Google Web Master Tools site verification with 123-REG.co.uk

June 12, 2011 Google / Google Web Master Tools (GWT) / Web Development
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If you run a website you should register for Google Web Master Tools (GWT) because they provide a wealth of useful statistics and diagnostic information that you can use to improve your site.  Anyway when you register with GWT you have various options for verifying your ownership of the your website.  My preferred option is to add a special DNS entry against the domain name.  I like this approach because its much less likely to be undone by a software update or someone tidying up files on your website.   The GWT verification screen gives you all the options and if you select DNS then asks you which registration company is responsible for your DNS records, they then talk you through step by step you to enter the special DNS record.  For various reasons I mainly use 123-Reg.co.uk for registrations and DNS and Google didn’t provide a walkthrough for this company so I had to select Other from the list and then workout what was needed.   Incase you also need to verify ownership of a site for Google Webmaster Tools using 123-REG.co.uk the steps involved are:

  1. In GWT select verify ownership, DNS and then Other
  2. They will now give you a unique string which will look something like “google-site-verification=tfUN8-Fj_jy6n2c76IZXXXXXxwpdqEmHsRLXXXXEvE”, highlight this and copy it to your clipboard.
  3. Login to your 123-Reg account
  4. Select the domain name you want to verify ownership of
  5. Under the advanced domain settings select Manage DNS (A, MX, CNAME, TXT)
  6. Scroll down the page until you get to Add New Entry
  7. You should now see 3 input fields
  8. in the first field enter an @ sign
  9. in the middle field select TXT from the dropdown list
  10. in the third field paste in the id string Google provided
  11. Scroll down a little further and click on Update DNS
  12. Wait a few minutes for the DNS change to propagate
  13. Go back into GWT and now click the Verify Now Button – if this does not work give it a little longer for the DNS changes to propagate.  It can take up to 24 hours but its usually much faster these days.
  14. If it still does not work exit 123-Reg and then go back in and make sure it saved your changes.  I’ve occasionally found that changes fail to commit the first time.

 

Finally the health warning, if you don’t understand DNS entries then be warned that making DNS mistakes can easily knock out your website, so if you’re not certain what you are doing get someone else to do it for you.

 

Looking forwards to Apples WWDC 2011

June 5, 2011 Apple Mac OS X / iPad
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On June 6th we’ll finally get to hear Apple’s next batch of announcements.  This time it has been a little different.  Normally Apple are very secretive and there is no official word in advance about what is going to be announced but this time we’ve seen several press releases about iCloud and other product updates ahead of WWDC.  But even at this stage we know little more than the product name and several of the new features that we’ll see is Lion.  This is an important event for the whole IT, technology and Electronic industry these days as Apple set the standard and in many cases make the market for so many innovations these days.   In the time honoured tradition I thought I’d better go on record and say what I would like to see Apple announce at WWDC:

  1. iCloud for streaming and storing any content you have in iTunes.  I worry that my iTunes isn’t backed up properly because its so large and I don’t currently buy a lot of video based content that I would like because it will consume too much disk space on my Mac.  If you add to this the problem that the content you want tends not to be on the Apple device you have with you when you are traveling unless you are very organised and sync what you want in advance then iCloud can’t come soon enough.
  2. iCloud for backup and storage of iPhoto and other content.
  3. MobileMe either replaced or upgraded so that I can access all of my iCloud content on the go.
  4. The Post PC Era.  When Steve Jobs said we’re now in the Post PC Era I couldn’t help feeling he was slightly ahead of the technology.  As of iOS4 you still need to plug your Apple device into a Mac or PC to register it, upgrade it and sync content onto it.  For many people with old printers you still need a PC to print!  iOS5 needs to truly remove the need for a PC or Mac base station.
  5. Facetime, I would like to see an upgrade so that you can conference in two or more people on the same video call.  Now that Microsoft own Skype I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Apple counter this by brining out a Facetime client for Windows.
  6. iBooks, we need a reader application on the Mac.
  7. Time Capsule.  There have been a lot of rumours that Apple will be upgrading their router / Time Capsule and this makes a lot of sense.  A device which can sit in the home and cache or backup your content from your Apple devices acting as a buffer between your home and the iCloud would be a great solution.  I would not put it past Apple to take this one stage further.  They could allow these devices to talk to each other across the Internet to form a grid, where all the communication are coordinated via their new data centre.
  8. Lion – Security.  I’ve always recommended Mac’s over PC’s to non-technical friends and family because of their ease of use and better security.  I would like to see this taken a stage further in Lion so that by default Applications can only be installed from the Mac App Store.  Of course there would need to be a way to switch this off for more advanced users but for most of my non-technical friends this would be a welcome security improvement.  As we have seen with the recent Mac Defender Malware it’s currently too easy to trick non-technical users into install software.
  9. Voice Recognition.  I want to see this done really well on every Apple platform.  I want to be able to be able to select tracks, listen to e-mails etc while driving or laying in the bath.  I don’t want to have to press a button to initial the voice command, it needs to be triggered by a phrase.  I want this to work like the LCARS Computer on the Enterprise, “Computer: Lights Off.”

Anyway not long to wait now, I’ll be back later in the week to review my wish list and review by 2011 Wish list from back on New Years Day.

We’re back…

June 4, 2011 News
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We’ve been busy over the last few weeks moving some of our older sites to better hosting platform and this has taken longer than expected.   There are a few lessons that have been learnt along the way.

  1. When you are just starting out with a brand new blog you don’t worry too much about the hosting.  It’s easy and cost effective at the time to just put your blog on a low cost shared server.  A few years down the line and as the blog traffic takes off it becomes more important and you need to move it to a professional hosting platform.  My advice to people now is when starting a blog or probably any website buy the smallest hosting package you can from the provider you will want to be with in a couple of years time.  The good hosting companies will be able to upgrade your package and move you to their bigger servers with minimal disruption.
  2. We’ve been doing this for a while now but back when we originally set-up this blog site we didn’t document the build and all the server tweaks.  For any hosting I really recommend that you keep a log of all the build steps and tweaks that you make.  We do this now by having a Word Document which details our procedure for building a WordPress site and then a site specific document which details anything unique to the site such as the name of the template used and any extra plugins.   This will save you a lot of time later wonder how something worked.

We’ve got lots of great ideas for articles over the coming weeks but as ever we are also interested in receiving guess blogs or products or services for review.  If you would like to get in touch please see the Contact Us section at the top of the site.

The essential iPad

January 5, 2011 Apple Mac OS X
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Over the last few days I’ve realised that I’m using my iPad more each day to the extent that it’s now an essential tool. I thought it might be useful to share with you how I’m using it and
the key Apps I’ve installed.

  1. OmniFocus. This is a great tool for managing your to do lists. I have quite a large team and I use OmniFocus to record the tasks I allocate to people, target completion dates etc. You can include notes and email the task details directly to people from the application.
  2. The built in Mail and Calendar Apps are fine and work with legacy Exchange servers. To be honest unless you’ve got a really up to date Exchange server not all the functions work quite as well as they should but when used with modern mail servers such as Googles it’s excellent.
  3. Dropbox. I run this on my Mac, iPad and an old Microsoft Windows PC in the office and it’s a great way to store files in the cloud and sync them onto each machine.
  4. Kindle ebook reader. This is my preferred ebook reader at the moment for one main reason… You can buy books from Amazon and then read them using the Kindle reader on iPad, Mac and PC. I like the way that they sync the page you are on and book marks across all the readers. If Apple ever do an iBooks reader on the Mac I might start to use that instead.
  5. EverNote. I now scan all important documents into Ever Note which provides OCR and searching over the scanned documents. Great for getting access to you documents on the go.
  6. IA Writer. This is a nice simple little text editor. I use it for quickly and simply taking minutes in meetings. It also integrates with Dropbox so that notes you type can be stored in your Dropbox account automatically.
  7. Twitter. I use the official Twitter App which was previously known as Tweetie. I wish this iPad version was available on the Mac. It’s a shame that they don’t sync where you have read up to between the desktop app and the iPad app but I live in hope.
  8. Pages. This is the Apple Word Processor. I’ve only been using this for a few days and in many ways it’s quite refreshing. The main problem is that it’s not MS Word and that’s what we’ve all been forced to use since Word Perfect failed to get a foothold on Windows. I would say that for 99% of people Pages is probably a better choice than Word for producing short, simple documents. I look forward to getting used to this over the coming weeks. I’m planning to buy it for the Mac when the new Mac App store opens.
  9. WordPress. Yes I’m writing this blog post on using the WordPress app. It’s got room for improvement but isn’t bad. I love typing on the iPads virtual keyboard. I tend to find that as iPad apps run as full Screen applications rather than in windows there is less distraction and I focus on my writing and get more done.
  10. TuneIn Radio. My iPad is now my main radio. It’s great when travelling. I often used to find myself in a hotel room with a poor choice of radio stations or stuck waiting for a train and unable to hear programmes I’d planned to listen to. I’m really pleased with this application.

When the iPad was launched some people called it just a big iPhone. I think it’s a whole new class of device. For many people who used to have a laptop, the iPad would be a great upgrade. For others a laptop may still be essential, for example photographers using light room will still want a Mac but they’ll also want an iPad to carry their work on to show clients.

My technology wish list for 2011

January 4, 2011 News
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Rather than try and predict what will happen this year I thought I would instead write my wish list of technical developments I would love to see in 2011.

1. Apple TV to support BBC iPlayer, add BBC radio stations to the radio section and add an app store.

2. The Mac App store will be a great success and lead to copy cat App stores on Windows and Linux machines. I would like to think that Apple will support applications developed using Java in their App Store.

3. Languages like Java and Objective C are far to technical for the vast majority of business apps. For business apps we need to revisit the objectives of COBOL and have a simple development language which frees developers to focus on the business applications functionality and usability rather than memory management, resource allocation etc.

4. Similar to the above point I would like to see BigDecimal support in Java greatly improved and ideally supported as a native data type. Doing decimal business calculations in Java is painful and the language could learn much from COBOL and RPG in this area. I know Java was never designed for business applications, you don’t need simple decimal support in set top boxes but it’s about time this was added.

5. ITunes in the cloud. Why should I have to backup copies of the music I download from Apple when they know what they have sold me and still have the original?

6. Better cloud based backup solutions. I want something as well integrated as Time Machine storing my data off site.

7. Time Machine gets updated in Lion to properly support file versioning rather than just snapshots. I find myself using Dropbox a lot now as I know the data is backed up and I can easily get access to previous versions of my documents.

8. A new approach to search engines emerges. I expect to see a subscription based search engine sooner or later. The problem is that although the people at Google are without doubt some of the cleverest people on the planet they are out numbered by the sheer number of average people trying to spam their search index. I could imagine paying for a service which is curated by a team of humans.

9. IE6 finally dies. A good slice of the budget for any major web site project is being wasted making the site work on IE6, the money would be much better spent on features for newer browsers and content.

10. Solar energy becomes more affordable and becomes mandatory in new buildings. Actually I’d like to see this go further and make sure that manufactures are required to make their White goods solar energy friendly. This can be as simple as allowing for a hot water fill in washing machines and dish washers.

I’ve stopped with my top 10 and look forward to seeing how many of these happen in 2011.

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