Andy Moore

Just testing! Not that it should matter much to you if you’ve viewing this page on a normal browser.

This is a sweet little tool for anyone into mobile or wondering how well their site would perform on a mobile device.

Are you mobi ready?

I reckon .mobi should have been .mob to honour the tradition of keeping things short on a mobile.
Our ringtones WAP site scored five out of five on the test but then it should, it’s based in PHP and evolves around the WURFL and WALL.

This site (andymoore.info) scores 1, ironic seeing as I profess to be a mobile developer.

And a quick update: It now scores five out of five too thanks to the WURLF Wordpress Plugin.

Going mobile with WordPress is easy, so is spending a few hours giving that plugin a rewrite to make it more friendly to my needs.

Sweet new toy

Samsung LE23R71WX

Okay so it doesn’t have an integrated hard drive, free-view or DVD player / recorder but you can’t deny this is a sexy bit of hardware!

Samsung HD Ready 23 inch LCD TV

(more…)

Making something nice and user friendly from something as ugly and unhelpful as a basic 404 is easy. Making it so that it logs the error and reports it back to you is good practice and should result in a better managed website with less errors.

If your 404 page looks like that you’re letting your users down when you could do a little something to help them out.

A bog-standard 404 page isn’t very helpful. It tells the user it hasn’t worked and tells them you’re not that bothered about it. A 404 like that on a site is a bad strike, I give a site three strikes before it’s binned. How many users only give one strike?

What makes a good 404 page? This is mine from one site I run:

It’s clean, crisp, simple and doesn’t bog them down with a million links. It’s quick and to the point. It says “We screwed up, we’re sorry” then moves on.

The main things is to apologise to the user, it’s your fault, not theirs, so offer some helpful links or redirect them to your index page.

If there’s no link to your index page, no option to search, no apology, or no redirection there’s nothing to persuade them to hang around and execute your call to action.

People are less likely to buy, click, subscribe or register if they get a bad impression from basic errors like 404s. A site riddled with bad links isn’t much fun for the visitor.

Some time back I needed a tool that’d tell me about all the files missing on my site, I wanted to be able to see which files were 404′ing the most and also be able to monitor errors in real-time. I got sick of pressing F5 to reload the standard cPanel error log.

How to handle Error 404s gracefully with .htaccess

Providing your hosting environment supports it and your administrator has it enabled htaccess is the business:[code]## catch error 404s and send them to error-404.html
ErrorDocument 404 /error-404.html
## catch error 404s and send them to a script
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
## catch all error 404s and just echo text
ErrorDocument 404 “Ah bugger, it’s a feckin’ 404″[/code]There are thousands of tutorials to do this if you need them.

The three examples we use above are.

1. Loads the page contents of error-404.html
2. Loads the contents generated by a script
3. Returns plain text statement inside the quotes

The 404 handling script I wrote handles the errors and logs them to a database. I can either view a historic report with a count of how many times that error has happened or a real-time report which will update the document before my eyes showing errors as they happen.

You’ve seen the friendly 404 page above, that’s generated to the user, the back end logs the error and gives us two reports to view it in.

Report 1 = Real-time AJAX / auto-updating -Working demo

Report 2 - Historic view - Working demo

You can download the script here, it explains what you need to do along the way but the basics of it are outlined here.

First you need to set up your database with the table we’ll use to log and report back missing files:[code]CREATE TABLE `ERRORLOG` (
`id` smallint(6) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`url` text NOT NULL,
`date` timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `date` (`date`),
FULLTEXT KEY `url` (`url`)
) TYPE=MyISAM COMMENT=’404 logging ‘ AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;[/code]Then we need to configure our .htaccess file to catch all missing file requests and point them to a script:[code]ErrorDocument 404 /errorlog/index.php?log[/code]Now we need to setup a few variables in our script. [php]// configuration variables
$host = ‘localhost’; // your database host - usually localhost
$uname = ‘xxx’; // your database username
$pword = ‘xxx’; // your database password
$database = ‘xxx’; // your database
$table = ‘ERRORLOG’; // database table name
$results = ‘30′; // how many results to show when viewing the report
$homepage = ‘http://www.andymoore.info/’; // your main url - include the http://
$seconds = ‘4′; // how many seconds to wait before redirecting a lost user
$daysdata = ‘30′; // how many days of data to store in the database[/php]If you’re following this you’ll now have your database set up to log errors, your .htaccess file pointing 404s at a script and some basic variables so the script knows about it’s environment.

That’s really all there is to it, create the database table, set up .htaccess to catch the errors, configure the variables prior to upload and it should work.

I know the answer, I’m just taking the time to write it up and document a new challenge in the hope it helps new users who are starting out on the internet and need to grasp some founding SEO logic. It’s really all about relevant content and building links to entice users then search engines to your site.

I’m Andy Moore, therefore the waste of cyberspace that is this website (www.andymoore.info) should be returned on Google when searching for my name, alas not.

The original site I had up here may have been funky and filled with scriptaculous effects but the loading sequence called for the body tag to have a style=”display:none” value rendering the page invisible to robots or anyone browsing without the use of JavaScript.

Anyone visually or physically challenged who was viewing with screen reading software or a text browser before would have had a user experience that left a lot to be desired.

Great visual effects and flashy JavaScript libraries can be dreadful for search engine optimisation. It’s simple really, crowd your page with stuff that’s hard for a robot to understand and you can’t expect your content to be spidered by the engines or included in the search results.

That said Yahoo list me at number 18 but they have some of the planet’s best JavaScript engineers there so if anyone can build a spider that can read it it’s them.

How can I remedy this? Firstly I dropped the old site, it wasn’t important, nor is it today in the grand scheme of things. The old site (pictured above) has been replaced by this, a self-hosted Word Press install. I could have easily taken off the display:none style on the body but it was still hard to update and manage, Word Press simply won for ease of use and extendibility.

The old site was never updated, no fresh content was ever added so it was in no way interesting to the reader or the robots. I mean, hell I was bored with it and there was nothing to compel users to visit the site again.

Setting the display of the body to none did it no favours. Now this site is much simpler and free from complicated JavaScript effects it can be read by spiders and humans, the code for it validates and it is updated, or at least I hope it will be, often.

Validation is one of those things that you should strive towards but in reality doesn’t mean jack to SEO. I’ve known ugly looking sites with broken code pull in 15,000 organic visitors daily.

Writing markup that validates is good practice and easier to maintain, just don’t expect results for that reason alone.

19th January 2007 - the mission is on. How long to get into the Google results, today I’m not in the top 100 on the .com or the .co.uk

Now this site is online, I need links pointing to it so users and robots can find me. It’s the links that are the road signs to tell visitors how to find me. I’m hoping first to pull in real humans and not worry so much about the engines, I need humans here now more than robots.

I’m lucky that I’m pretty active online and can build a little nest of links up quickly, if you’ve not got such an opportunity you need to find sites to link to you, if possible without you having to link back but reciprocal linking still builds links. Email the owners of relevant sites to yours and request a link. It’s easy, boring as hell, tedious and frustrating but simple enough.

I’m a moderator over at Dev Shed WAP Forums and have over five hundred posts there carrying my signature which has now been updated to link back here.

The ringtones and mp3 downloads forum I manage over on my ringtones site has a growing number of posts from me too so I’ve changed signatures there to link here.

I’ve also changed by signature of on the Site Reference Forums where I hang out quite a bit. It’s a nice community and some great interesting things get discussed there.

My girlfriend Caroline plays the bells in the Carillon Tower in Loughborough so I built her a site. I get a mention on there as the developer so that’s another link.

From zero links pointing here to over a thousand links pointing here in no time, only on a limited number of sites but there are now signs pointing here. These links will be read and any users clicking on them will know what they will find.

So what if my linking to where I’m getting links from makes links reciprocated, a link is a link and if it has the right anchor text it holds value.

All these links have my name in them as the words used in the link, I’m called Andy Moore so that’s what my links need to say about me to be most effective.

Example:

Andy Moore links to my personal site and has value.
Me links here too but has none as it’s text isn’t relevant.

If a user can read a link and know what to expect when they click it the same rule will apply for search engine spiders and robots as they journey around the web. If the spiders can read your pages you’re well on your way.

The final tip and this one is as juicy as they come. Use Google Adsense on your website, it’s contextual advertising so Google has to send a spider to read your page. If it doesn’t do that they can’t be contextual in their ad serving. It’s the quickest way to get a digital representative reading your page. It pays in more ways than money alone.

The race is on now. How long to get inside the top 100? How long to do top 10?

I’ll feel a complete tit if six months pass and I’m still not included in results but I know this theory and logic is sound as I’m using it on other sites I work on get top ten listings on very challenging keywords with over 100,000,000 results.

Time will tell but right now I’m going to stick some Adsense on my site.

And here it is: