Author Archives: Richard Bleakley
About Richard Bleakley
Free lance web designer, IT support consultant at Blackdog Media. ← Older postsGoogle tips for more effective searches
February 28, 2012Google is capable of lots more than standard searches. You can use operators to great effect which will give you more accurate results and help you in your mission to syphon through the dirge.
Here are some of the most useful:
Search a specific website
site:blackdogmedia.co.uk hello
Adding site: followed by a website (without the www. or http://) will give you search results from that particular site.
Using a minus sign to exclude results
-keyword
Using a – (hypen, minus sign, dash) will exclude a particular key word from the google result.
Quote marks to search for an exact phrase
For example, “the quick brown fox”. This is apparently a handy one for cheating in pub quizzes…someone told me.
Other Tips
There are lots of handy google uses. For example, google can do maths 5*7/34 (5 x 7 divided by 34). Or unit conversion, by typing 100 kilograms in pounds you’ll discover the answer is 220.462262.
You can search for specific file types by typing filetype:pdf (returns PDF documents only) or filetype:doc blackdog tab will return word documents with blackdog tab from the Led Zeppelin song (no relation to the name of my company).
Posted in How to | Comments OffMerry Christmas
December 24, 2011Well it’s finally here – have an amazing Christmas and new year. Here’s to an amazing 2011 & even better 2012.
Rick
Posted in Uncategorised | Comments OffBackup Strategies
December 13, 2011They say (whoever ‘they’ are) there are two types of people when it comes to backing up. There are those that have lost data and backup ferociously, and there are those that don’t back up who will lose their data, or at very best will come close. Hard drives are incredibly fragile bits of hardware, and once the platter is scratched it’s basically impossible to recover the data unless you have a cool £10-£20K you want to spend on the recovery process.
Personally having had a BAD experience once in my life with data loss which resulted in a veeeerrry unhappy wife, I’m now a paranoid uber backer upper (PUBU). Here’s the solution I came up with, which might be useful for you. I would thoroughly recommend it!
At home I’ve a QNAP TS-210 NAS. Which is a hard drive attached to my network. As soon as I turn on any of the laptops at home, they start backing up via time machine. You can also use this box to backup your PC laptop (it supports SMB or AFP).
Why not use time capsule? I hear a lot of complaints about unreliability so avoided that solution. Also, the QNAP box came with lots of other stuff, for example I can set it to download movies in my absence and my TV can play movies directly from it (no need for an apple TV). It also has a built in web server, iTunes media streaming, surveillance system, full RAID (multiple instances of same drive just in case one fails).
So what if the house explodes, burns down, gets washed away by the flood or struck by lightening? Hopefully this will not happen, but if it does I’ve also got a cloud based backup happening as well. I went with backblaze, although there are lots of different cloud backups available. Backblaze costs $5 a month, so it’s not exactly a bank breaker. It backs up everything except your operating system and applications.
Once all that’s set up, you can simply forget about it (but test it every once in a while).
Posted in How to | Comments OffWhy I love wordpress
December 13, 2011I was a little late to the party when it comes to wordpress. I had experimented with just about every other system under the sun, with some success, but was never really very happy. Wordpress have just released v3.3 which is a great update. In my world time is money, so to be able to login and update every client site in about 5 seconds with one button push is a huge bonus. Most other CMS require manual process which usually goes like this:
Download files > Unpack > Upload files to site > site down > site breaks > heart fails > site apology > site restored
Good start to the day!
Posted in Uncategorised | Tagged CMS, wordpress | Comments Offrobinmark.com
November 3, 2011Latest bit of work for Robin Mark – robinmark.com
I had previously hand coded a content management system, but having realised the awesome power of wordpress, decided it needed that treatment. Used a great event manager plugin, really customisable. Timed myself making the move from the old site, managed to transfer in under 2 hours which is pretty good going.
It will be interesting to see how the statistics are affected by the improved SEO in wordpress.
Posted in work | Comments OffRIP Steve Jobs
October 6, 2011Like many millions of geeks the world over, I was saddened to hear the news of the passing of former Apple founder CEO Steve Jobs. It came as quite a shock to most. Jobs kept his personal life private. Rightly so.
His list of achievements under apple (and also outside such as NeXt and Pixar) are astonishing. The inventions created and pioneered under apple have led the PC market by the nose. Love them or loathe their cocky self assuredness, apple have indeed changed the world as we know it. From the use of typography and design, to firewire, to the iPod which paved the way for apple to create the iPhone & iPad. Not to mention the Mac itself, software built around the hardware it runs on – this is one of the mains things that sets apple products apart from their competitors, and the reason that ‘it just works’.
Apple aside, Steve Jobs was an inspiring man and a great example of character. I love this clip from ’97. In this video Steve is insulted by a member of the audience, his response was one of grace even though he could probably have biten back.
In the famous Stanford Commencement speech, Steve outlines some of the steps that brought him to this place, including some of the personal aspects of his life such as being told by doctors to ‘get his affairs in order’ after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“I want to make a ding in the universe”
~Steve Jobs
I would say, and I’m sure most will agree, mission accomplished.
Posted in Uncategorised | Tagged apple, jobs, passing, RIP, Steve Jobs | Comments Off ← Older posts