We’re currently working with a client in France on a very image heavy website. To share images traditionally would mean the client would need to package up images in a zip file or send them over multiple emails.

Another way the client might have sent them traditionally would be on a CD or usb drive to send over lots of images.

Drop box changes all that and it is so simple and intuitive to use that anybody can use it once it’s installed.

Drop box allows you to share a folder (and the files within) on your computer with anybody in the world.

Basically you sign up to drop box and download the drop box application to your computer. Once it’s installed, it creates a drop box folder under your user folder. It integrates with windows explorer so you can share folders with other through bringing up the context menu on a right click.

To share a folder is simple, right click it, go to drop box menu item and click share this folder. This will bring you straight to the drop box website where you can share the folder by entering the email address of the person you wish to share it with. Simples.

I’ve used it so far to share files with my accountant, clients, co-workers, family and friends.

Dropbox is here to stay and the best part is, it’s free (well it’s free up to a folder size of 2GB and you get 250mb more for each additional person you recommend to the system, dropbox’s viral marketing mechanism).

I’ve worked with several hosting companies in Ireland and the UK and none have impressed me as much as TSO Host to date.

If you want to work with an Irish company then I have great time for Blacknight.  But if you’re looking for a shared hosting solution that is scalable, fast and has a well thought out hosting control panel then I would definitely recommend TSO’s clustered hosting package at £19.99 per month (or £199.99 per year).

The advantages:

1. Shared hosting price, but when you need performance it can handle significant traffic.
2. The control panel allows you to create individual hosting accounts for each website you have, this is advantageous because when you’re updating a site through FTP there is no danger of overwriting other files. It also allows you to give out ftp details to clients without any fiddly configuration.
3. A temorary domain is created for each website.  This has been excellent for me, some scripts rely of absolute paths and on some shared hosting accounts the root path is a few directories down from the domain, with tso, your temporary domain root is the same as if the site were live.
4. Automatic database back ups.  This for me is really handy. If you create a database, TSO will automatically dump backups into a backup folder for you.
5. You can resell hosting.  For webmasters this is a great feature allowing you to create sub accounts off the main hosting account.

There’s also a nifty affiliate programme too whereby anyone with a website can add a banner such as the following and earn a commission, like so

Short answer is everyone is on Facebook (or at least knows several people who use Facebook) and you can target individuals more specifically than you can with Google.

For example, if you are a company that sells anything to do with weddings be it flowers, dresses, cakes, invitations etc. and your business is located in Waterford, Ireland, you can target all the females within 50 miles of Waterford, who are engaged or in a relationship and get them to join your company facebook page.

If you are selling GAA merchandise you could target all the people from a certain towns and who have an interest in GAA.

In fact most businesses can get access to their target market very easily through a few simple clicks.  What’s more Facebook approximates how many people you will potentially advertise to based on your criteria selection. You can also target by gender, age and interests etc., you can even target by work place (if users have that set, unfortunately most users don’t set that field).

You can also get a bit more advanced with it and only advertise to friends of people who are currently subscribed to your page, or exclude people who are in certain groups or pages already.

The beauty of it is that once you have someone on your page you can repeat advertise to them for free and what’s more their friends will see your messages via page updates on their profile. This is the beauty of Facebook advertising i.e. your money doesn’t stop working for you once the user clicks like on your ad.

Google ads has it’s own advantages, generally when people search online they search in surf mode, comparison mode and buy mode through the use of keywords and phrases.  You can get people coming to your site looking to purchase your goods if you get the key phrases right and not only will your ads appear on Google’s search results page it will also appear on other webmasters sites whose page topic matches the advert in terms of keywords and phrases.

The problem with Google is that you cannot focus in as specifically as with faceboook and you only get 1 shot at selling something based on the money you spend on a click.

So depending on your business Facebook could be an ideal way to capture your market and you can grow from there.

Page rank is a measure of how important your website is to Google.  A page can have a rank between 0 and 10 (0 being the lowest rank). In fact a page can have no page rank at all, which means it hasn’t even been picked up by the search engine bots or spiders.

Note: Page Rank is not the same as your position on the search engine results page (SERP).

Page rank is calculated based on how many other web pages link back to your website, these link backs are considered votes, however not all of these votes are of the same worth.  A link back page that is already considered important and has a good page rank is worth more than a page with a low page rank.  Also, a page with lots of links is worth less to you than a page with only a few links… therefore the link backs that are most sought after are from pages with a high page rank and low link count. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Page Rank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Sites with good page rank generally do better on the search results page than pages with poor page rank, however, if the content on the page is not right then it won’t make a difference how much page rank your site has. Also, the links that gave you the page rank should make good use of keywords in those links to let Google know what your page is about.

You can check a page’s Page Rank by installing the Google toolbar on your browser and customise it to show Page rank, this shows a little progress bar icon on the toolbar showing the current page’s page rank. You could also use a site such as PR Checker to check a page’s page rank.

UTD Google Page Rank on The Google Toolbar

I was pulling my hair out this morning when I transferred my PHP Content Management System to an Windows IIS Shared Server and started getting the message Error 500: The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

Debugging wasn’t working, there were no syntax errors, I was stumped. So I started breaking down the code into little modules to test.

I tried printing out a variable that wasn’t initialised and low and behold the dreaded error appeared.

echo $test;

If I initialised the variable first there were no problems i.e.

$test  =  “Hello, World!”;
echo $test;

So, basically, the problem was that php was spitting out some debug warnings, however the shared hosting account was interpreting this as an internal error and hence the error message on the client browser.

An ideal fix would be to get rid of all warnings from the code, however, a quick workaround was to simply turn off error reporting altogether using the following line of code:

error_reporting(0);

Hope this helps someone out there!