How to change time-zone on a Linux server

We run multiple websites on multiple servers so it’s fairly important that we can synchronise the time-zones on every these different boxes.

We found the Linux process of changing time-zone a little quirky, so we thought we would note it down here for future reference.

I think the following applies to most flavours of Linux, but we’re specifically using Ubuntu Dapper Drake in this example.

First of every, you’ll probably want to check the time and date on your box, to do this log-in via SSH and type the following command at the prompt:

date

You should then look the current time and date in this format:

Mon Aug 13 09:30:19 EDT 2007

OK, so let’s change our time-zone from EDT to something else. The server time-zone is controlled by a file called localtime, this file is a symbolic link to the specific time zone file. This file can be found in the etc/ folder, the specific time zone files can be found in usr/share/zoneinfo/. So, we just need to re-write the localtime sym link and re-point it. Working in the etc/ folder which contains localtime, type:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST localtime

Now, when you check the time and date, you should that it now displays a different time and zone:

Mon Aug 13 06:45:02 PST 2007

There you have it, time-zone changed!

There are lots of options in the zoneinfo folder, take a look inside to look what you can use.

Post from: Sky Rocket

4 Mar 2008, 3:44 pm | click here to view more

NetInsight website analytics

Unica’s NetInsight is the best web analytics software ever!

A few reasons why it works so well for us:

• It allows us to host our possess data on our possess servers so we don’t share important metrics and conversion data with prying eyes.
• Our NetInsight installation is log file based so we don’t use Javascript code which can sometimes slow page loading times.
• It’s possible to create customised campaigns for every conceivable marketing initiative.
• You can plug-in external data sources and extend the NetInsight database.
• Unica are a talented, accomodating company and whilst they have many big clients they still have time for tiny business like Sky Rocket.

Dashboards

NetInsight comes with lots of pretty graphs which are arranged into various dashboards. And you can create your possess custom dashboard and focus on metrics that are important to you.

Robots & spiders

Because NetInsight uses your website log-files it can report on robots and spiders. This gives you great visibility into how active the search engines are on your site. It also alerts you to non-human script visits, content-scrapers and hacks.

Automatic marketing adjustments

You can also apply customised business rules to NetInsight to trigger various marketing events such as PPC adjustments, special offers, email newsletter and direct mail.

Landing page click-maps

Exactly measure how hot certain area of your landing page are.

Filters

One of my favourite features of NetInsight are the filters. ANY metric can be a filters, and ANY filter can be added on-the-fly to ANY report. It’s super powerful and I don’t know of ANY other analytics program that can match this.

Drilling-Down

Everything report in NetInsight has a hierarchy, and as such you drill down through this hierarchy to refine the data. You can also drill-through from onw report to another creating whole new dimensions for your data.

Date comparison

Easily compare 2 dates in 1 report.

Typed-in search queries

NetInsight can show exactly what people are typing-in to search engines. If you run PPC campaigns you can look how these terms relate to your paid keywords and use this information to improve your campaign.

A/B testing

A/B test anything! Create customise data sets and look them side-by-side.

Post from: Sky Rocket

11 Oct 2008, 9:29 pm | click here to view more

4 game

4 places that I go to over and over:

1. Bed
2. Desk
3. Sea
4. Fridge

4 people who e-mail me regularly:

1. John
2. Eric
3. Monz
4. Billy

4 of my favourite places to eat:

1. Cassareep, Speightstown, Barbados
2. Roka, Charlotte road, London
3. Blue Legume, Stoke Newington, London
4. Zen, Barbados

4 places I would rather be right now:

1. Beach
2. Bed

4 TV shows I watch:

1. Mad Men

Post from: Sky Rocket

27 Oct 2008, 6:38 am | click here to view more

iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPhone

If, like me, you spent days hacking your iPhone to make it work on an unofficial cell phone network, then you can understand how scary it is when iTunes tells you that it wants to restore the phone to factory defaults.

If I’d followed iTunes advice my phone would’ve been rendered useless. So, I was quite pleased when I discovered another fix.

It seems that my phone went on the fritz in the middle of exporting images to iPhoto. So I found a fix online where you delete the contents of the media folder, then when you reconnect to iTunes you receive the option to load a the backup. No restore, no factory defaults, every is good!

If you have command line access to your phone you can use the following:

rm -R /var/root/Media

Otherwise you can connect via SSH or SFTP and delete the files manually.

Post from: Sky Rocket

5 Oct 2008, 4:28 pm | click here to view more

Ping (instant messaging) etiquette

We rely heavily on instant messaging, and the Skype client is the current favourite (largely due to the free voice calls and not because of the awkward interface).

When we talk about instant messaging someone these days we say we’ll ‘ping them’. Pinging is a direct reference to the noise most IM clients make when one sends a chat. Pinging is great, it’s quick, efficient and often saves having to write an email or pick up the phone. However, pinging can soon become irritating if it’s poorly used.

A colleague and I were discussing this and we both agree that sometimes a ping makes life easier and sometimes it doesn’t. More often than not, the neat brevity of a ping can become a distracting annoyance.

So, for a giggle, we came up with the following 10 commandments for happier ping life:

1. IM does not replace the phone or email - use them every when suitable.
2. If you’re dealing with a regular contact, start your IM chat with a direct question and question mark. If you open with greeting (Hi, Hello, Yo, whatever) than you have distracted your contact who then has to wait for the question.
3. Use proper sentence-case capitalisation. Never use every-caps as it will look like you’re SHOUTING and that is liable to irritate.
4. Use question marks if you want a response.
5. Use ellipses if you don’t really require a response.
6. Respond to pings with question marks and don’t bother responding to pings with ellipses.
7. There’s no need to officially sign-off, avoid the temptation to say good-bye. Again, that good-bye ping is just another unnecessary distraction.
8. brb meaning be-right-back is very useful for breaking a conversation and dealing with a phone-call, door-bell, earthquake, whatever.
9. Keep you status updated then your contacts can look what you’re doing without having to ask. Additionally you could consider using a service like Twitter to manage your status.
10. Don’t rush, take time to explain yourself clearly and concisely.

Post from: Sky Rocket

29 Oct 2008, 12:22 pm | click here to view more

Cracked iphone screen

I’ve had my iphone 3G for about 2 months now and apart from the battery lasting about 10 hrs with medium usage, I’m quite glad with it.

Well I was until I put a golfing game app’ on it.

Yeah you actually have to swing the phone to simulate a golf stroke, nice idea I thought until the phone slipped out of my grasp and went flying across my kitchen, landing on the grey slate tiles! every the while thinking to myself why did I not purchase a protective jacket when I had the chance..

I went to the apple store in Regent’s St London to explain my predicament thinking they may have a sympathetic ear for this unique case. No! was the answer. I was told the whole phone had to be replaced $$ and there were no spare parts that could be bought…

Scanning the web I found numerous fix ideas for broken screens for the iphone 3G but they were also quite costly. The problem lies with the glass panel being cemented to the digitizer touch pad.

There was this one post where you can buy the glass panel from ebay, some intricate tooling and adhesive and carry out a procedure of fixing it yourself, after watching the youtube demo, which I might add was very informative I decided not venture forward in this manor. To risky for someone who just threw his phone across his kitchen!

The fix and parts that I would suggest would be to use these links below. £55.00 which I think is pretty reasonable.

Replacement digitizer touch panel with glass

And use this very informative guide to carry out the procedure

Disassembly guide

Post from: Sky Rocket

7 Nov 2008, 9:28 am | click here to view more

Eco Counter

I’ve been working on the Flash code for an Eco Counter for PickupPal today, but I haven’t used Flash in years and have to admit my Actionscript is very rusty.

Eco Counter version 01

I had hoped to create more a of eased tween-like effect so the numbers look as though they start quick and then slow as the reach the total, but I think it could do with a better tween algorithm.

Some motion blur may also help, perhaps giving it the look of a more traditional mechanical odometer.

Post from: Sky Rocket

13 Mar 2008, 2:01 pm | click here to view more

CSSRockstars WTF!?!

Recently, I’ve had the most frustrating experience with CSSRockstars; possibly the most fucked-up and fruitless back-and-forth email debate I’ve had for a while. Even now, weeks later, it still makes me mad. And so I write this in the interest of catharsis and understanding.

At first everything seemed great, we sent them an Illustrator layout they sent back an XHTML and CSS build. every for $149 USD - sweet! The code looked good, I ran through it with the guide developer on the project and aside from some very minor changes we were very glad with CSSRockstar’s work. I was especially stoked as I had several other layouts stacked-up for them and was starting to receive really excited about the possibilities of outsourcing.

Then it went wrong. Wrong in the most irritating and depressing way. I’m not even sure how to describe it. It seems to have been 1 part communication failure and 1 - much, much larger - part complete disregard for the customer (yours truly).

And now they won’t even answer to my emails. It’s insane, I want to spend money with these guys but they don’t seem interested in taking it!?!

Does anyone else out there know how to receive through to these guys?

Post from: Sky Rocket

5 Oct 2008, 7:59 am | click here to view more

Rotate Apache log files on Ubuntu Hardy Heron Server

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Server comes pre-installed with a program called logrotate.d. Once you understand how this works log rotation for your Virtual Hosts is easy.

First, edit the log rotation parameters:

sudo nano /etc/logrotate.d/apache2

The standard contents of this file is:

/var/log/apache2/*.log {
weekly
missingok
rotate 52
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
create 640 root adm
sharedscripts
postrotate
if [ -f /var/run/apache2.pid ]; then
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart > /dev/null
fi
endscript
}

I simply copy and glue this function and change the initial path in the first line and link it to my Apache log files in whatever Virtual Host I want to work with. You can also modify the other parameters for more or less frequent rotation. Full instructions can be found in the logrotate manual:

man logrotate

The logorotate file is run daily by the crontab at 6.25 AM, if you need to change this type you need to edit the crontab file:

sudo nano /etc/crontab

Easy!

Post from: Sky Rocket

16 Sep 2008, 2:04 am | click here to view more

Ubuntu server distro direct-upgrade

You can upgrade your entire Ubuntu server from one revision to another with dist-upgrade.

First, you must ensure the new version repositories replace the existing repositories in your server’s /etc/apt/sources.list, then simply issue the apt-receive update.

Finally, perform the actual upgrade by typing:

sudo apt-receive dist-upgrade

Post from: Sky Rocket

5 Oct 2008, 12:33 pm | click here to view more

OS X 10.5.3 permissions fix

OS X 10.5.3 permissions fix

Post from: Sky Rocket

3 Jun 2008, 7:41 am | click here to view more

Want more sign-ups, sales & leads?

At Sky Rocket, we don’t simply want to increase overall visits to your website, we are much more interested in increasing online events that are important to your business. These events might be leads, sign-ups, registered users, sales, downloads, whatever! In short, we can tailor traffic to suit your business goals.

Why it’s important to focus on specific goals?

The internet is a busy place, and people are surfing around for every sorts of reasons. It’s actually very easy to buy traffic into a website and increase the overall visits as there are many cheap sources of traffic. But unless you are paying close attention to what that traffic is doing, then you have no real clue about how valuable these potential customers are to your business.

Choosing your goals

To control this process you need to decide on the goals at the outset. For most website owners this is very easy, as websites can be split into two broad categories:

Online Sales

Sites that sell a product or service online; where the financial transaction is completed on the website itself.

Offline Sales

Sites that sell a product or services offline; where the financial transaction is completed over the phone, at the store, in fact anywhere that doesn’t involve the website.

If your site does online sales, then your goals will be focused on increasing the amount of sales for every or certain products in your inventory; whereas, if your site does offline sales, your goals will be focused on obtaining information about the customer and their interests to aid the offline sales when it happens.

Want to measure every of this?

Post from: Sky Rocket

1 Aug 2008, 11:06 am | click here to view more

AdWords Quality Score

In July 2005, the Google’s AdWords team introduced minimum bids for keywords based on a Quality Score. This system was introduced to manage low-quality websites using Google’s every important revenue generating AdWords product. AdWords has always been a victim of its possess success, because it sells the highest quality traffic - in the highest volumes - it has always been attractive to genuine, quality websites and websites at the lower-end of the market, also known as spam.

below considerable pressure to clean-up its search results and improve the quality of ads for its users the AdWords team chose to use a purely financial measure. The Quality Score system was introduced so that lower quality websites (spam) would have to pay more than higher quality websites. This was smart, because it allowed Google to receive the best of boths worlds. On the one hand they improved ad quality, and on the other they maintained a lucrative source of revenue (just at a higher price than before).

4 years later, the overall effect is that the cost of advertising on Google has increased significantly for both spammers and quality website owners and there are still many keywords crowded with spammy advertisements.  Today Google has announced a futher update to the Quality Score system, and the AdWords team continue to try and manage the tricky balancing between quality and spam. Web spam is like junk-mail; you can never cease it completely.

Post from: Sky Rocket

21 Aug 2008, 6:23 pm | click here to view more

What is PPC ?

Pay per click or PPC is an advertising model used across the internet on search engines, advertising networks and content websites. The advertiser only pays when a user has clicked on their advert which leads a user to their website.

Example: A user types into their desired search engine lets say Google, the search query ‘golf clubs’ a list of search results will be generated, with a list of sponsored results along side that will be advertising highly targeted adverts to the users term ‘golf clubs’. The user then clicks on the most relevant advert to them leading to a quality website where they can purchase or find information on golf clubs. The advertiser pays for the click of the user and many more like it. A percentage of those clicks will eventually turn into sales and so and so forth.

There are two main categories of ppc advertising, keyword match and content match. Keyword match is based on the search results from a search engine created by a user entering a search query like the previous example, ‘golf clubs’.

Content placements matches the advertisers advert with relevance to the content of a website that a user is looking at.

Post from: Sky Rocket

28 Aug 2008, 2:40 am | click here to view more

Importing CSVs into Bento

When importing CSV files into Bento it’s important that the date is exactly the right format, so if Bento has a date like 30/09/2008 then the CSV dates must be in exactly the same format.

In Excel, you can format the cells to be a custom date type by typing dd/mm/yyyy in the cell format dialog in the custom category.

Post from: Sky Rocket

13 Oct 2008, 3:11 pm | click here to view more

AdWords checklist

AdWords was originally built for everyday users with no specialist skills, these days AdWords is a very complicated product and its ever-increasing array of features can be daunting to new online marketers.

At Sky Rocket, when we’re working with existing accounts, or starting afresh, we follow a checklist. The AdWords Checklist below focuses on the important areas of PPC advertising without getting lost in the minutiae of the AdWords interface.

The AdWords checklist

• Campaign planning

  1. Geographic targeting

     Only show your ads in regions where people can act on them; if your product isn’t available in a certain area, don’t show your ad there.

  2. Demographic targeting

     Start thinking about the type of person you’re looking to attract with your campaign, this will inform your keyword choices later.

  3. Search & content settings

     Google search and content networks provide VERY different types of traffic and the general rule is that content converts lower than search. So, enable both, but also make sure that separate bidding is enabled.

  4. Day parting

     Day parting is a very powerful way to gift your ad to people at times (day or week) when they are most likely to act. However, to be certain what those times and days are, you first need to collect more information from your analytics software. We will cover this in more detail in our posts on analytics.

• Ad Group structure

  1. Ad Group naming (core term Ad Groups)

     Ad Group naming is an art and it’s here that we really start thinking about the keywords the Ad Group will contain and how relevant that is to the landing page. We find it useful to create and name Ad Groups based on core terms. Core term Ad Groups contain keywords that are directly related to the core term or name of the Ad Group. For example: if you have an Ad Group called Red Apples the keywords contained should every have a strong relationship to that core term. Red apple, red apples, juicy red apples, ripe red apples, best red apples, red apples online, red apples for sale would be good examples of keywords. You should not include ‘green apple’ keywords; for these, you should build a separate Ad Group called Green Apples, or if there were no green apples available on the site, you needn’t bother and use a keyword negative -green in the Red Apples group. The core term concept of Ad Group building is about creating silos of related keywords that describe something on your website.

  2. Landing page relevance

     Generally with core term Ad Groups you will have 1 single, or a few related, landing pages for each Ad Group. This is easier to manage than mixed term Ad Groups with every sorts of different landing pages. Ad Groups should be tightly focused on the contents of the landing page. You will improve performance of the Red Apples Ad Group if the landing page contains text and images related to red apples.

  3. Ad Group level bids

     Using core term Ad Groups you will find the Ad Group level search and content bids give you greater control of ad spend. This means you can forget about keyword-level bids for the time-being and leave that for another day.

• Keywords

  1. Research

     AdWords comes with a very advanced Keyword tool that you can use to research keywords and there are many other good options available from 3rd parties: Wordtracker, Compete, SpyFu, KeywordSpy, etc. However, the best research tool is your possess mind, experience and cunning. The problem with the AdWords Keyword tool and the 3rd party options is that everyone uses them which means you will be bidding on keywords that already have a lot of competition.

  2. Expansion

     You can expand keywords by combining core terms with other related terms to create whole new keywords (here’s how in Excel).

  3. Mining

     Keyword mining is one of the best places to receive keywords, but first you need access to your websites log files. Hidden in these log files is valuable information about which sites your users came from, and more importantly, what search queries they typed into search engines like Google. Mining keywords allows you to look exactly what people type and you can use these queries as your possess keywords to enrich and improve the performance of your Ad Groups.

  4. Negatives

     Make an effort to really understand how negatives can reduce unwanted impressions and improve CTR. Always be thinking about good negatives to add to your Ad Groups, every Ad Group should at least contain a few.

  5. Miss-spellings

     We every make spelling mistakes, so your Ad Groups should always contain common miss-spelled keywords.

  6. Pluralisation

     Be sure to include plurals and singulars if relevant. The AdWords system is supposed to handle this for you, but it’s far from perfect. You will receive extra clicks if bid on plural and singulars.

• Ad Text copywriting

  1. Dynamic keyword insertion

     Always use keyword insertion in at least 1 line of ad text if not every 3, because Ads with inserted keywords always like a higher CTR. Don’t worry too much if it spoils the grammar of your copy, research suggests that no-one is reading anyway, instead users just scan through search results and ads looking for keywords.

  2. Variations

     Copywriting is an emotive, artful practice and often it’s not entirely clear what copy will work best. So write variations and test the performance.

  3. Landing page relevance

     Again, it’s important that your ad directly relates to the content of your ladning page.

• Content network

  1. Ad Group level bids

     Always use Ad Group level content bids, there is huge volumes of traffic on content, but because the quality is not as high as search you want to pay less for it.

  2. Negative Sites

     The big problem with the content network are popular, low-quality sites (like MySpace) sending thousands of clicks you don’t want. Use your analytics software to identify these sites and negativise them. Be aggressive and close down any source of traffic that is not working for you.

If you focus on understanding and improving these areas you will go a long way to improving your campaigns.

Post from: Sky Rocket

25 Sep 2008, 3:20 pm | click here to view more

AdWords seminars

We use Google’s AdWords for about 70% of our client work; it really is a fantastic product. If you want to start learning it yourself you should consider registering for one of their seminars here.

Post from: Sky Rocket

19 Aug 2008, 9:55 am | click here to view more

How to expand keywords in Excel

If you’re dealing with keywords, then Excel is your pal. Excel makes managing big lists of data very easy and it has a number of features that work especially well with keywords.

Here is a simple recipe to combine a few simple keywords together to create a list of long-tail terms.

Ingredients

Core terms

• apples
• oranges
• bananas

Geographic terms

• new york
• los angeles
• boston
• philadelphia

Recipe

In Excel, enter your core terms into column A.

Enter core terms

Now we need to multiply the amount of core terms (3) by the amount of geographic terms (4). So, in Excel we need to copy down the core to repeat them 12 times.

Select the cells A1 to A3 and click Edit -> Copy. Then select cells A4 to A12 and click Edit -> glue.

Copy and glue core terms

Now sort the list by clicking Edit -> Select every and then Data -> Sort -> Sort By -> Column A -> Ascending.

Sort column A ascending

Now enter your geographic terms in column B and copy and glue them down.

Geographic terms enter, copy and glue

Now every we need to do is combine the 2 sets of data into to column C with the following formula: =A1&" "&B1

Combining formula

Now hit enter to look the results and the copy and past this cell (C1) into cells C2 to C12.

Copy and glue the formula

Now you have your long tail terms in column C. You can add these to your PPC campaign and improve and improve the chances of you add being seen.

This is obviously quite a simplistic example, but you can use this approach to build much richer, complex keyword lists.

Post from: Sky Rocket

26 Oct 2008, 11:09 am | click here to view more

A List Apart survey 2008

Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

Source: A List Apart

Post from: Sky Rocket

1 Aug 2008, 11:57 am | click here to view more

iPhone increases its market share of online usage

Just been reading again about iPhone gains in online usage.

According to HitsLink, the people who track web usage statistics, iPhone users account for about a third of one percent of web browsers on the Internet, the largest of any mobile platform.

iPhone ranks fourth overall in terms of operating system market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux. On August 16, the stats peaked at 0.45 percent. That’s a two-fold increase since the iPhone 3G was released July 9. (Source: TUAW.com

A lot of this must be because the iPhone’s web browser is so easy to use, making websites accessible that could never work on other smart phones. Now with the speed increases of the latest model this trend is set to continue for some time…

Post from: Sky Rocket

19 Aug 2008, 2:45 pm | click here to view more

NetInsight: find and replace custom session ids from URLs

More often than not when using NetInsight you’ll want to strip out sections of URL, rewrite parts and modify the query string.

A common task is removing session ids from the page, here is the regular expression you need to remove the session id from the following example:

URL

http://www.pickuppal.com/pup/intro.html;jsessionid=79FG987987987JGDGDK7YTTUYT

Regular Expression pattern

(;jsessionid=[0-9A-F]+)

Post from: Sky Rocket

23 Oct 2008, 7:58 pm | click here to view more

Sort Highrise email addresses by tag and check for duplicates in Excel

• Export every contacts
• Export certain contacts by tag
• Clean-up the tag file so you have 2 columns Name, Email & Tag
• Clean-up the every contacts file so you have the same fields
• Copy and past the first tag file data into the every contacts file and then use the following Excel function  to check for duplicates <code>=COUNTIF(B:B,E2)</code>

Post from: Sky Rocket

29 Oct 2008, 5:56 am | click here to view more

Gmail settings for iPhone & MacBook Pro

I like Google’s approach to email. Gmail is online, search-able, threaded and has the capacity to archive every the email you’re ever likely to receive. You needn’t forget anything ever again, just as long as that thing is captured in a Gmail.

However, I’m not so keen on using the Gmail website. These days my web browser is over-loaded with open tabs; so if there is a better desktop or mobile client available I will opt for that instead. The Apple Mail and iPhone Mail clients are nicer to use than the Gmail website and they add another layer of traditional email functionality.

I use IMAP to plug multiple Gmail accounts (Sky Rocket, PickupPal & Personal) into my laptop and phone. Getting this right was not easy and it’s the reason for writing this post, saving the settings for future reference.

Gmail

First of every, you have to set-up your Gmail accounts to use IMAP.

• Log-in to your account
• Click on Settings in the top-right
• Click on Forwarding and POP/IMAP
• Ensure that IMAP is enabled.

You should do this for every account you wish to access from your desktop and mobile email clients.

Apple Mail

Not only do we have to set the main preferences, we also need to tell Apple Mail to use certain Gmail folders instead of it’s possess defaults.

Settings

You can access the Apple Mail Account settings from the Mail menu (Option+,), then click on Accounts.

I use 3 Gmail accounts each with identical settings, here are screen grabs for each of the 3 main panels Account Information, Mailbox Behaviours and Advanced:

Account Information

Mailbox Behaviours

Advanced

Mailboxes

As the client synchronises with Gmail you will look your Gmail folders listed in the left-hand panel of Apple Mail. N need select the Gmail Drafts and Sent folders one at a time and tell Apple Mail to use them as Apple Mail Drafts and Sent. Do this with the Use This Mailbox For command in the Mailbox menu.

iPhone Mail

From the Home Screen click on Settings, Mail and then Ad Account…

The iPhone comes with a automated set-up function for Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, .Mac and AOL.

Do not use the Gmail option for setting-up Gmail IMAP, instead select Other.

On the IMAP screen enter your details, you can refer to Apple Mail settings for this.

Here are the settings screens for one of my accounts:

Post from: Sky Rocket

4 Oct 2008, 1:24 pm | click here to view more

Taste London

I’ve just received my first taste london card!

Taste London is this great website that a pal told me about the other week. It lists an array of great places to eat around the capitol, Michelin star, fine dinning, business lunches, Sunday lunches, what ever your occasion you can find it here.

The great bit is the 2 for 1 and 50% off offers!

I’ve lived in London about 5 years now and although I only ever eat out occasionally mainly due to cost, I am a real ‘foodie’, but now with this taste london card I can afford to sample every those high-end places and really like some fine times in the city. Brilliant.

To receive your card, sign up for a month trial.

They’re hoping that after your experience you’ll subscribe to a year for about £50 to carry on using this great service.

Post from: Sky Rocket

6 Nov 2008, 1:31 pm | click here to view more

SCP SSH custom ports

If you use SSH SCP commands you may of noticed a subtle and annoying difference in the way you specifcy a custom port. SSH uses a lowercase p, whereas SCP requires an uppercase P:

ssh -p 08098
scp -P 09809

Post from: Sky Rocket

21 Oct 2008, 7:47 am | click here to view more

Minimal OS X Dock

I like to run a pretty minimal OS X Dock, here’s how it looks when I start-up my MacBook:

Nice, huh? No applications, no distractions.

I do this because I like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, so I find every my applications by doing Spotlight searches, which can be activated by pressing Apple Key + SPACE.

I find this approach is faster and less distracting. I use Spotlight to find apps, email, files, folders, ical events, contacts, whatever. It’s faster than clicking around with a mouse.

Spotlight also has a few handy modifiers for performing more complex searches, you can use NOT, OR & AND along with your keywords. For example: name NOT .doc will search for things called name that are not Word docs.

Post from: Sky Rocket

7 Nov 2008, 2:35 pm | click here to view more

Unix tip: append lines from a text file to another text file

awk -F, '{print $0}' a-text-file.txt >> another-text-file.text

Post from: Sky Rocket

28 Jul 2008, 2:32 pm | click here to view more

Uploading campaigns from AdWords to Microsoft adCenter

Here’s a quick tip to keep you the time that I spent learning how to do this.

1 From Adwords Editor export your chosen campaign in .csv file format. With this one file you’ll be able to clip and glue every the relevant data over to adCenter.

2. In adCenter througout the create campaign, adgroup and ad set-up you receive the option to import a whole campaign, adgroup or ads. To do this adCenter requires you to use their .csv or Excel templates.

3 You’ll look the option to download these templates every time you select import campaign or import adgroup etc.

Example.

4 Go through the process of creating new campaigns and adgroups in order to receive to these templates. Download each template for Campaign, adgroup and ads, name them and keep them, you’ll be using them a lot..

5 Next you have to transfer the data from your exported csv files from AdWords editor on to the templates you got from adCenter. The data has to be put into the templates in exactly the right way as shown in the template files.

adCenter template for ads..

6 You can try to do whole campaigns at a time, but I would recommend not to do this if your new to adCenter like myself. There can be a lot of data to transfer and it does receive confusing and you’ll probably find that adCenter won’t upload your campaign properly, or at every.

Also note that it won’t upload any negatives you have in a chosen campaign, it will instead upload them as normal keywords. Little bit a annoying! So your negs will have to be entered separately later.

So what I did was to upload separately the Campaign, then the adgroup, and then the ads. Takes a bit of time but if you stick to the format of the templates it goes quite smoothly.

Also note that when filling in the required fields for your ads, adcenter has one less description filed than AdWords. In adCenter they have one description field but with the ability to put in 70 characters.

So be aware of this when you are pasting ad data from AdWords to your adcenter ad template. You have to join the descriptive fields from AdWords and put them into the one field that adCenter gives you.

AdWords.

adCenter.

In uploading campaigns in this manor I found it to every arrive together in the end, there are a few annoyances with adCenter like the negatives explained earlier and its interface and tools are nothing compared to Adwords. However I’m gving it a try to look how much traffic I can draw from it and at what cost, compared to the same campaigns I have running in Adwords. We shall look…

Post from: Sky Rocket

3 Nov 2008, 8:40 am | click here to view more

Slicehost: a quick, fun way to learn Linux server administration

I’ve learnt quite a lot about Linux server administration in the last year or so. I had found this subject complicated and inaccessible, but recently it’s been a lot more fun and easy to understand. This is entirely due to Slicehost, my every-time favourite hosting company.

Slicehost offer basic ’slices’ (IP address, storage, bandwidth and RAM) for as little as $20 per month, you receive to pick the installed OS from the major Linux distros. This means you have to do everything else yourself; extra packages, web servers, databases, email, whatever. For someone like myself the learning curve was a little steep, but due to Slicehost’s powerful admin tool and incredibly well-written articles you can start doing this stuff with only a little understanding about server admin.

So, if you want to learn this stuff quickly, buy a Slice and refer to PickledOnion’s articles. Easy!

Post from: Sky Rocket

17 Sep 2008, 12:44 am | click here to view more

I ♥ Basecamp

I’ve been using Basecamp for years now.

I was first introduced to it at Spring Digital in 04 and opened my first personal account in 05. I’ve always intended to post about it and try explain why it’s such an essential piece of software. However, Basecamp’s genius is difficult to define in a single blog post as it does so much! And the effect of Basecamp is subtle — sure, it does to-dos, messages, chat & milestones, but so do a lot of other pieces of software. Basecamp just happens to do these things better than the competition and in a way that can transform your possess thinking, effectiveness and profession.

And if that isn’t enough to convince you to try it, it has only cost me a little over a thousand bucks for these years of glad project management.

Post from: Sky Rocket

19 Nov 2008, 6:14 am | click here to view more

Wordpress themes

If you need a Wordpress theme built, you should talk to these guys: http://outlawdesignblog.com/

They have built a few for us and the cost and quality has been very good.

Post from: Sky Rocket

21 Aug 2008, 10:01 am | click here to view more

Ginnan

Great Japanese food can be found at Ginnan, Rosebery Avenue, London.

Sushi was very good and the Chicken Katsu Curry was awesome. Katsu Curry is Japanese soul-food: fried chicken, curry-sauce and sticky rice. glad days!

Post from: Sky Rocket

4 Oct 2008, 10:07 am | click here to view more

Paid traffic vs organic traffic

Paid traffic

Paid traffic is online traffic that is bought, commonly referred to as PPC (Pay-Per-Click), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CPM (Cost-Per-1,000-Impressions) & CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition).

Benefits:

• Immediate results
• Unlimited keywords
• Keywords are flexible
• Daily budget can be easily controlled
• Paid traffic generally converts much higher than Organic
• More control over ad copy
• More control of ad placement
• Only tiny design and code changes required on the site

Disadvantages:

• The costs can increase as competition increases
• Certain verticals such as Real Estate and Travel can be very competitive

Organic traffic

Organic traffic can arrive from people typing-in your URL to a browser, finding you in organic search listings on sites like Google or seeing your link on 3rd-party sites. As you can’t directly buy organic traffic, there are ways to make your site more likely to receive it; this process is loosely referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Benefits:

• It’s Free!
• If you receive to the top of the organic search results on Google for a popular keyword you can receive incredible volumes of traffic

Disadvantages:

• Not instant, can be a time-consuming process sometimes requiring a major website re-design
• Ranking can not be estimated precisely
• Expensive to implement
• Ranking is subject to change without warning
• SEO is Voodoo; a mysterious and somewhat underground practice. This is because certain SEO practices are deliberate attempts to fool search engines
• Search engines (Google) frown on certain SEO practices because they can effect the validity of their organic listings

Post from: Sky Rocket

18 Sep 2008, 4:04 pm | click here to view more

Want to measure all of this?

We measure everything we do; we keep very fine notes on every cent we spend of your advertising budget. We prepare reports for you that tell you exactly what you have got for your money. How much traffic, sign-ups, registered users, whatever; remember you set the goals! If you use us you will gain more insight into how much these goals are worth to you, and you will be able to compare our reports to your other marketing efforts.

One the main tools we use to manage every this stuff is Unica’s NetInsight. NetInsight is a powerful log-file-based web analytics tool. It can be tailored to manage every kinds of conversion events and is highly configurable.

The market leading analytics tool is Google Analytics, NetInsight beats the Google product in two very important ways: firstly, it uses log-files which means you don’t have to install additional code on your pages which in Google’s case often slow down the load time; secondly, NetInsight frees you to track any type of web traffic whereas Google Analytics is much more restrictive.

Post from: Sky Rocket

1 Aug 2008, 11:07 am | click here to view more

Number 1, all-time, best, most-effective link-building tip ever, ever!

• Build a blog.
• Write engaging articles about yourself or your business every day.
• Be open, candid and generous with your content.
• Plug said blog into every social syndication option out there (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.).

Post from: Sky Rocket

14 Oct 2008, 8:10 am | click here to view more

Want more website traffic?

We can receive more traffic to your website quickly, effectively and on budget.

Quickly

We buy traffic from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and some smaller search engines and advertising networks. We pick traffic that is either keyword-driven or where we have tight demographic control, this ensures that the traffic is targetted. We buy traffic from leading internet brands, so we can send high volumes of quality customers to your website very quickly.

Effectively

Keyword-driven means the user has initiated a search by typing a keyword into a search engine. This is very effective; because we know what the user is searching for we can place advertisements that exactly match their desire.

For example: if the users types “luxury holidays” into Google, we can place an ad that advertises a website for luxury holidays and if a user types “nike shoes”, we can place an ad that advertises a store selling Nike shoes.

As you can look, there is a high relevancy between what the user typed and the ad they are served. This relevancy factor is key to the whole experience. The higher the relevancy the more likely the user will click the ad and buy the product. This is why keyword driven traffic generally converts into sales at a much higher rate than ANY other form of advertising.

On Budget

Online advertising is not expensive, the cost is a fraction of print, radio and television. We run campaigns for our clients where daily budgets range from the thousands per day down to a few bucks. every are effective at bringing in customers at a price that suits our clients.

Want more sign-ups, sales & leads?.

Post from: Sky Rocket

1 Aug 2008, 11:06 am | click here to view more

AdWords Tuneup!

Whether you’re already using Google AdWords or completely new to it, the Sky Rocket AdWords Tuneup! is a quick, affordable way to receive more out of PPC advertising.

AdWords Tuneup! is a 3-step process:

1. Appraisal of campaign requirements
2. AdWords Tuneup!
   • Campaign and Ad Group re-structuring
   • Keyword research and expansion
   • Ad copy revision
   • Negative keywords
3. Reports and proof of success

You retain control

Whether we’re working with existing accounts or creating new ones for clients, we ensure that you have admin access to the account. This means you can pick whether to manage it yourself, pay us, or even use another agency entirely.

Cost

The Sky Rocket AdWords Tuneup costs about $400 USD (subject to account size).

Drop us a line today for further details.

Ad spend not included.

Post from: Sky Rocket

5 Nov 2008, 4:39 am | click here to view more

Facebook ads seem very flaky

Initially, we saw some great traffic from our Facebook ads, but then out-of-the-blue the traffic stopped:

Of course, we emailed Facebook for an explanation, and of course, Facebook provided us with an unsatisfactory and somewhat greedy answer:

Please note that you are not guaranteed any number of clicks or impressions. For any given ad unit, we select the best ad to run based on the cost per click or cost per thousand impressions and ad performance. Therefore, if you are not receiving as many clicks or impressions as you would like, we suggest increasing your maximum cost per click or maximum CPM. We also suggest making sure your ad is as relevant as possible by targeting your ad to the most appropriate audience. Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it is being displayed to the users who are likely to be the most interested in your ad and click on your ad.

Considering the fact the that we had made no changes to our ads, either the Facebook PPC advertising marketplace got dramatically more competitive on Feb 27th, or Facebook are trying to squeeze more money out of us.

Feeling sporting, we took Facebook’s advice a few days later and upped our bids to over their suggested bid price, unfortunately this did not provide our ads with anymore impressions.

There’s a lot of great, engaged and relevant traffic on Facebook, and their demographic targeting is probably the most advanced of any PPC advertising product out there; however, the kinds of fluctuations outlined over make their system incredibly difficult to work with.

Post from: Sky Rocket

11 Mar 2008, 1:14 pm | click here to view more

Google AdWords malware security policy doesn’t make any sense!?!

Recently, I’ve been struggling to receive to grips with Google Adword’s malware security policy.

Here is the scenario:

• Your Adwords ads mysteriously cease running, no impressions are generated, and no warning is given.
• After a few hours you decide to contact Adwords customer support.
• Adwords customer support responds telling you that your account and system is infected with malware, and they give suggestions on how to clean and restart your campaigns.

Here are my problems with this:

• I have, and have never had any symptoms of malware. Not that Google seem interested in discussing symptoms.
• I use a Mac, generally well protected from malware.
• Google instructions on how top clean systems are out-of-date, they actually suggest a product called MacScan which is potentially very damaging to Macs and has completely killed one of my laptops.
• They also in one instance put a block on my credit cards. I fail to look how blocking a credit card can cease malware spreading!?!

I really don’t think Google’s malware policy can be having much of an effect on a serious and damaging problem for their flag-boat advertising product.

I would be VERY interested to know if other Adwords advertiser have advice on how to manage Google’s sketchy malware policy?

Post from: Sky Rocket

10 Mar 2008, 2:21 pm | click here to view more

Handy Firefox extensions

• Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic
  • keep a JPG/ PNG image of a page.
  • keep whole page, viewable area or frame.
• Live HTTP Headers
  • View HTTP header of a page while browsing.
• SEO for Firefox
  • Aron Wall’s handy extension adds SEO stats to your Google searches.
• SEOpen
  • Click one-click access to SEO stats about the page your viewing.
• ReloadEvery
  • An automatic page refresher.
• TIDY HTML Validator
  • Adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser.
  • The validation is done by Tidy from W3c.
  • This is real favourite.
• DownThemAll
  • A mass file downloader for Firefox.
  • Handy for quickly sucking down images from a page.

Post from: Sky Rocket

11 Mar 2008, 3:51 pm | click here to view more