Mersey Internet

Rank Decoding Engine - An Initial Review

Have you tried Michelle MacPhearson's Rank Decoding Engine from http://www.crowdmountainsite.com

It's a great piece of free software that will help you find out which sites Google rates most highly in your particular niche.

Unusually for such a great and useful program, it is actually possible to do what it does, yourself, manually. So I had a go, the hard way to see what I found.

To make my life simpler I just chose a single keyword phrase (in reality you would choose nearer 10 phrases)

On my test the top Crowd Mountain results were:

site1.com 3 results
site2.com 2 results
etc

and on my manual test I was able to check site1.com and see its 3 results were in positions 17, 37 and 39
and site2.com was in positions 6 and 8

So remember - the Rank Decoding Engine simply orders sites by the number of times they appear in the top 50 search results. It doesn't weight the sites by position.
I'm just wondering which site you would say had the most authority. The one that appears 3 times in the top 50 but at low positions (17, 37 and 39) or the one that appears twice at higher positions (6 and 8)?

What if a site came in at positions 1 and 2. The Rank Decoding Engine would rate it lower than a site that came in at 48, 49 and 50.

Just something to think about.

BUG ALERT

I think I have found a bug as well although I really need to test this a bit more.

site1.com was actually uk.com and The Rank Decoding Engine reported it as having 3 results in my test.
But when I looked the sites were actually

www.feathers.uk.com
www.historic-uk.com
www.hotels.uk.com

so historic-uk.com shouldn't have been counted.

Being a uk resident I'm looking forward to country specific versions but I'm more than happy with what we have at the moment. A really useful tool to add to the list.

Mike Kay
Mersey Internet.

Configuring ZKStudio in Eclipse with Tomcat6 on Ubuntu Intrepid

This explains how to get the hello world demo zul file working in ZK Studio in Eclipse with Tomcat6 on a localhost system on Ubuntu Intrepid.

I have just had a nightmare couple of days getting this working so I thought I would document how I solved it in the end incase it helps anybody else. I am sure there is a better way to solve this but at least this works.

First install tomcat6
sudo apt-get install tomcat6

This will install tomcat to /usr/share/tomcat6 (known as CATALINA_HOME)
and also to /var/lib/tomcat6 (known as CATALINA_BASE)

Eclipse doesn't like this split location installation. The way to make it happy is to copy the link to "conf" from /var/lib/tomcat6 to /usr/share/tomcat6 (e.g. in Nautilus navigate to /var/lib/tomcat6 right click on the conf folder and select "copy". Then go to /usr/share/tomcat6 , right click and select "paste")

It will also later be looking for a file catalina.policy in the conf folder but on my system the file is called 03catalina.policy and is in conf/policy.d So I copied this file to where it is expected and renamed it.

Eclipse workspace can easily get corrupted. If anything stops working, assume it is corrupt. DONT try and fix anything with this suspect workspace. Just quit Eclipse and restart it specifying a new workspace location.

Once you have a clean workspace do the following:

1: Set up tomcat

In the window at the bottom with the tabs (Problems, Tasks, Properties, Servers etc)
Select Servers
Right click on the background and choose New->Server
Choose tomcat 6 server and click next (if it wont let you do this you have a corrupt workspace. See above for solution)
browse to /usr/share/tomcat6 for tomcat location (if it complains make sure you have copied conf and catalina.policy as explained above)

2: Set up ZK packages
(I'm assuming you have done the bit that adds ZK)
Go to Window, Preferences, ZK, ZK Packages
Add directory /home/mike/zkbinwhatever
put a check in the box and click a few oks

3:Create a project
File, New dynamic web project
choose any name
under configuration click modify
add check to "ZK Support"
click a few oks and finish

4: create a zul
right click the project name and select "new zul"
change the container to /whatevername/WebContent
click finish

5: Run it
Choose Run, run
select an existing server (the tomcat 6 one)
your project should be in the right hand column as an existing project
The server should start and status = synchronised
Up should pop the Hello World demo!!!

Put your thoughts in order with an SEO Mind Map

Download the mindmap here or see it in action as a Java Applet here.

Try as I might to sort out my bookmarks, it just isn't working. I've tried every bookmark management system under the sun but its still just a mess. Then I discovered FreeMind.

In this post I will show you what I created in a couple of days from my collection of disorganised SEO bookmarks. I've divided them into 2 main groups, SEO Advice and SEO Tools. You will need to read up on FreeMind to gain the full benefit but the main things to remember are that anything with a little red arrow is like a hyperlink. Click on it and it will take you to a website; and the other main thing is that anything with a small circle will expand to a deeper level if you highlight it and press the spacebar.

Hope you enjoy my SEO Mind Map.

SEO Mind Map by
Mike Kay is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

so you can copy and use it as long as you credit me as the original author and refer to my website.

Free Business Websites

Businesses often want to create their website themselves and just want some guidance on what to do and of course how to do it as cheaply as possible.

You can do it for free but you will have fewer headaches if you spend a little on getting a decent hosting package (see later).

So this is my recipe for 1 simple basic business website.

All you need

1 tech person
1 internet connection

I would recommend you should choose a website designer to be that tech person (preferably me!) but whatever you decide here's what needs to be done.

1. Decide what the website is for
2. Decide who your audience are and why they will come to your website
3. Learn some basic SEO and Accessibility facts.
4. Choose a website design template
5. Change it to match what is right for your company
6. Fill in the content i.e. your words and images
7. Choose a web address e.g. www.mycompany.co.uk
8. Choose some web hosting
9. Upload your website

Read on for a fuller description of each of these steps
Continue reading "Free Business Websites"

Free Newsletter Template

This newsletter template provides a way of handling the uploading, storing and management of newsletters on a website. It would be ideal for use in a school or church website. In its current form the newsletters exist as PDF files but this could easily be changed to cater for other file types.
Newsletter Template Features

Standards based (XHTML Strict)

Accessible Design

Admin facility to manage the newsletters

Go to the Template page