Philip Nicosia

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.

Last Friday I had my Harley serviced in Oxford. I booked it in for first thing in the morning and was going to wait while they did it which they estimated at 2 to 3 hours.

So I thought I would put my new Sony UX180P to the test and took it along so I could catch up on some forum and blog reading while I was waiting. The only thing that put me off was the cost. Data costs via a GPRS network tend to be expensive unless you have a special plan which I don’t and could cost anything between £3.00 to £5.00 per megabyte depending on the network.

Luckily I stumbled across an offer which Orange was doing where on pay as you go you can get unlimited internet access for £1.00 for a whole day. Now the unlimited access is if you are using their GPRS or CSD but it turns out they are also doing a special offer for 3G data access for £1.00 a day as well albeit limited to 25 megabytes which would have been ample for me. Strictly speaking on the 3G data access you aren’t supposed to use it for modem access for computers.

Anyway, when I went to order my Orange World Daily Access for a £1 it didn’t actually give an option for GPRS or 3G. When I connected my PC through the built in 3G modem it connected to the 3G network by default rather than the GPRS network so I was happily surfing away at thoroughly useable speeds. The battery in the Sony UX180P lasted just long enough for them to carry out the service which was good as at least it drew my attention away from all the goodies and new bikes that they had there and temptation couldn’t prevail.

Last week I set myself a target to get in the top 10 results in Google for the search term “Philip Nicosia” without the quotes. I was a bit preoccupied yesterday to check but I had a look this morning and to my surprise I came in at No.2!

Hats off to Google for that one. Now you might think it pretty obvious to come in so high for a search term which is basically my name and the name is in the domain and I would agree.

However, despite my site being crawled and listed in both Yahoo! and MSN the same search term doesn’t find me in the top 100 results. I didn’t bother looking any further than that so it might be somewhere. I guess there is more work be done there.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes Yahoo! and MSN to catch up.

Bugs our rabbit was taken ill yesterday afternoon. She was fine in the morning and her usual bright and breezy self but around lunchtime I noticed that she was acting out of character and was listless. I immediately called the emergency vet and took her to see her. She seemed fine at the vets and even perked up a bit and the vet gave her some antibiotics and something to help her digest food just in case that was the problem and we came home.

She was still very quiet for the rest of the day but was eating a little bit so we thought she was getting better. Around midnight we checked on her again and she ate a little more but sadly when we woke up this morning she had passed away during the night.

It was really unexpected as she was only 2 years old and a very happy and active rabbit. We only had her for a few months but each and every day was a pleasure to be with her. She would always be around your feet in the garden and used to enjoy exploring her surroundings. We would find her in the strangest places and if you weren’t careful she’d be running up the stairs in the house to explore some more.

We will miss Bugs and her bunny little ways.

We decided to bury Bugs in the garden in her favourite spot underneath a rose bush. She was always happy there watching the world go by and now may she rest in peace.