Philip Nicosia

Okay this is my second attempt at switching broadband provider. I’ll be leaving TalkTalk broadband hopefully and good riddance to them!

I’ve signed up with Plus.net who for the same price as I was paying before will give me an up to 8MB connection albeit with some download restrictions. They limit you to 4GB during peak hours and 50GB during off peak hours. There is no way I’d go over any of those so its no problem for me.

What I particularly liked about Plus.net is that not only do they offer a no charge 30 day trial where you can cancel your service and pay nothing if you’re not happy, they don’t tie you into long term contracts too. That’s ideal for me as hopefully Sky Broadband will have their 16MB service running in my area in November/December this year so it is going to be pretty easy to move provider if I want to.

Anyway, I’ve got an email confirmation that Plus.net will be able to supply my broadband and I should be live with them within 5-10 days. I’ll just be glad to see the back of TalkTalk to be honest. Anyone thinking of joining up with TalkTalk broadband or any of their other services check out TalkTalk Hell first before committing yourself to something you’ll be stuck with for a long time.

Well I eventually got through to TalkTalk today and got to explain my problem and that I still hadn’t got my MAC code.

To my surprise the guy on the phone confirmed I had ordered it more than 28 days ago and said “I’ll get you a MAC code within the hour and call you back”.

Well, you can’t argue with a statement like that but I did wonder whether I would ever get the call back. I’m pleased to say a couple of hours later he did ring and I’m now in possession of the elusive MAC code. Whether it works remains to be seen but I will be positive and take them at their word and use it later today.

It just goes to show that they can generate MAC codes easily enough if they want to.

I’ve been trying to leave TalkTalk broadband since the 11th May 2006. The first MAC code I was given I was told was invalid and after chasing them again and again and again I still don’t have a new MAC code. They tell me it takes them 28 days to generate a code (Why so long?) but the last recorded request I made for this is 25th July 2006. It’s now the 29th August 2006 and I still don’t have it.

So I thought today I would ring them again and find out what is happening. I called them 5 times this morning and each time I got cut off before I could get an answer. Bearing in mind this is a telecommunications company, you’d think their systems would be good enough for this not to happen. Getting cut off once maybe, but 5 times in a row?

I’m still no further forward!

I seem to be getting quite a few hits from the PHP 4 Script which is where I bought the script that runs my gallery so I thought I would explain how I put it on this blog.

Now I’m not very technically minded and usually leave these things to the professionals but this script was so easy to setup that I did it myself.

Integrating it into your site should be a piece of cake as all you need to is add one small piece of code into your site where you want the gallery to appear and it is job done.

I did come across a small problem but this I’m sure could be overcome easily enough if you know what you’re doing but when I created a page within wordpress for the gallery I couldn’t get it to work with just adding the small piece of code. Wordpress just didn’t like it at all so what I ended up doing was to include the gallery content with an iframe on the page and now it works seamlessly with the rest of the site.

The gallery is actually located at www.philipnicosia.com/gallery/index.php and if you went there you would see the gallery pages without the rest of the sites template. I’m not interested in getting my pictures indexed in search engines and have actually blocked them from the gallery directory so it works for me.

I’d highly recommend the script to anyone as it is so easy to use. They also have a free version too which limits you to one gallery but if that’s all you need then it’s ideal.

Whenever you upload your Google sitemap to your Google sitemaps account they will download your map and validate it for you which can take a couple of hours depending on how busy they are at the time.

If you can’t wait for Google to do it and want to make sure everything is okay straight away then we have launched a Google Sitemap validator on my site XML-Sitemaps.com.

The validator will also optionally ping Google with the whereabouts of your site map if you haven’t done so already although we would recommend you inform Google of your sitemaps via the Google Webmaster Tools.