Chris Worfolk's Blog

After flicking over a few websites today I went on to Dev Articles (one of the Dev Shed sites) and Carl (aka Ceon), sitting on the computer next to me started talking about an article he had seen written by me on there. Wierd I thought and we went off in search of it. Some minutes later I had in front of me, the article I had originally written for Dev Shed which can be found here.

So long story back to about March, I saw Dev Shed were looking for writers and being a contributer (actually pretty much the only contributer) to Cool Forge and several other sites I decided to grab a little more information and soon I found myself being asked to send an article in to see what it was like.

Somewhere down the line we lost contact. But at the beginning of the month I was clearing out my inbox and found the emails I had, had with Dev Shed and I thought, huh, I wonder whatever happened with that.

Turns out that they published my article after all as you probably guessed from everything I have written so far. I have an author profile and everything as well, that can be found here. And hopefully I will get the chance to write for them again. So in conclusion that was a bit of good news that brightened up my day :).

Everyone goes on about search engine optimization these days. You have to have the right keywords, ways to fiddle the search engines and so forth. But is there really that much to it? Apart from a good title tag and making your static pages look dynamic, how much can you really do now that the days of meta tags have all but passed?

The real question is though is people go on about "I optimized mysite into the top 3 on Google for such and such a term." But despite the fact that this is what everyone claims to do, nobody really knows how to do it and those that do won’t share their knowledge despite their openness claims. Even this lack of openness usually has a price to be reached too.

Is SEO even something you want to do this days? It seems today it is about spamming your website accross the net, pretending your site is about things it isn’t and generally underhanded tricks. Sometimes the basic SEO programme is about contaiminating search results such as sites like Funny.co.uk do with their fake keyword pages.

So what is the best way to get search engine traffic? After all we all want it because we all need visitors to make money from sites. Well most of us. Perhaps the answer is just more content but the amount of content required to pull in enough traffic is just not human. So the answer still elludes me.

Earlier I made a post about a video blog – a blog which has infact been started as to the point that some footage has been recorded. There are also a number of other video projects that have been recorded. But thanks to the joys of Windows, none of these have actually got off the ground. Why?

Well basically, I came to plug my capture card in and it comes up with "this device cannot start (code 10)" I have emptied Google and several other search engines, flicked through solution after solution, run through all the help wizards and even posted the problem on Experts Exchange to no avail. So at the moment I have loads of video footage and I can’t even upload it.

Yep it sucks and also leads me onto a deeper issue. Camcorder
technology sucks! I have to record it onto a tape that looks like a
casette tape, then rewind it to the place, plug it into my computer,
get the connection working, then play the video in real time to upload
it. That is really old technology in pretty much anyones book.

As Dana correctly pointed out on Web Talk Radio, the footage should be
just there available on the computer as soon as the camera gets moved
anyway near the computer via wireless technology. But at the very least
surely it should be like DVD or something rather than working on what
is basically a higher quality version of an analogue system.

And this still leaves me with the issue that I can’t upload video thanks to my IEEE PCMCIA card not working!

It has to be said, Sky One’s programming has degraded even I can see it now. Sure I think 9-11 conspiracies are interesting from an entertainment perspective but Channel 4 only started to make a drama about it so to leap into hour documentaries into it is going a bit too far. Still at least the programme itself was quite a good quality.

However this was soon followed by the worst raunchy TV or something. This kicked off with reports of the naked news show, a TV show where the news reporters are all hot naked girls. Yes this isn’t the most high quality programming for Sky One but at least they are just reporting it – the rest of the world that actually makes this stuff – you people should be ashamed! ;).

The worrying this is I am not sounding like an old person. But seriously, don’t you think this is getting a bit low. I mean the Brazilian kids show is just basically domination porn. These are things that should be restricted for us teens and working late business men who secretly looks this kind of stuff up on the internet. It’s not what should be on prime time TV.

The real thing is that it makes South Park seem like good holesome programming. I miss the days when Dawson’s Creek was one of the meanest things on TV after Dawson forgot about Pacey’s birthday. Those were the good old days. Now if you will excuse me I have to go download some porn.

Well I realise my blog posts can’t compare with the standard of Deans, but here goes anyway.  Out of interest, rawpulse’s last post was very funny. But what many people don’t realise is that we wasn’t joking about the range of Carl action figures ;). Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on one, providing Malibu Stacey doesn’t get a new hat.

Ok, so let’s get on with this funky post. I will get to the "real content" of the post in the next paragragh but here I will mention that I have spent the entire day cleaning stuff up. My inbox is the main one, with my emails being reduced from 500 in the inbox, 200 unread to less than 50 in the inbox and 7 unread. Plus at one point I had my desktop icons down to 7 columns!

Anyway the video blog thing. I was listening (well I still am currently) to Web Talk Radio, it’s a week old show but anyway they are talking about how blogs are evolving and video blogs are going to be the next big thing. So I am thinking of getting into video blogs as I have mentioned several times before whether it was on Nerd Federation or elsewhere I’m not sure.

Many of my sites have random shows though so I though instead of doing these one shows where I will never produce an episode 2, I might as well put it together in a blog. Especially if the systems for uploading, editing and outputting video gets easy as that is the real thing holding us back at the moment.

MSDN’s Channel 9 has been a big influence as well as it features 1-2 minute talks with the various developers after 5 guys got bored working and went round filming people. It’s really taken off and despite a lack of recent posts by Robert Hess it is really cool. So keep checking Nerd Federation for new details on such projects (on video blogs not on copying MSDN lol).

Hmm, I thought I had so much to talk about, and basically I do but then again that involves remembering things which is very difficult. Anyway so tommorow is a depressing day but tonight I am going to live it up by watching TV till gone 11 and drinking coke. Wild I realise but I have to do something to fill time until the next day of Legend of the Green Dragon.

I am currently watching the Hamburg Cell, the Channel 4 drama about the 9-11 build up and such. It seems good so far although as with all these dramas it takes a long time to get into it and if my thinking is correct it may not even have an ending. Of course there will only be one way to know though even that is not for sure.

What I really need is more snack foods to pass the time, and where is Deni when you need him online? There are so many questions these days. Ok, time to take a break from writing this post while I go fetch a new drink and some ice pops. I can stop any time I want ya know.

Ok, a thing that sucks time. I just built a new site which I will post about later. But anyway I got it compatable with XHTML 1.0 transitional almost but when I put it though the W3C validator I got shot down for using onLoad on the body tag. That sucks.

After months (around May I think) upon months of me being constantly hot, I am finally cold again. No rain, the sun is out – beatiful weather conditions. With the best bit being that it is still cold. I like nice weather and all but I don’t like the heat so these climate conditions are verging on perfect for me. Now all I need is to jel my hair virtually upwards and strut.

Today I am just getting into Legend of the Green Dragon although I have a few hours to blow before the next game day as I am out of turns. It’s a really good game once you amerce yourself into it although I couldn’t find any walkthroughs online so I am thinking about writing a players guide, once I really get into th game and figure it out at least.

Work on my various websites continues with the building and intergrating of a new forum ready for the new site engine which hopefully I will be able to do a different forum installation for each site or at least have different skins so that users can feel like they are on a nice intergrated forum when in actual fact – they aren’t ;).

I think my posts on Nerd Federation are getting slightly shorter, the three paragraph layout is not usual any more. I should have plenty to talk about soon though so stay tuned – and by that I mean either check the site regularly or get an RSS reader and the URL of our feed :).

Actually, there is no real need for the word why as it’s silent in the title when said as a sentence but it seemed to have a king of deep thought edge so I thought I would stick it in. The problem with this posts, as many of the previous posts on Nerd Federation is that there isn’t really one core point to it. Therefore it’s hard to come up with a title.

But anyway, I checked the stats for the site today. We have some popularity although the most requested page is actually the admin page for us posting lol. Still, we picked up a third search engine referral, this time for the term Nerd Federation. Checking Google we are second which isn’t too bad considering that the only one above us is the post on BuffyTalk plugging the site.

Elsewhere around our wacky lives, today I have to take a long journey (well 40 mins round trip actually) so I have enough money to continue my domain expansion. I have a few that I am keeping my eyes on and as I mentioned in my previous posts am developing a new content system although the planning is not going so well at the moment.

Nevertheless things go on, and eventually terror shall be rained from the sky by us! Erm, actually you should probably ignore that.

Inspired to create a new site and along with it a site engine, I have decided to redfine my roadmap into 3 channels which I am going to concentrate my online efforts on. So basically so I can remember my own thoughts and generally share opinons I am going to go through my three projects one at a time and discuss them a little.

Project Dreagon
This is a project I have worked furiously on all weekend and am really pleased with the progess providing I can keep it up. Myself and Ceon are developing an online game set in ye olden times think Legend of the Green Dragon time although it’s more like BlackNova in terms of game. Anyway it will be awesome when it’s finished.

Project erm, I forget
This project did have a codename, as pretty much all my projects do but to be honest I have forgotten it lol. Anyway this is a collaboration between all three of us here on Nerd Federation to build a content site will new content every day hopefully attracting visitors and search engine traffic. It will have 4 content channels – developer, reviews, cult and misc. Although the script needs some more work.

Project Grey Weed
This project didn’t actually have a name considering I only came up with the project when developing my new roadmap so I just thought of the code name now. BTW the idea came from a combination of thinking about the weeds in my pond (pond weed) mixed into a fusion of judge Grey from Judging Amy. Anyway the idea is to build a site engine inspired by the articles on Dev Shed to allow me to power and admin several sites from one location.

As I am working on a new project I decided it was time to write a new function to protect myself from SQL injection attacks. I wanted to do it right so I headed onto the net to find some advice and tutorials on how to do, which ways are best effective, methods to use and so forth. Anyway one of the results I came accross is from the PHP manual (at least I think).

The worrying thing though is that I am half way down and all that has been on the page so far are ways in which SQL injection attacks can happen on a side with full code reference and methods on how to do it! Lol, the problem with anything open source that is available to the public is that if you publish a bug fix, others will exploit sites that don’t yet have the bug fix.

Take a flick through the article at http://php.us.themoes.org/manual/en/security.database.sql-injection.php. I am sure there will be a fix at the bottom, but it is still worrying considering the amount of people who don’t secure themselves against SQL injections. Dreamweaver does pretty much nothing at least for ASP and JSP pages if memory serves.