In light of Vince Cables changes to UK copyright legislation I have found myself forced to write to my MP.
In amongst the pages of proposals is the right of the music industry based on suspicion alone to request the immediate disconnection of internet connections without warning or evidence. The internet user will get no chance to defend themselves or see any evidence and unless they pay a £20 fee for the privilege of appealing against their disconnection then they will immediately be classed as guilty.
Many people, myself included, depend on the internet for work and business and cannot afford any risk of the internet being shut off without due process being followed.
FOR THE ATTENTION OF:
Annette Brooke MP
Mid Dorset and North Poole
Dear Annette Brooke,
I read with absolute horror this morning how Vince Cable has launched a sweeping change to the justice system in the UK.
From a system where someone is innocent until proven guilty, we are suddenly introducing a system where everyone is guilty until they pay a fee just for the chance to try to prove themselves innocent when no evidence has ever been presented to their guilt.
The fact that music companies will be able to request that internet users access is shut off, without having to provide any evidence at all and based solely on the basis of suspicion is begging for systematic abuse, especially when we have seen loads of cases of this industry knowingly threatening innocent people in the past. Not only will the internet of users be shut off without a shred of evidence, or warning, which will be devastating to many people who use the internet for work or business, the abused user will then have to pay £20 for the privilege of appealing against being shut off. In no other situation would we consider it acceptable to charge someone to defend themselves when there is not even any evidence of wrong doing.
I urge you to bring this matter up most urgently as this is a gross infringement of human rights. Allowing this to go unchallenged would be Orwellian to say the least.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Pantry
August 4th 2011 Uncategorized
Well I am not sure how this one has passed me by and how I have never heard of this service before. Launched at TechCrunch on 27th September 2010 CloudFlare works like a CDN proxy network for your site, and not only does it speed things up, it also offers you the ability to survive traffic spikes and protect your site from many types of nasty stuff. It will even enable your site to stay up, when it is down. The best bit is that this is all available for free. Let me say that again Free!
I have added one of my other sites to it as a test and noticed a good improvement in load times and will be carefully reviewing the stats over the next week or so and then taking a choice about possibly moving other sites over as well. So far though I am impressed, it is still early days though.
I suggest popping over to CloudFlare and seeing what they can do for you. If you want more features above and beyond the already great features you get for free then you can pay $20 per site per month for even faster performance, supposedly the easiest SSL ever and some other extras that are not really required.
October 15th 2010 Uncategorized
In an online world where everything.com seems to have already been registered, people are turning to alternative domains more and more often. If you cannot get the .com, then you may be able to get the .co.uk or the .net and this raises some potential issues for people with regard to branding and visibility of their website.
If you are in also involved with children and schools then you need to be especially careful about who you are seen to be playing with. This week shows up a very bad mistake for the National Schools Film Week who’s mission statement says “Our core purpose is to enrich the education of young people across the UK by providing schools with unique film and cinema based learning experiences inside and outside the classroom that are directly relevant to the curriculum, placing film at the heart of their cultural experience.” They have picked up the domain name www.nsfw.org unfortunately many people on the Internet will already be aware of the much more common meaning of that 4 letter acronym Not Suitable For Work. NSFW is usually seen on posts where content or images included are not suitable for viewing at work normally due to nudity or pornographic content and indeed the more commonly visited version of the domain would be the .com which in this case does feature pornographic content.
National Schools Film Week now run the risk of enriching the education of young people in a completely different manner to that expected if any of them visit the nsfw.com domain instead of the nsfw.org one.
The lesson to be learnt is to carefully check other people using the same or very similar domain names to make sure you do not inadvertently end up sending completely the wrong message to your visitors through a common typo or a mistake in the top level domain.
Welcome back to our look at some of the things that can hold your site back and stop you getting all web traffic and visitors you would like.
If you missed our introduction then please take a moment to go back and review How can I rank better in Google
Anyway straight on with the good stuff. Some of this will mean you need to use a couple of basic simple tools to help but these are all free and 10 minutes with these easy and simple free tools can pay dividends to your site traffic and search engine ranking position. The first tool you will need is part of Google itself and it is the Google Webmaster Tools There is not a serious webmaster alive who is interested in promoting their site that can afford to ignore this free tool. The second is a website spider eg Xenu this is a windows tool but there are hundreds of free web spiders and sitemap generators for all platforms.
You should set up Xenu and register for Google Webmaster tools (GWT) so if you read the appropriate instructions for each of those then come back here we can continue.
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September 20th 2010 Uncategorized
Everyone wants to drive people to their websites, for some people this is to increase sales in an ecommerce platform or an online shop, or to increase awareness of a brand, company, charity or organisation along with the goods and services that it can offer. There are many different methods that are being used to achieve this goal with viral marketing and social media campaigns being the current flavour of the month. These can both be very effective methods to drive a lot of traffic to your site in a short period, however in most cases you will see a sharp peak in traffic which quickly drops off once the viral has finished or the push on the social networks is no longer being pushed as hard. Videos are increasingly being used to drive promote companies and sites and to be able to share a lot of knowledge in a relatively short time.
These methods can be great at promoting a site, however there is one thing that can always generate traffic for you and this is your search engine rank or position. Recent research by Chitika has shown just how much of a difference moving up the results can have on the amount of people visiting your site. Their figures clearly demonstrate how important it is to be on the first page of results with less than 24% of all the traffic in the study coming from results that were below position 5 and they note that making the single step from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1, a change of just 1 spot in the rankings has the biggest jump, percentage-wise in traffic.
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September 16th 2010 search
