One the original sites I used to use was UK Frenzy (http://www.ukfrenzy.co.uk/) back in around 2002/2003. UK Frenzy was one of the original sites for online vouchers and regularly featured Amazon, Dell, Dixons and Comet Vouchers. Today they are still offering information in pretty much the same format and also have a fairly active forum of users sharing vouchers and online bargains.

The second site is started to use around 2005 was HotUKDeals (http://www.hotukdeals.com/). This site started small and rapidly grew into a massive list of product offers, deals and merchant specific voucher codes. Over the years the categorisation has changed but the site still offers a vast amount of fantastic buyer’s advice.

A third site that featured heavily in my online purchasing for sourcing bargains and money saving opportunities was Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert (http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com). In particular it was the user forums and specifically the Discount Vouchers and Discount Codes forum. Over the years Martin’s site has grown from strength to strength and is regularly featured on the BBC, but the true value of this site is its users. I regularly check back here to search for merchant vouchers.

The following two sites are close to my heart but also worth a mention.

Greedymoose (http://www.greedymoose.co.uk) was a site I set up in 2004 and ran till 2005/06. It hasn’t received much in the way of updates since then but at its time was heavily visited voucher code site that produced some good revenue. At its heyday it ran several unique discount vouchers that can still be found on some the later ‘voucher code’ sites – but at the time these were unique to GreedyMoose. Maybe soon GreedyMoose will have revamp – watch this space.

The final site that will be mentioned is UK Discount Vouchers (http://www.ukdiscountvouchers.co.uk/). UK Discount Vouchers (UKDV) was formed in mid 2004 as a user’s forum for discount vouchers and sharing them easily with fellow shoppers. This worked to a certain degree but forum spammers eventually got too much and the site was changed to a Blog in August 2006. Since 2006 the site has grown and has now transformed into a store specific site where users can access their favourite shops and easily check for discount vouchers and codes for that store.

So that’s a brief round-up of my original voucher code sites that I used and developed.

Having done my own research into it at the time it relates in most instances to the automatic transmission fluid is past its best and the clutch brake is sticking when the car comes to stand still. When you then try to pull away the brake does not disengage in time and you get the sudden judder and shake of the car. As you can imagine this will probably not do the car much good in the long term so the solution is as follows:

1) Buy official Honda Automatic transmission fluid. This will either be Honda CVT Fluid or Honda ATF Premium fluid. Your Honda dealer will advise the current recommendation.
2) Drain the transmission fluid as follows:
2.1) Bring the tranismission up to normal operating temperature. Drive the vehicale to do this or run the engine until the radiator fan comes on.
2.2) Park the car on a level surface and turn the engine off.
2.3) Remove the transmission drain plug as pictured below and drain fluid into a suitable container.

2.3) Reinstall drain plug (or new one if it looks damaged/corroded).
3) Refill with the transmission fluid from 1) to the recommended level

You should then find the HR-V’s shudder/judder has stopped. If you still experience the issues then the transmission will probably need to be looked at by a qualified Honda technician.

Good luck and let me know if this helps anyone.

Ensure you have a functions.php file in your theme directory that you are using. If not create the file and edit the file. The following lines will help remove select lines from your wp_head() function:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 ); // Removes the links to the extra feeds such as category feeds
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 ); // Removes links to the general feeds: Post and Comment Feed
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link'); // Removes the link to the Really Simple Discovery service endpoint, EditURI link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); // Removes the link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file.
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link'); // Removes the index link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link'); // Removes the prev link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link'); // Removes the start link
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link'); // Removes the relational links for the posts adjacent to the current post.
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator'); // Removes the Wordpress version i.e. - WordPress 2.8.4

Don’t remove these items unless you have a need to. The Wordpress generator removal could be useful if you are not religiously upgrading your Wordpress install as it helps hide the WP version from potential hackers to a certain degree.

Working with CSS I am constantly trying to convert RGB values from Photoshop to their hex equivalent. There is probably a setting in PhotoShop that I have missed, but the following small form will quickly convert RGB values to the HEX equivalent. You can then use these values in CSS with # at the beginning.

Let me know if you find this useful:

The HTTP Response is the information returned in the HTTP Protocol when you access URL’s over the Internet. Google, Yahoo and in fact all browsers rely on this information to determine if the information you are trying to access has been found or if not what may of happened to it.

The full HTTP response contains a variety of information that a web server will send in response to a HTTP request. This information can yield interesting information such as the web server a site is hosted upon, the scripting language used and most importantly the response code. The following search box allows you to enter a URL and see the full HTTP Response.

Why is this useful you may be thinking? Well Google, etc rely on the response codes to determine if they index your site. For a resource to be indexed you will most often than not be looking for a ‘200 ok’ response. If a page is missing you may get a ‘404 page not found’. If a page has gone you may look for a ‘410 Gone’ response to be sent back.

Feel free to use this tool I have developed to test your URL’s HTTP response:

Response Code:

For those of you who don’t know the history of a robots.txt file then i’d suggest you have a Google or Wikipedia for it.  In short it ’s a text file that specifies which parts of a web site to ‘index’ and ‘crawl’ and/or which parts to not index.  You can also get specific and setup up rules based on a certain spiders and crawlers.

To start with you need to create a text file called robots.txt and place in the root of your web host.  You should be able to access it through your web browser at www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

You can view other web sites robots.txt files by accessing the robots.txt at the root of their domain.
 

If you want Google, etc. to come into your site and index everything then things are very easy.  Simply add the following to your robots.txt file and away you go:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Alternatively if you wish to stop all pages in your site being indexed then the following should be present in your file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To stop robots indexing a folder called images and another called private you would add a Disallow line for each folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /private/

The above would still index the rest of the site, but anything in those folders would be excluded from search engine results.

To disallow a file you specify the file as above with a folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /myPrivateFile.htm

If you only wanted Google access to your site you specify the following:

User-agent: Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If you are looking at getting your site fully indexed then I would put the first example in your robots.txt file.

My requirements involved determining the URL of any given image and then to use this in some CSS styling.   Faced with this scenario the following code should help:


//Setup placeholder object and string for URL
Placeholder pl;
string imgSrcUrl = "";

pl = ImageX.BoundPlaceholder;//get the bound placeholder for this control
if (pl!=null){//test the placholder is not null
imgSrcUrl = ((ImagePlaceholder)pl).Src ;//get the source url from the placholder
if (imgSrcUrl!=null && imgSrcUrl!=”"){
FeatureCSS = “<style type=\”text/css\”>\n#section {\nheight: 232px;\nbackground: url(”+imgSrcUrl+”) no-repeat -26px 0;\n}\n</style>”;
}
else doSomethingElse();
}
else doSomethingElse();


With extensive experience in the web site development and management field since the mid 1990’s working at organisations and companies such as USC, Sony, WGSN.com & University of Warwick, I believe I can offer realistic web site solutions for your business needs.

Please browse my services via the navigation links or use the contact details throughout the site to enquire about your web site requirements and how I can help.

Firstly, Google still include a page rank on the Google navigation tool bar – ok this is not updated immediately but I would assume this is based on infrastructure and speed issues.

Secondly Google went to all the trouble to patent the page rank rating algorithm through Stanford University and I would doubt they are going to just leave this behind. The page rank has been the foundation of Google success and although it is undoubtedly tweaked and used along side other algorithms it is still in my opinion the basis of the initial search engine rankings.

Thirdly, when you hear Google employee Matt Cutts discussing page rank in such detail you know it is still fundamental to how Google works – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/ . As Matt discusses in this article pagerank in the toolbar is usually late to reflect how your site is ranking. This however is just the navigation tool bar representation of this. Really behind the scenes page rank is changing all the time as the index is added to, pages removed and back links calculated.

So there you have it -PAGERANK is still alive and soldiering on. Whilst Mr Cutts still talks about pagerank we know it is still one of the main factors in Google search engine ranking.

Hidden Text
An old technique to increase keywords on a page was to include long lists of keywords and key phrases as hidden text on a page. This was sometimes achieved by placing the text far below the main content on the page or by displaying the text as the same colour as a background colour, i.e. white on white or black on black. This technique goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Cloaking or Doorway Pages
Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users. Matt Cutts (Google employee) describes a classic case of this on his blog site (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/) whereby BMW displayed text to search engine robots whereas normal web users would be shown other content via the use of a JavaScript redirect. It is important to not try to do quick redirects on pages so that the search engine crawlers see certain content and then a user’s browser redirects to another page

Link schemes
Avoid links schemes that provide a massive increase in incoming links from bad neighbourhoods and other sites of dubious content. Participating in such schemes can result in your site being penalised.

Automated Search Engine Submission Software
Avoid using search engine submission software such as ‘WebPosition Gold” or other similar products. As long as your site is linked to from other sites and your site is up and running with a valid robots.txt file then pages and content will be indexed without the need for this software.

Duplicate Content
Avoid duplicating the same content on different pages. If Google detects large amounts of duplicated pages on different sub or main domains then you can risk a ‘duplicate content penalty’ which can result in the site losing rankings. Sub domains such as above are all treated as separate websites and if duplicate content is found then both sites can suffer ranking problems until the original origin site of the content is determined by Google’s algorithms.

Content Solely for Search Engines
Avoid publishing any content that is solely for search engine spiders. Content that is too rich in keyword density and unintelligible to a human can be detected by Google and other search engines and result in site penalties. Always write content firstly for humans and secondly for crawlers and robots. As long as the pages are proper English there is no problem with including keywords.

Frames
Although not a ‘Black Hat’ SEO, Frames should be avoided on sites as they cause huge problems with crawlers indexing sites. Individual pages can only be indexed and therefore that means each page in a frame will be indexed which will cause problems when someone clicks on that individual page from search engine results.