I bought a second hand car a couple of days ago and noticed that it had a Parrot bluetooth hands free kit installed. Great I thought and I tried to pair my mobile phone with it only to get a message “Memory Full”. Now I didn’t have the instructions for the kit with the paperwork I got with the car so I did a quick search on Google for “Parrot user guides” and low and behold the number 1 result was for the user guides at www.parrot.biz.

Clearing the memory was as easy as pressing the red and the green button together. Now I was able to pair my phone to the kit and can happily use my phone hands free now and not break the law.

Where would we be without search engines?

I bought a baby Harley Davidson last year and its just had its 1st birthday which means I have to get it serviced. Embarrassed about the fact I have never cleaned it once since I got it so I thought I ought to do that before I got to the Harley dealership. I like things to be clean but sadly don’t have the patience to do it myself unlike some people I know. I have a friend who bought a Ducati from a dealer who delivered it to his house in an enclosed trailer and he spent the next 2 days in his garage taking it apart to clean it “properly” as he told me.

That’s something I’m never going to do so I searched on the internet for:

Motor cycle cleaning
Motorbike cleaning
Motorbike valeting
Motor cycle valeting

but couldn’t find anyone in my local area to do it.

Then I thought on the off chance I would call the guy who recently valeted my car for me to see if he did bikes and much to my delight he said yes.

He came round to my house and after a few hours I couldn’t believe the difference. It didn’t look like my bike at all and it was if it had just left the showroom.

Now I don’t feel so guilty taking my bike to the dealer anymore

So if you are in the Aylesbury area and you need a motor bike or a car cleaned I would highly recommend David Hadley who did mine. He can be contacted on 0808 178 7117.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my sites, XML-Sitemaps according to Alexa was the 6707th most popular website in the world. Now I know this isn’t true as I know exactly how many visitors this site gets a day. I also have other websites which receive 5 x the amount of daily visitors yet rank between 50,000 and 60,000.

So why is my site with less visitors showing such popularity? My guess would be that the majority of people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed which collects the data are webmasters who are interested in seeing what their Alexa rank is. As my site XML-Sitemaps is geared towards webmasters this really makes a nonsense of the figures quoted as it isn’t representative of your average surfer.

Apart from the Alexa Rank figures the toolbar provides a convenient search box so you can search the internet without having to go to Google, etc, first. Now this used to be okay when Alexa was using search results powered by Google but recently they changed and now there search results are powered by Windows Live. If there was ever a reason to delete the Alexa Toolbar this would be it.

I’m sorry but Windows Live as a search engine just isn’t cutting it for me. I’m sure they are trying hard but for me its a waste of time. I’ll give you an example:

Searching for “free ringtones” (without the quotes) 5 of the top 10 results (including the top 2) are disabled blogger accounts presumably as they were spam pages designed to fool search engines, another 1 is a disabled homestead page, presumably disabled for the same reason as the blogger pages, the 3rd result is another disabled domain which says “Domain deleted - reason abuse”, another 2 are made for adverts pages which only have adverts on which you can click which just leaves 1 genuine website left.

At least with Google generally I find at least 9 of the top 10 results are genuine sites and the ones that do slip through are normally removed quite quickly.

It makes you wonder how many people will now delete their Alexa Toolbar because of this. It might be the only people left using it are the webmasters to check on their Alexa rank which is only going to make their figures even more unrepresentative of the general surfers.

One of the many websites I have and one of the most popular according to Alexa (it’s currently the 6707th most popular website in the world?) is XML-Sitemaps.com. This website is slightly different for me too as it is the only website I have which is a joint venture with another person. I can’t really take any credit for this site as the brains behind it is a very talented programmer named Oleg Ignatiuk.

I first came across Oleg at Scriptlance.com which is a site that puts programmers and webmasters together. The idea being if you need some programming done on a website you setup an auction and programmers will bid on the project for how much they will charge for doing the works.

When I first heard about Google’s sitemap program, not being that technical I asked Oleg to take a look and see if I could use it for one of my websites. It turned out that I couldn’t as the site I had in mind was dynamic in that all the pages were written on the fly by the server so they didn’t really exist. The way Google’s sitemap generator worked is that it would scan your file system for files and add them to the sitemap. As these files didn’t exist I couldn’t do this. The other option would be to scan your log files which would work but only for pages that people had visited so potentially a large volume of pages would be missed.

So the next question was, can you write me something which would work. The result was a truly amazing script which would crawl my website picking up all the pages and adding it to a sitemap which I could submit to Google. Oleg went the extra mile and added in some other useful features for me like identifying problem areas of the site where there were broken links and reporting pages which these were on so I could easily fix them. He also made it possible to create multiple sitemaps automatically. Google only allows 50000 urls per site map. Because my site had around 300,000 pages it was necessary to split up the sitemaps and create a sitemap file for the remaining sitemaps. This was all done automatically and all I needed to do was press one button to start the crawl.

Now I had this amazing script which worked perfectly and I remember looking around the internet for something similar and there wasn’t anything that even came close to it. So I asked Oleg what he thought about selling it to the masses. There were so many webmasters in a similar position to me that I was sure there would be a good demand for a low cost script that enabled them to create Google Sitemaps for their own sites. By this time the script had cost a considerable amount of money to develop. The decision to sell it was two fold. 1. To recoup my development costs and 2. to reward Oleg for all his hard work. We agreed I would pay for development costs and hosting and promote the site and Oleg would handle all the technical support and we would split any revenue from the site.

We decided to create a free online sitemap generator that was limited to 500 pages so most webmasters would have an easy solution for creating sitemaps and hopefully would spread the word around about the site. It was launched on 25th June 2005 and was generating quite a lot of interest within days mainly thanks to Google who linked to the site from their Sitemaps 3rd party programs & websites page. Meanwhile Oleg worked hard on adapting the script to make it suitable for self installation and to protect the code. We launched the standalone php script on the 5th July 2005. The timing couldn’t have been any better.

I remember waking up on the 6th July 2005 and checking my emails and thinking “that’s a lot emails to come in overnight”. On opening my in box I was surprised to see order after order after order for our newly launched sitemap script. I was amazed and it took a while to realize where they were all coming from. It turned out that someone had written an article and mentioned our site in it. This was picked up by Sitepronews.com and sent out as an email newsletter to all its subscribers.

The site has gone from strength to strength since. In a little over a year it has created more than 190,000 free sitemaps crawling almost 29 million pages. It now creates more than 1000 free sitemaps a day and had to be moved to a more powerful dedicated server to cope with the demand. The script has evolved too with added features due to customer demands such as creating text sitemaps to submit to Yahoo! and html sitemaps for human visitors.

I am very pleased with the way this site has worked out and its success is predominantly due to Oleg’s dedication, skill and hard work. I am obviously biased about how good this site is but check out what other people are saying.

Unlocking the Cingular Edge card in the Sony UX180P is actually an easy task. All you need do is make a note of the IMEI number, call Sony Support at 888-476-6972 (United States) or 239-768-7676 (International). They will give you an unlock code and you then need to the Sim unlock procedure.

Follow this procedure to unlock the Sony Ericsson EDGE module after obtaining the SIM unlock code. This involves connecting to the card using HyperTerminal, entering a few commands and your unlcok code and that’s it. They even provide instructions on the internet to do this.

Some things they don’t tell you (or at least I couldn’t see) in the specifications is what networks the Edge card will work on. When I unlocked mine and placed a new sim card inside there is an option to choose a network. All I got in the UK was Orange and T-Mobile which both work on the 1800 frequency. Vodafone and O2 were not available and they use the 900 frequency in the UK. I must admit I hadn’t even considered there could be a problem here but luckily I use T-Mobile anyway.

I don’t really know how this EDGE or 3G data works to be honest and whether different networks are using different frequencies for their services.

What you can do though is if EDGE is not available in your area use the GPRS network or even dial up (very slow) to get a connection.