New Design!

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After three years with the previous design, I have decided to give the site design a much-needed refresh! I will also be refreshing and updating the content in the next few weeks.

The new design should be a lot cleaner, lighter and more professional so should make for better reading. :)

I’m also consolidating my freelance web development portfolio into this website as I now have a full-time job and have less time to dedicate to web development.

If anyone has any comments regarding the site, please feel free to email me at craig@cwatson.org, leave a comment below or tweet me @craigwatson1987.

WordPress NextGEN Gallery – SEO Permalink Patch

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WordPress LogoAfter converting my gallery from Coppermine to NextGEN, one of the only downsides was the non-SEO friendly nature of NextGEN’s default permalink structure.

After searching through Google, its seemed others had also raised the issue, but the feature was as-yet unimplemented by Alex Rabe, NextGEN’s developer. Undaunted by this, I set about dismantling NextGEN’s code to implement it myself.

So, after several hours of coding, hacking and bug-fixing, I have released the changed files for anyone who wants to implement the feature in the future. Just download the patched version of NextGEN (tar.gz | zip | changed files only) and replace your current NextGEN plugin files. You will need to update your permalink structure once after activating the SEO settings in the NextGEN Options page.

Disclaimer

Obviously there is a risk in using this as it I haven’t tested on anything other than my own website. Remember to backup your current nextgen-gallery plugin folder, as well as any customised CSS files you have.

I have submitted the changes to Alex, so hopefully they should be integrated into the next release of NextGEN.

If you have any questions/comments, please by all means ask :)

Update 21:00 BST, 8th July 2010

I have been testing the changes and have found a couple of minor bugs, mainly relating to the use of European characters and quotes in gallery/album names. These bugs have now been fixed, and a proof-of-concept for European characters is here.

The archives above have been updated to include these changes. If anyone can provide feedback (even a “it works!”) it would be much appreciated – I’m trying to save Alex as much testing as possible :)

How To: Backup with SSH and Rsync

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PuTTY logoMy websites (hosted with EvoHosting) are incrementally backed up to a server running on Atlantis – my VMware ESXi host – for the dual purposes of offline development and data resilience. I’m fairly sure that there are numerous guides out there already to accomplish this, but hopefully this will be useful for some.

For ease of explanation, I will skip any network configuration, though if anyone would like detailed configuration on NAT, port forwarding and dynamic DNS, please by all means leave a comment or email me.

SSH Key Configuration

The first thing to do is to configure SSH key authentication, so that your source server can login to your backup server without being prompted for a password. Run the following command on your source server:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Copy this key into your authorized_keys file (usually in /home/$USER/.ssh) on your backup server and set permissions to 700 so that nobody else can read or edit the file – these permissions are explicitly required for most SSH installations, so double-check that they are correct.

Rsync Configuration

After looking around for help on rsync for a while, this is the rsync command I have come up with:

rsync --delete  -ae 'ssh -p999' /home/craig/public_html/ backup.network.local:/home/craig/public_html/

The “delete” option tells rsync to delete files on the backup that aren’t in the source, and the -p999 option tells SSH to use port 999 for the transfer – I used this as I use a non-standard port for SSH for security, however if you run SSH on its standard port (22), you can remove the -p option.

MySQL Backups

Although Rsync will copy my public_html directory, it won’t backup my MySQL databases. To do this, I used the mysqldump utility. Unfortunately my file permissions wouldn’t allow me to use the more efficient mysqlhotcopy utility, so I have had to make do with a slightly crude full backup, which is gzipped to keep the file size minimal:

mysqldump --all-databases | gzip > ~/databases.sql.gz

This full backup is then imported back into the backup server’s MySQL databases.

Automation via Cron

All that was left to do after this was to schedule the backups automatically via each server’s cron scheduler. The MySQL database imports take place 45 minutes after the Rsync copy to give the backup time to complete.

Where needed, I have written simple Bash scripts to simplify the process and to remove the backup SQL scripts after transfers and imports.

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Hopefully that has been educational, please feel free to comment if you have questions/suggestions :)

Website Revamp!

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I have now converted the whole website to run the WordPress blog software, including a slightly more professional look acheieved by combining my previous design with Pyrmont V2 WordPress theme!

An added bonus of using WordPress is the SEO-friendly URLs, like the one you’re viewing right now. Hopefully the site should be a lot more streamlined – if you see any glitches or problems, by all means comment or email me :)

I still need to convert the Coppermine gallery over to the same theme, but hopefully that should be done over the next couple of days – depending on how nice Coppermine wants to be!

SEO: The Web’s Holy Grail

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The Google Logo

With companies spending hundreds – if not thousands – of pounds these days on marketing and advertising, it’s not just enough to have “a website” out there somewhere in the ether; it has to be easily found by the average user, and this means it has to be optimised for the lean, mean search engines that crawl and index millions of websites on a daily basis.

In this blog I won’t be going into detail on the intricacies of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but I will cover some of the tips I’ve picked up over the last few years that may be some help.

1 – Write Good Code!

Too many websites use bad/unreadable/invalid code that does display the website correctly in the vast majority of browsers, but is very hard for a search engine (like Google) to crawl and understand. Search engines see only the (X)HTML markup of the page, without any formatting controls like CSS (whether in-line or external) – they don’t see the graphics and layout that you and I see.

The most efficient way to combat this is to write clean, efficient and valid code that separates content from presentation by using CSS to control formatting and XHTML to control layout. Tables should be used for displaying data, while <div> tags should be used for content separation. Sticking to the W3C XHTML specification (either the Strict or Transitional DTD) is key to this, as it allows all websites to comply to a central standard. Making sure your website is valid code isn’t just for completeness, search engines care about neat code as well because it makes their jobs easier.

2 – Be descriptive!

Following on from point 1 above,  be as descriptive as possible with both your alternate image text and link text. Because search engines only see text, all images are converted to their text equivalent, which is defined in the XHTML code as the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. Being more descriptive in your alternate text helps the crawlers to understand and index your website more easily. It also allows your images to be indexed by specialist image crawlers (for example Google Images), opening up more entry points into the website.

Try not to use the classic “click here” for hyperlinks for the same reason. More descriptive link text not only helps the search engines, but also helps your user in deciding what links are worth clicking.

3 – Use Links Wherever Possible

A good trick I use quite a lot is to put a link back to the website’s homepage and either my personal website or my freelance portfolio in the footer of the page. This creates both an inbound link to the target website and an outbound link from your website, and increases the number of pages your site relates to in the eyes of crawlers, therefore giving you slightly better rankings.

XHTML Text

4 – Use <meta> Tags!

The use of <meta> tags to describe the content and purpose of the website varies slightly between browsers and crawlers. Some crawlers just look for <meta> tags, others crawl the entire page and index content, some do both – so try to make those <meta> tags as descriptive and representative as possible. The “keywords”, “content” and “author” flavours all have different roles, and any websites putting random words into the “keywords” tag in the hope of getting hits for unrelated keywords will be ranked down, as well websites with unrelated “content” tags, so try to be as on-topic and relevant as possible.

5 – Choose a Good URL!

It’s extremely important to choose a URL that reflects the topic of the website, as search crawlers try to tie these two together. Long addresses will be harder for visitors to remember, so a balance is needed between descriptiveness and length. If the name you want is taken (and it often is), try looking for other Top-Level Domains (TLDs) like .org and .co.uk instead of the obvious .com, although .org domains are generally used for non-profit organisations so it’s generally a good idea to keep within the intended use for the TLD if possible.

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Hopefully the above points have enabled you to optimise your website and get it further into the rankings without going into too much detail. The key thing to remember however is that SEO is by no means an exact practice. It may take day, weeks or months for a crawler to index your website and even longer for it torise up the rankings, so have patience!

A Very Belated Update

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So where has the last six months gone??

It seems like only yesterday I was packing my gear in Aberystwyth. Since then, I’ve moved back to Essex, packed in a fair few We Will Rock You shows, redesigned this website, played bass in a variety show concert started a new job and and built a brand new desktop PC – so it’s been “all go”!

The new desktop PC has been about a month in progress but it’s finally completed and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it’s turned out. More details are on the Computers section of this site, so I won’t bore people with techncial specifications here, but it’s safe to say that it was definitely worth the effort!

September 20th saw a parial change of cast for We Will Rock You at the Dominion. Among those to leave were Julian Littman, Lain Gray and Lucy Sinclar who play Pop, Vic and Meat respectively. I have yet to see the new cast, but I’m sure they will be brilliant.

I’m now working at Colchester Sixth Form College as an IT Technician as part of my degree course’s Year in Industry. It started pretty slowly, then sped up quite a bit as staff and students were off for the summer, freeing up the servers and network for maintenance. Hopefully it’s calming down slightly now!

The aforementioned variety show was the brainchild of Hans Montanana, the former head of music at Rickstones School who I’ve kept in contact with over the years. I actually came out of semi-retirement as a bassist to play the concert, not having played seriously for over three or four years! It was definitely a challenge going back to basics and reading from chord charts again but hopefully I’m now back into the swing of it and the next one (if there actually is a “next” one) will be a bit easier!

Last of all, I’ve given this website a bit of a revamp and redesign, and added a new section dedicated to the building of my new desktop PC. The theme of the redesign was partially inspired by the recent events at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, I’m still not 100% happy with the design so there may be a few further tweaks in the next few weeks!

Anyway, that’s your lot, apologies for not updating over the last 5 months but it has been pretty action-packed!

Up the ‘kin Irons!
Craig

April 2008 Update

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After a nice relaxing Easter break at home, I’m now back in Aberystwyth for the final two months of this term, before returning to Essex for a year and a half in May.

I’ve been offered a position at Colchester Sixth Form College as an IT technician (the official job title is “IT Support Officer”) – I was originally a student at the College between 2003 and 2005 studying the International Baccalaureate and I’m really looking forward both to being back there and being in a normal job.

Even though I’ll be coming back to Aberystwyth in September 2009, an awful lot of the friends that I’ve made in my two years here won’t be, as they will have all completed their final years and graduated – my industrial year is a “sandwich year” between the second and final years of the course – so essentially this is my last term with quite a lot of my friends, which is an extremely sad thought!

OK, so this has been a pretty short entry (by my usual standards), but not a lot else happened in the three weeks I was back in Essex, apart from three We Will Rock You shows at a rate of one per week, taking my show-count to 54 (yes, fifty-four) and concreting my opinion that the newest cast are – quite possibly – one of the best I’ve seen. I finally got to see Sabrina Aloueche as Scaramouche, and I was completely blown away. I’ve got reviews on my WWRY-London.co.uk Forums for the shows on Monday 17th March, Tuesday 25th March and Thursday 3rd April.

I’m also taking on another freelance web design job for a local singer and the obligatory chocolate-scoffing. Even the journey back to Aberystwyth went without a hitch – for once! I was tempted to include my views on Liverpool’s awe-inspiring win in the Champions League into this blog, but I think it deserves its own entry.

Up the ‘kin Irons!
Craig

2008 – The Year So Far

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So, what’s been happening in the last two months?

Linux – Transition Complete

I’ve now finally got Fedora 8 up and running on my desktop PC as well as my laptop so Linux is my main operating system – with Windows being used from time to time for various web design tasks (the recent redesign of my university webspace being one of them) and I have to admit that despite my stance as a self-confessed “Windows user” a year ago, I’m now really enjoying the Linux experience. Everything is so streamlined, but it does take some getting used to and playing around with to get it the way I want it (some of the difficulties and shortcomings being detailed in my transitioning blog) – but I’m generally happy to play around and try different things so maybe this suits me better than others.

SonicaCMS goes live!

SonicaCMS – my plain-text PHP content management system – has now been released as an alpha version (meaning for very early testing and evaluation purposes). It’s been a work-in-progress for quite a while and with a general lull in university work I’ve decided to go public and make the first version available, so if you’d like to download it and try it out, by al means head over to www.sonicadesign.com/scms – I’d be very grateful for any bugs/feedback.

University - New term

As far as university goes, I’m awaiting the results of my first semester exams on Thursday 28th February – some more eagerly than others though. I’ve also actually given a lecture on web development to first years – a somewhat daunting experience but turned out well in the end once I’d gotten over the nerves and into the flow of things. The lecture mainly covered bits and pieces that I’d picked up over the last year and a half of doing websites on a semi-professional freelance basis as well as some search engine optimisation (SEO) material. By the end I actually started enjoying it, so I could be making a return to the lectern at some point in the not-too-distant future…

Along with the new term comes new modules – one of which I’m actually (shock, horror) enjoying: CS35910, aka Internet Services Administration. It generally covers a lot of the things I’ll need to know when I’m out in industry, and it’s material I’m genuinely interested in which always makes a difference. I’ve yet to be given any assignments this semester, but I’m sure they’ll start rolling in soon, as there’s only four weeks left before term ends for Easter.

Liverpool FC - Benitez to go?

Away from computers and all things geek, Liverpool FC are having a bit of a rough period recently, with several high-profile spats between manager Rafael Benitez and the club’s American owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks. After being knocked out of the Carling Cup by Chelsea and the FA Cup today by Barnsley, as well as being effectively ruled out of the Premier League title race by a string of sub-standard performances against sides we should have been beating, we have to yet again concentrate all efforts on the Champions League, which despite all my optimism, isn’t looking too promising either seeing as we’re up against the Italian Serie A champions Inter Milan in the last 16.

I have a feeling that if we don’t progress against Milan, then Benitez’s job will definitely be on the line – more than it ever has done in the past – and, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing him go. Obviously he brought Liverpool the Champions League in Istanbul in 2005 (a night which I will never forget and get goosebumps every time I watch the replays on YouTube) as well as the FA Cup in 2006 in Cardiff and he has secured one of the most important signings in recent LFC history in Fernando Torres, but something tells me that Benitez’s time has come. Maybe I’m being over-critical, but time will tell I think.

We Will Rock You 2008: A New Dawn?

Over Christmas I boosted my show-count to 51, seeing the new cast that took over in September for the first time – and what a cast. You can read detailed reviews about each show on my WWRY website forum, but the shows on 17th December and 10th January certainly gave me the impression that the show is in extremely capable hands, although I haven’t yet seen Sabrina Aloueche in the Scaramouche role – being treated to Sarah French-Ellis on both visits – but I have it on extremely good authority that she is every bit as good as the rest of the cast. My advice – if you’re anywhere near London and are even remotely interested in musical theatre or rock music (or both), book and see this show – you will not regret it.

To go with the new line-up of cast members, an all-new souvenir brochure has bee released, and I have been lucky enough to have been posted a copy by a friend. All fifty-four scans are online on the WWRY-London.co.uk Gallery, I’ve also been busy making my first new banners and wallpapers for over a year, so please check them out! Also in a completely shameless plug, please also feel free to join up on the WWRY-London.co.uk forums.

OK, maybe this entry has been slightly longer than I originally intended, but with two month’s having passed, I thought it was about time for an update.

Site Design Update and Belated Blog Update

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I’ve just finished a minor site layout change, hopefully you approve :)

In other news, apologies for not updating this for another three months – things have changed quite a bit. I’m now back in Essex after finishing my first year at Aberystwyth. It feels strange being back – although I am actually broke. So if anybody out there is looking for a freelance web designer, take a look at www.sonicadesign.com and get in touch!

I’m currently doing a bit of recording for a friend’s various metal projects as well as being a general unemployed student. Probably unsurprisingly, I’ve already crammed one We Will Rock You show into the month I’ve been back and I’ve got a couple more booked for the coming months.

One of two highlights of the last month though is seeing Iron Maiden live at Brixton Academy on 24th June with a good friend – courtesy of some quick bidding on eBay. We managed to get a pair of tickets for £60 – which is £20 below the combined face value :D . The setlist was the same as they played at the Download Festival, with a mix of tracks from A Matter of Life and Death and The Number of The Beast complete with Eddie and tank during the encore. Some photos will find their way onto the Gallery pages quite soon.

Needless to say the gig was a complete stormer, and standing back next to the sound desk gave us a brilliant view of the whole stage. The support acts deserve a mention too, Indian metal outfit Parikrama were surprisingly good – their Indian influences were pretty well integrated into traditional metal, the violin was a brilliant addition in my opinion. Lauren Harris was also very good – I recognised a couple of the songs from seeing them at Earl’s Court last year.

The other highlight of the last month is about my new laptop that I covered in the last update in April. I have now configured it to quad-boot. Yes, you read right. Four operating systems :) – Windows Vista, Windows XP Media Center 2005, Apple OS X and Fedora Core 7 Linux all on a 120Gb hard drive with some room left for my music and documents. I’m not going to bore you listing all the details, but needless to say that I am thouroughly pleased with my efforts :D . It was a bitch to get Grub (the Linux bootloader) to work properly, but nothing ever goes smoothly with technology.

I’m hoping to expand the site with a few computer tutorials and how-to’s in the near future, so watch this space :)

Up the ‘kin Irons!
Craig