So I’ve come up with some tips for better time management and just generally to get more work done in a day!

• Plan – have a plan of things you need to do and what you also want to do if there is time. Write this the day/night before once you have all your work done for that day, and stick to that plan.
• Allow for fun – allow time to read your email, play the odd online game, read loads of blogs. Don’t not plan it, if you know you will do it.
• Focus – as you are doing things, do one thing at a time. Shut down your email client, turn your instant messengers off (or at least to “busy”), and just focus on the current thing you’re doing
• Do the worst job first – don’t like the thought of backing up your site? Make sure you do it first and get it out of the way. Then you won’t waste time doing things just to avoid doing that. Try it out – it does help a lot
• If you do the same thing each day, get a program to do it – this could be harder for some non tech’s, but even if in Word you always do the same thing (make a table a certain size, put a header in and change the font) either make a macro do it or make a “template” pre set out. It may save only 2 mins a day, but it all helps.
• Reply to emails straight away - don’t put them off, you will only forget about them or spend more time looking for them…

Of course there are lots more, a Google for time management ideas would come up with loads, but those are what I use and what actually work!

Ok. Earlier i was playing with the pcmcia (some people call these pc cards or smart cards) and pushed it out but couldn’t get the release button back in. It is quite simple. Just use a pen or something to push it in further than you can with your hand (but don’t force it).

I really should get back to some SEO posts…

Just a little post, after spending a long time searching and finding nothing and then finally getting through to Orange support:

If you try and install the Live box installation and it just brings up a help box about firewalls and anti viruses, either give up and call Orange support, or do the following at your own risk

Assuming everything is plugged in correctly -

• Open up your browser (Internet Explorer or FF) and enter: 192.168.1.1 (this connects to the livebox router)
• Login, using username/pass as admin/admin
• Under my services, click internet. Then type in your username (in the form of yourusername.wanadoo.co.uk@fs or whatever – ie everything in your email after the @ and add on @fs) and password
• It should then work…

Setting up a wireless connection to your livebox

Assuming you have a wireless card in your computer, go to start – connect to – wireless connection (or similar, depending on your system. It may be under network connections/control panel/etc. Now go and press the”1″ button on your live box. This enables pairing for the next 10 mins or so. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to connect (and it will try and connect to your livebox for ages but not actually do anything!… Then go back to your pc, hopefully it’ll list the live box. If it does, click connect (if it doesn’t, move closer to the live box or seek other help!), you will need to enter a “WEP” code. This is on the bottom of the livebox so go and type that in. (If you are connected via a patch cable, just go to 192.168.1.1, go to the wireless settings, and copy the WEP key (and put it on a usb stick and put it on your other computer etc) to ensure you have the right code… It should all work.

Hope this helps someone. It isn’t the best write up, but to be honest it is more help than I got from orange support. I called up once saying i just couldn’t connect wirelessly, and he tried to get me to pay for some guy to come out and fix it. All I had to do was press that “1″ button on the back of the livebox.

Leave comments if this has helped you or if you have any other tips for the Livebox.

Making a site as popular as Techcrunch is probably the dream of almost all webmasters. I was talking to a friend about this, and we were talking about how they became so popular.

So… how did they do it? And more importantly, how can you copy them to follow in their footsteps?

There are quite a few reasons, but i’ve gathered the top 10 (not in any order)

1. An easy to read and use design
2. Between 5-10 posts a day, always something for readers to read
3. Available in multiple languages, such as Japanese and French.
4. A tech (geeky) subject, and geeks love this kind of stuff, write about it in their blogs etc and thus easily raise the number of hits
5. Some of the best writing style I’ve seen on blogs come from Techcrunch. They employ people worth employing – not idiots.
6. Full time staff employed also will help by not only writing quality posts (see above point) but also helps them get exclusives and find news before other main tech news sites pick them up
7. Review many startups and new products, and get a lot of backlinks
8. Option to subscribe – thus again increasing readership
9. Likely that they bought traffic, like many big sites, to again increase readership and popularity
10. Nice and easy to read posts of quality length, with relevant pictures

There are possiblity other points (such as often getting exclusive news), but in my opinion the main overall point is quality content that people WANT TO read. Of course, content isn’t everything, Michael Arrington is very well connected and when he launched the site he got lots of good backlinks from other popular blogs.

For more information, take a look at his take on how he became popular.

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there – it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

They offer domain registration services. Quite cheap too. Too cheap, I’ve found out now ;)

I reg’d about 13 domains the other day as they had some offers on (75 US cents for a .info, and cheap .co.uk’s). Had a couple of problems registering them (had to keep adding them to my basket), didn’t realise that once I had paid over paypal that I would then have to log back into RegisterFly and confirm it – again…

But anyway, I thought I had reg’d them all, and had selected to use their whois protection service (ticked, so I thought by default it would be activated on all the domains). Once I finally reg’d them … it wasn’t.

And setting the name servers to the name servers I wanted (3 of them – ns1.dreamhost.com to ns3.dreamhost.com) seemed quite a task. Did manage to set them all in bulk after 5 mins of finding their option to do so. Well, at least it says its done – and will take upto 24 hours for them to do it (not just waiting for the normal wait after changing name servers – this is just while it is in RegisterFly’s que…). Whois’ing the domains now (about 45 mins after I did it) still shows the default name servers (Which make the site point to a sedo listing…)
Setting up their whois protection requires me to do it one by one. Their bulk action doesn’t do anything. It is a right pain. I’ve sent an email off to the RegisterFly guys, no response yet.

Their interface looks nice, but is crap.

I forgot what I was doing (think it was browsing for the domains), and it redirected me to a page that said I shouldn’t be here…

So, to RegisterFly – some things they need to sort out:

• Sort out your paypal thing – make it clear that you have to return to your site after paying you via PP
• Automatically enable whois protection when I click the option to do so…
• Update the name servers straight away. All other registrars that I use do this…
• Under your user area, where you have the nav list, don’t use arrows looking like there is a drop down menu, when there isn’t one…
• If i search for example and select .com (in the main domain search), and it is taken, tell me clearly and don’t just list every other extension with them all selected to register them. It is a nasty trick.
• Oh I could go on. But I won’t be using them again anyway.

Would be interesting to read your thoughts about RegisterFly.

They are cheap. And hopefully I’ll get all this sorted out (including a .co.uk that I am not even sure if they have registered, but I am not going into that).

Maybe a serious SEO post later ;)

If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/

It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:

>/dev/null 2>&1

to the end of it.

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the xxxx database.

* Are you sure it exists?
* On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.

Well recently I needed to make sure that if oen of my wordpress installs couldn’t connect or whatever that it showed a different page (well, different text). So if you want to do the same (at your own risk), open up wp-includes/wp-db.php and edit:

• line 46 (connecting to server)
• line 66 (selecting the database)
• you may also want to edit the html from around line 312

Hope that helped you. Now digg me (just kidding – who wants this at the top of digg!) to prove that it works (although – of course my host will cope with it ;). They have before)

Some ideas to put on your messages:

• Tell them that something is wrong!
• Put a link to a Google cache (in the form of http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/)
• Try the coralize site – in the form of http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8080/
• Put a retry button/link

Get more market share

Youtube has between 40-45% market share of online video sharing. Google Video has nothing like that. So combining Google video and Youtube will mean that Google almost dominates the video sharing market.

Why pay for advertising?

Google paid $900 million in a deal with Myspace to sell advertising space there. By buying youtube it can put all the ads it wants – and keep all the profits. At the moment Google adsense ads are on Youtube, but Youtube currently will get 70-80% of the profits. Now that Youtube is Google’s, the big G can keep 100% of the profits itself.

The lawsuits

Many people recon the reason Youtube hasn’t been sued yet is because they have no money to pay out. But then, Google video has lots of copyrighted material, and Google has lotsof money – but where are the lawsuits against them?

And hey, this is Google – the guys that decided they would scan thousands of books and display (parts of) them online! And they got away with it!

Also some big name companies such as Warner music have already done deals with youtube. Rather than keep setting lawsuits against each other etc they work with each other.

” ErrorDocument 404 /404.php”

That is it!