Author Archives: Alistair

How To Get Your Google Profile Indexed

In December 2007, Google released the first incarnation of the Google Profile. This was the beginning of a continued effort from Google to refactor numerous services to have a more modular architecture, so that key pieces of information were held … Continue reading

Posted in Search | 2 Comments

YouTube Subscriptions & Unexpected Notification Behaviour

I use the YouTube subscription feature to try and keep on top of a swarm of excellent video content being provided through YouTube. In my account settings, under the Email Options section I have all of the default options selected … Continue reading

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Favikon, Favicon Generator For The Masses

Stumbled onto a simple but useful free online service last week named Favikon. As the name suggests, it is related to the small but often memorable favicon or favourite icon. For those that don’t know what a favicon is – … Continue reading

Posted in Services | 2 Comments

Google Account Canonical URL Failure

Search engine optimisation consultants world wide have been pushing the URL canonicalisation wagon for quite some time. URL canonicalisation ensures that a given internet resource can only be reached by a single URL. That might seem like a relatively straight forward … Continue reading

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Wikirank, Visualising Wikipedia Usage Data

  I came across a clever web site named Wikirank, which provides visualisation tools to explore and compare the usage data from wikipedia.org.  If you’re wondering how Wikirank could manage that, wikipedia.org provide access to their web server traffic logs … Continue reading

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Enhancing Dopplr “Add Trip” Functionality

I recently signed up to the fabulous travel service Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues. While adding in a trip from the Gold Coast to my home town of Chinchilla, Dopplr got a … Continue reading

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CommBank Keeping Warm By Burning Money

While viewing http://www.news.com.au yesterday, I noticed an advertisement on the home page for Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ad was for instant approvals and same day funds (working now), however clicking the ad presented me with a “Page Not Found” … Continue reading

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Twitter Performance Problems, The Root Cause

The performance and scalability problems of Twitter have been covered to death, so I won’t wax lyrical about the different reasons that the micro-blogging service has had performance and uptime problems over the last year. With the advent of cloud … Continue reading

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Search Engine Optimisation Via Dead Trees

I thought I’d undertake some professional development surrounding search engine optimisation, ironically in the form of a paper back book, named Get to the top on Google written by David Viney. As I work my way through the book, I … Continue reading

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Project Euler, Problem #1

The first problem within Project Euler isn’t meant to twist the brain in knots and is a gentle introduction to what is coming further down the road. The problem states: If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments