This post will show you how to subscribe to a pocast in the podcasts app for ios using the url of a podcast feed, rather than looking it up in the podcasts directory. its not obvious, but if you paste [or type] the url of the podcast feed into the Read more…
Google have released an ‘author’ tag. the author tag is what enables sites to have a ‘byline’ in the google search results. this post will show you how to setup and test the new author tag so that google can (at their discretion) show a picture of you next to Read more…
Imessage does not show contacts list in messages. By default when you open the imessages application it shows the sent / received window. This is ok if you are only going to send and receive to imessages contacts as you can search them from the search bar. It does get Read more…
You can search using spotlight to find items matching a specific filetype. eg. if you want to search within all pdf documents for a specific keyword you could search for the following kind:pdf report this would find all the pdf files with the word ‘reports’ in the name here is Read more…
This will show you how to use spotlight to search google and display the results in chrome, firefox or any other browser 1) open safari 2) go to preferences > general 3) make sure ‘google’ is your preferred search engine. 4) make sure the browser you want to use to Read more…
This will show you how to preview files in spotlight on osx. if you perform a search using spotlight you can preview all the files shown, simply hover the mouse over the file and a ‘quicklook’ will appear. if its an mp3 or any other music file then you can Read more…
This little keyboard shortcut will let you activate spotlight without having to click on the magnifying glass in the menubar in osx 1) press cmd + spacebar when you press cmd + spacebar at the same time you will see the spotlight search appear in the top right hand corner, Read more…
This one is pretty cool, you can find your friends location using siri on your iPhone! make sure you are logged in to your ‘find my friends’ app (get it from the app store if you dont already have it) ask siri ‘where is contactname’ and it will look them Read more…
This short blog post will show you how to enable spotlight indexing on a network drive. I have also added the commands to disable spotlight indexing on network drive that’s already indexed. The first thing you have to do is to make sure you connect your network drive to the Read more…
Since yahoo site explorer is now dead I have been looking for alternative ways to profile backlinks. to check your own backlinks and the backlinks of your competitors http://blekko.com search for “yoursite.com /seo” note the space between yoursite.com and /seo http://blekko.com search for “yoursite.com /domainlinks” note the space between yoursite.com Read more…
This is my list of 100 places to get free legal music downloads online www.largeheartedboy.com have a list with lots on it itunes is good for free music itsfreedownloads.com have a list of the latest free tracks on iTunes Amazon mp3 store has a lot of free stuff too last.fm Read more…
Some cool SEO tools for you to try out – I’m always looking for SEO tools, the more tools I try out, the more I understand what the general consensus is amongst the SEO community as to what makes your site perform better. That said, there are always things to Read more…
Songgenie is an application by equinux that finds metadata for your music collection. Songgenie can find song names, album names, genre, track number, lyrics and can help fix missing or incorrect itunes song data. 1) Download and install You can download the app from the equinux website, there is a Read more…
coverscout is an application by equinux that finds covers for your music collection. It can fix missing album and song covers in itunes. it embeds the artwork in the mp3 files, and will make your itunes look perfect :D 1) download and install you can download the app from the Read more…
Just incase you use google basefeed (google merchant, or google shopping) their new specifications go live tomorrow, sept 22nd 2010. basically you need to have a brand, a UPC / EAN and a manufacturer part number for everything, and if you sell clothes then you need a google product type Read more…
After moving into my new flat I had to wait three weeks for my isp to connect me. here is a list of my essential iphobe apps that kept me connected. mail.app this one is the most important. it let me read my mail. safari.app this one helped me search Read more…
This will show you how to remove the search box from safari and perform your searches from the addressbar, like you do in google chrome its really easy, just go to https://github.com/rs/SafariOmnibar and download their installer.
This short blog will show you the ways to activate launchpad osx lion. Launchpad was introduced in osx as a way to launch applications similar to the way you launch apps on an ipad or iphone. Launchpad displays apps from your mac in a grid and is configurable. Launchpad shows Read more…
Spotlight on osx is a fantastic feature which will give you suggestions by searching your mac for documents and apps. This post will show you how to turn off spotlight search to disable spotlight search suggestions and free up some resources on your machine. There are lots of scenarios where Read more…
This will show you how to enable the new wordpress.com stats in your self hosted wordpress blog :) they let you see pageviews per day, week, month. they also let you see search terms, etc go to your self hosted wordpress admin goto plugins > add new search for ‘jetpack’ Read more…
This post will show you a few of the cool useful linux and osx commandline tools that I use every day. They are mostly available for osx, but some require fink or brew to install on a mac. # ssh available by default on osx and linux. lets you log Read more…
This will show you how to enable google instant in google chrome browser. if you dont know what google instant is, then go to google.com and start typing in things. thats google instant =) it works slightly differently in chrome you can enable it in chrome thus: goto the spanner Read more…
Setting up eclipse on a mac to work with SVN this post will show you how to setup eclipse on your mac to work with a local [or remote] SVN repository install eclipse goto help > install new software select ‘use all available sources’ search for ‘SVN’ under ‘collaboration’ click Read more…
iPad screen flicker fix: My iPad screen started flickering randomly one day. It would flicker when I was scrolling in safari, or when I was playing a game. It wasn’t a major flicker, but it was notice-able. The areas that were meant to be white went darker. There were horizontal Read more…
WordPress ultimate seo guide – This post is about making your wordpress perform better in search engine result pages. WordPress is pretty good, but its not perfect. this will tell you how to make it stronger. 1) what is seo? Making sure that your pages have the best chance of Read more…
google is now using the speed of your site to determine your search rankings your site needs to be as fast as it can. Along with optimising your site for search results and w3c and wcag validation you now need to optimise for speed using google pagespeed. there are a Read more…
Today I am going to share some html css and wcag v2 aaa validation tools with you. these things will help to make sure your site performs as well as it can, and as fast as it can. google have announced that they are now counting the loading time of Read more…
Some tips for your wordpress blog before you can optimise for search: header tags make sure you have the proper header tags in your pages dont make the title of your blog be an h1 tag only have one h1 tag per page make sure the h1 tag is on Read more…
ok, so here are a few ways to collect stats for your wordpress blog. pretty basic stuff, but very valuable google analytics – provides an excellent way to track all the users of your site, what pages they go to, where they go, how long they stay on your site, Read more…
SEO seminar with Rand Fishkin – I work as a web developer. its a great job, and its great fun (especially since I’m a geek). One of the companies we do a lot of work with have a lot of good contacts. one of them is @randfish – founder of Read more…
I have just setup mu pingpressfm wordpress plugin to add a couple of hashtags so that I come up in twitter hashtag searches :) I added #musicblog and #macblog. I have a lot of posts waiting on my mac at home to fill up the music part, and I have Read more…
You probably know this already: turn off push in mail ( settings > mail > fetch new mail ) and set the schedual to hourly or manual – manual will only get mail when you open mail, it will also control the updating of calendars and contacts :) turn off Read more…
im testing out some gps apps for the iphone – mostly so that I can track my cycling, but also cos I think they are excellent =) first im trying out everytrail – its free, and its pretty basic. it tracks you, you can save the tracks and you can Read more…
as its the new year its time to loose the flab. this applies to email too. I just read in one of my rss feeds an excellent way to find crap emails you dont want – search your gmail for ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ then go through them and unsubscribe. which is nice, Read more…
I got an iphone 3gs today. Its nice. basically the exact same as my ipod touch, but with gps and a (crap) camera. i uploaded all the apps I had for my ipod, synced my calendar, contacts, mail accounts, setup the settings and thought ‘great, what do I do now’. Read more…
keeping chrome firefox and safari synced is hard. browser wars are good. and bad. now with the launch of a dev build of chrome for the mac and linux there is now a decent choice of fast browsers on mac. one problem is how to keep all the data synced Read more…
This one is pretty cool. ive been looking for a decent way to get all my feeds to my mac. I have them all setup in google reader and was thinking about putting them all into mail.app (which im still working on) – but untill then I offer an intermediate Read more…
I have been making sitemap generators. a little script that generates an xml file with every product, category, brand and combination thereof; along with every news article and static page. one site has 8000 odd urls! the sitemaps also include a timestamp of when the data was last modified. there Read more…
This post will show you how to sync your mac osx contacts to gmail contacts. This will allow for a two-way sync – ie when you add a contact to your addressbook, its automatically added to google and when you add a contact to google its automatically added to your Read more…