Many of my clients want a little more than on-page search engine optimisation of their websites but don’t want to spend a fortune using a specialist SEO company.  One factor in improving search engine rankings is to ensure that you have incoming links to your website from other sites.

A simple way to achieve this is to list your website in one of the many website directories on the Internet.  Doing this manually can be extremely time-consuming so I investigated several of the auto-sublission tools available.  I stumbled across SliQ Submitter, an affordable, automatic directory submission tool.  It is possible to sign up to use this for as little as three months – plenty of time to make a lot of submissions for your site.  If you are a web designer or developer you may be tempted by the 12 month version for just a little extra.

This is an impressive piece of software, which is kept regularly updated by the delvelopers to ensure that the directory list has all the most current entries.  The setting up procedure took remarkably little time and then, after working in manual mode for the first dozen or so directory submissions, I was able to switch to full auto mode and head off to do other things whilst it did its stuff.  In little over an hour I had successfully submitted a site to over 1,900 directories.  They have even thought of what to do where a directory uses a captcha to check that a human is behind the submission.  Credits can be purchased really cheaply on one of 2 captcha decoding services so that even that is taken care of automatically.  When directories mail you back asking to confirm a link, simply run the auto email response tool and it will trawl through your inbox on the mail server and do all your replied automatically too.

This is a very well thought out and executed tool, which I can thoroughly recommend.  For more information, head over to the SliQ Submitter website!

I was one of the thousands who must have been trying to order an iPad2 from the Apple website on launch night.

Although the official time for the launch was 1am on 25th March, the units came online for purchase just over 20 minutes before then. Convinced I was stealing a march on many others I progressed an order, only for it to bomb out with an ‘Ooops!’ error message every time it started the card authorisation / payment process.

The Twittersphere was advising everyone to turn on 1 click but mine resolutely refused to play ball, persistently returning card authorisation errors. I tried three cards, all with the same result. By 2.15 am I’d had enough and went to bed.

A 6.30 alarm call had me back online and trying again. This time, still not using 1 click, the transaction went straight through without the ‘Ooops’ ….. hey, the iPad is almost here …… But instead a much more ominous ‘card declined’ error appeared. Try again with a different card …… ‘Please contact your card issuer’.

I didn’t need to – they contacted me, their fraud department in fact. My guess is that Apple’s systems were so overloaded that they were unable to properly establish proper two way communication with card payment gateways and repeated attempts to hive money from my account were viewed as suspicious.

Of course, in one sense this is reassuring that my card issuers are on the ball in trying to stamp out fraud when there is suspicious account activity. On the other hand I could have faced severe embarrassment and inconvenience if I’d tried to fill up my car with a dud card.

The serendipity element was being able to buy a unit on launch day in Hull anyway (see separate post), thus meaning I didn’t have to wait the 2-3 weeks lead time quoted on the Apple website.

Postscript: Had a call from Apple today, asking me if I would like to order the iPad that had failed so miserably last week. I wonder how many others have received a similar call?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPadbr />

Having been fortunate to arrive at Currys in Hull at 4pm on launch day to find there was only a queue of 5 ahead of me and stock left, I wish I had taken the plunge and bought the maximum permitted 2 units. With the current UK shortage and prices rocketing on eBay, the second could easily have subsidised the first. Fortune would have favoured the brave …. but then again, I would have been depriving someone else from enjoying one of these remarkable devices, for a while at least. Would my conscience have nudged me, I wonder?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPadbr />

Sometimes things that you’d like to share come to you when you are nowhere near your computer. So what’s the best way to get a post up on your blog?

It’s been possible to do this via email from a phone for several years. I remember doing just that using an old Nokia handset about 5 years ago when we were in Whitby with about 30 eleven year olds on a school trip. It was a great way for their parents to be able to follow everything the youngsters were doing via a blog site. We even posted photos, routed via a flickr account if i recall correctly.

So, what advances have there been 5 years on? I decided to see what ways I could update these pages remotely and report on my experiences.

This introduction is being written using Blogpress on an iPhone. A full review of the experience is to follow …….

Thought it might be useful to catalogue things I came across that I found useful whilst designing websites and using my Mac Pro and OSX to its best.  The theory is that if I put them in a blog I have a place to remind myself (increasing age = increasing forgetfulness!) and they might even prove useful to others.

Time will tell ………