu can find each page - if it can't, the neither can Google.
Remove all duplicate content from your site - see this article on preventing duplicate content.
Create a Google sitemap and submit to Google (you will need a free Google account for this).

Link Building

A successful search engine optimisation campaign can be done by link building alone, however this is definitely the hard way to do it. The fact is there are thousands of very badly optimised sites that perform very well because they have great incoming links.
Don't build links too quickly on new sites, build slowly over 6 months and don't push too hard.
You can get links using any of the following methods..

Reciprocal Link exchange with other sites
Writing articles and submitting to article sites
Paid one way links
Writing interesting or contraversial content that other sites will naturally link to (the best method)
Providing something free - a software tool or resource
Getting links from your web developer on their client's other sites
Posting signature links on various forums, such as this SEO forum
Submitting to directories (one way), free or paid
Writing testimonials for products you have used (often these are published with a link)

Ongoing

Remember, search engines do things slowly, so it's best to make small changes and upload them straight away, rather than doing the entire site offline and uploading the final product once it's all done. Changes to the homepage can be detected within a few days, whereas changes to subpages can take several weeks.
Keep an eye on your rankings, and also the traffic each phrase is bringing in. If your homepage has a page 1 listing for a phrase, but isn't generating any traffic, then you are probably targeting the wrong phrase.

Also make sure you spend some time each month keeping up to date with what the search engines are doing. Keeping up with a good SEO blog, or visiting some of the bigger forums is a good way to find out what Google is up to and whether you need to vary your strategy.

Source: Search Engine Optimisation

Content Management Systems

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

A content management system, or cms is a web application for managing websites. The content management system will provide you with a login which you can use to change part of the content on the website.

How Content Management Systems work

All content management systems are different - built for different purposes and needs, but most share some level of basic functionality. Content Management Systems will normally store the pages of a website in a database, not in html files like traditional web management packages such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver.
A CMS is usually a good idea when the website has a lot of pages, or the content needs to be changed frequently. A good CMS will speed up the process of adding content, by creating the new page, adding a button on the menu, and putting a link in the sitemap. Becuase this happens automatically, it makes for a good level of consistency across the site, where a manual system is subject to user error.

Source: Content Management Systems