All entries for October 2007

Snap Shot's MapShot | Beta tested, unknowingly, on this Blog.

Writing about web page http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/17/snap-shots-experience-making-your-links-more-interactive-with-snap-shots/

Snap have announced a new service.

The newest member of the Snap Shot family is MapShot which you can activate by typing a very specific address into Google Maps, click “Link To This Page” and copy the URL. Now paste the link into your site as you would a normal link and we’ll add a MapShot automatically.

This new ‘feature’ was working on this Blog back in the middle of August but with branded links.
Check out how to use Google Local to create previews of your own branded page on Google Maps.

Robert McGonigle : 18 Oct 2007 09:33 |  Tags: Branded Page Google Local Google Maps Mapshot Snap Shot |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Brian Burtt – Celebrating his life

Writing about web page http://www.burtt.co.uk

I have learned how well weblog entries can work to gather together comments of those left behind after a death. The posts on Mike Smith here generated many comments from people who became his friends through business. Some of these were from friends that I did not even know of including students and staff at Northumbria University.

My father-in-law, Brian Burtt, died at the end of september.

Alison has been busy with the estate so I have helped her to set up a site to remember Brian .

Robert McGonigle : 17 Oct 2007 22:44 |  Tags: Brian Burtt |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Rising Sun, A5, Brownhills | Good food, service & Spuds!

I was on the road yesterday and found that my route took me past an old favourite stop, The Rising Sun, Chester Road North, the A5, Brownhills.
Picture by Andy Venn
I found that the service was still friendly with a varied menu and selected the fish pie. The pie had varied fish and seafood and was tasty as usual but the potatoes brought out the spud snob in this irishman. New season boiled Maris Pipers, perfect!

Find the Rising Sun on Google Maps

Robert McGonigle : 12 Oct 2007 10:33 |  Tags: A5 Pub Food Potato Snob Rising Sun Brownhills |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Links get sites found & Warwick Blogs links work Fast & cuts carbon!

Writing about web page http://www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk

I blogged yesterday about an ‘out of the box’ website that I had reviewed. The main problem was that it had no links to it so the search engine’s bots were never going to find it. I linked from our new sub-site www.startup-support.co.uk last week and then blogged about the tools after my visit.

The whole site is now cached by Google with the only traceable link from yesterdays blog entry! Even better the owner found out about this with her first web generated enquiry.

This speed of responce is due to the friendly lists of updates maintained for us by the Warwick Blogs site. These direct the search engines to the changed content without the bots needing to spider the whole site. This saves electricity at the search engines data centres. So use sitemaps to the www.sitemaps.org standard in your websites to reduce your carbon footprint!

Robert McGonigle : 09 Oct 2007 18:14 |  Tags: Carbon Footprint HTML Links Sitemaps |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Website Out of a Box?

Writing about web page http://www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk

Last year I asked a student to research website templates; how to evaluate them and to create an approved list.

Last week I helped the owner of www.malverncurtainmaker.co.uk and found that her site was quite good from the start and easy to update and improve.

She had bought a Takeaway Website from http://www.mrsite.co.uk/ for £35. This will cost £2.90 a month to renew and host after 1 year which is clearly where their business will build earnings but this is still a low-cost way to a web-site.

I did not like the pages being labelled page2 etc but apart from that all of my requirements can be met with this package and on-line tools.

I was going to repeat the project this year to see if another student could make better progress but now I shall add mrsite and competitors.

Robert McGonigle : 08 Oct 2007 12:44 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem