Philip Nicosia

A friend asked me about my my webcam and what I was using and how I got it onto the website. I bought a NCS-330W SOHO 802.11g Wireless Network Camera complete with external enclosure from Network-Camera.co.uk.

The camera is situated underneath the jetty by the lake outside of my house. Being wireless all I had to worry about was getting power to it which wasn’t a problem as I had some lights nearby where I could pick up a feed from.

Then all I had to do was turn it on, get a connection to the wireless router in the house and then make some configuration changes to the router to allow port forwarding to the camera and I was set. This was a pretty simple exercise and took about 10 minutes to complete following the instructions supplied with the camera.

The only other thing I had to do was to setup an account at DynDns which was free so that when my broadband provider changed my ip address the camera could still be found automatically.

The camera has a built in webserver which means I don’t need to have a pc on for it to work and it serves the video itself. Putting it on the website was simply a matter of adding a small piece of JavaScript code to the page and the camera took care of the rest.

There are a lot of other nifty things you can do with this camera and I’m using it in its most basic form but if you are interested in seeing what you can do then visit Network-Camera.co.uk and take a look.

I did a search on Google today for funny ringtones. Out of the top 10 results 1 was a page not found and the cached version was a page of keyword spam, 5 redirected to what looked like pay per click pages, and 1 had no content. which leaves just 3 results for genuine pages. The next 10 results there were 7 redirects to what looked like pay per click pages.

That means for this search term out of the Top 20 results 70% is spam.

Now I’m not knocking Google as I think generally they do a pretty good job. I just wish they could detect redirects better so we can have better search results.

With ever increasing energy prices in the UK we are encouraged now to switch suppliers in order to get a better rate. One of the most popular ways of doing this is by visiting uSwitch.com. They offer a service where you enter in your existing supplier and how much you spend and they will compare all the prices of the different suppliers and tell you if you can get a better deal.

Now I did this a couple of months ago when I was with British Gas and the savings I made were quite considerable and I switched to Atlantic Electric and Gas. It all went through pretty smoothly and I was happy to save the money.

Being an affiliate marketer myself I know how these things work. Each time a customer switches suppliers uSwitch are paid a commission by your new supplier. They don’t hide this fact on their website and do tell you this and after all they are not a charity and need to cover their expenses somehow. I don’t have a problem with this.

My concern is though today I visited their site and input my existing supplier as Atlantic Electric and Gas, how much I spent, size of house and how many people live there and it told me that npower was cheaper. But, when I entered all my details again but this time told them that npower was my existing supplier and gave details of the plan they had told me was cheaper it tells me that Atlantic Electric and Gas was cheaper.

So once again I enter my details with the plan from Atlantic Electric and Gas that they tell me was cheaper and guess what? They tell me that npower is cheaper.

Confused about this I telephoned their customer services department to ask why this would be. The lady on the end of the phone tried to skirt the question and asked me things like are you happy with your existing supplier etc, to which I said yes but my concern was why their system kept telling me that another supplier was cheaper all the time. To this she said bear with me and the phone went dead. I guess I’ll never know.

Across the lake where I live we often see balloons taking off into the skies. It’s something that has always appealed to me and would be great to do but there is one problem. I’m scared of heights.

I don’t mind being in an airplane but the thought of being in an open basket looking down just freaks me out.

Once you take off there is no going back either. You can’t just say I don’t like this get me back down. You would have to wait until the flight is over so it’s something I won’t be trying anytime soon.

If you fancy it then you can get further details at Balloon Flights from Watermead.

As first point of contact for my site XML-Sitemaps.com I quite often get emails from people saying “Your generator won’t find all my pages”. Because our generator works in the same manner as a search engine robot this is something that all webmasters should be concerned about.

We will always check out these concerns but haven’t as yet found any site that misses a page when there is a link to it somewhere.

The most common reason for this problem is JavaScript menus. They might look nice and fancy on the page but robots are generally blind to the links to your other pages. If they can’t find them then it goes without saying that you’re going to have a tough job getting them indexed.

Another cause is misuse of the robots.txt file. It is surprising how many people block access to search engines without realising it. Google has within their webmaster console in the Google Sitemaps program a robots checker. It allows you to put any of your pages in and it will tell you if it is being blocked.

The Google sitemaps webmaster console will also notify you of other problem areas with your site including pages not found, urls timed out, urls restricted by robots.txt, etc.

They also give you stats showing you the top search queries that are made where your site appears and also which of these bring you the most traffic.

If you have a website and you haven’t already signed up for a Google Sitemaps account then it’s definitely worthwhile and if you need a Google Sitemap then don’t forget you can get one at XML-Sitemaps.com.