As any good SEO will tell you, tracking links is a good thing, but alas not for UKSEOHere, that went down inexplicably for the past few days. Not checking the site for a few days I thought it was a hangover from the April Fools gag, but it wasn’t, it was twitter’s fault – for adding link tracking to their feeds.
Which is a proper pain in the arse, as not only were the UKSEOTweets not being discovered, but if people sneak in another hashtag, the proliferation of apostrophes inserted into the database meant that when the data was passed to the javascript, it wasn’t putting the points on the maps at all!
Anyway, it’s now fixed and my head hurts from playing with regex for the past two hours, thanks to Peter Handley for spotting the error to begin with!
Yes in a joke that fooled at best half of somebody, I moved the UKSEOhere map over France, and introduced another tag to the database – a #cheeseeatingsurrendermonkey tag, for a random position somewhere in France. The backstory? An update to the French Postcoding system & changing from Imperial to Metric the Latitude & Longitude of a map resulted in squiffy results. Complete and total BS, that fooled nobody.
Still it was interesting, and I’ve worked out a lot of stuff in the April Fools prank, so not all was lost.
You can still see the map here at our specialist UKSEOhere French map, and any tweet with the phrase #cheeseeatingsurrendermonkeys still geolocate to somwehre in France.
If you feel bad because you fell for it, take solice that:-
In preparing for the prank, I genuinely knocked out my site for 2 hours.
Google Chrome automatically translated my site into French when browsing the site.
If you checked the website for ukseohere this morning you will notice that we’ve been having problems with the Ukseohere map & default locations.
After doing a little research, I have found out the problem.
The issue lies in two places, first issue is the proposed decimalization of the latitude/longitude system. Since being introduced, the lat/long calculations have been running on imperial systems, this has now changed to metric systems.
The second has been that the French government has introduced a postal system very similar to our own.
An update will follow soon, but in the meantime I’d advise against any geolocation tools, including sat Navs, google maps & even atlases for the time being.
For those of you who don’t know, in a few short days is the Twestival, a Twitter based festival organised in venues throughout the world. I myself am going to one, the Manchester Twestival (which has now sold out).
One thing I’ve been keen to do is create some sort of venue/conference mashup, so that if there is a twitter hashtag, the postcode isn’t geocoded, rather the actual venue is geocoded. Obviously more SEO’ers are likely to be at an event, so more chance to meet up. Today the system goes live with the first custom event tag, for the Manchester Twestival!
To use it, simply tweet #ukseohere with the word #manctwester in it, you don’t even need to put in a postcode (though I would), and your tweet will show under the Manchester listings. For example:-
#ukseohere M1 At the #manctwester Twitter Twestival!
I’m looking to add a few more Twestival sites, so if you want an icon & a link from the UKSEOHere website, please comment below with:-
Event hashtag
Event details (address, pictures, website etc.)
So far here are the hashtags & the events they link to, with the twestival in mind:-
Hi everybody! I have updated UKseohere with another batch of custom icons. To make them display upon your map listing, simply include any of the below words in your tweet.
Do you have any suggestions for the next update? Please contact me!
Incidentally, there is also a special “secret icon” that is triggered by a certain keyword. Doubt it’ll show, but I do have a search on so that it will email me. First person to tweet it will get a linkback, and be a little embarassed.
For those of you logging into the map recently may notice that there’s a few less points on the map, this is with good reason, as I’ve introduced something that I felt needed to be.
Each Twitterer can only be in one place.
This was done because I pretty much had a monopoly on the North Wales coast being a) the only known North Walian SEO (well the only one I know) & b) the fact that I try and spend as little time as possible in LL29 meant that I looked like I was everywhere.
This is in accordance with what I hope to achieve with this project – people meeting up & networking. Of course, if one of you lovely people were to say come to LL30 & I was in LL29, I’d probably pop on the bus & say hi, but for some areas, redundant data can be a problem. I want to be a little more real time .
Of course, one thing I am kind of working on is some sort of archiving system, whereby tweets are stored & you can see where you’ve been on the map. This is a work in progress, largely because it’ll store a large amount of data. Would there be privacy concerns? Would you like a map of where you’ve tweeted from? Assume all comments begin with the line “I am not a lawyer” .
One new featured added today is custom icons. This is great, as it’s something that can be added if and when I (or indeed you!) come up with any ideas for new icons, they’ll be added.
All you need to do is include one of these words in your tweet, and it’ll be added:-
Beer
Wine
Coffee
Tea
Work
This is only a start, I’m planning to add a few more, got any suggestions of what words to add? Contact me!
I was impressed with the launch last night (thanks to everybody who made it go well), so much so that I discovered the first bug of what will hopefully be not that many.
The bug was due to geocoding at real time – whilst on a map with 4 or 5 points Google could handle it, but when there were 25 points on the map, Google couldn’t and therefore missed points off the map. Not good.
Now, the geocoding is done if & when something’s added to the database. Which is great, as there’s less geocoding done, and more mapping.
Finally, as I’m using less geocoding requests (so much so that Google will only complain if people tweet #ukseohere 2700/minute), I can set the site to update more regularly. So instead of 15 minutes, it’s now every 5. Enjoy!
Any questions or feature requests? Contact me if you have any ideas. Thank you!
It is with great pleasure to announce that my latest project – #UKSEOHere has been launched!
An idea suggested by NicholaStott on Twitter for a #UKSnow esque map for twitterers where Search Engine Professionals can tweet their rough location & what they are upto. People in the area can then tweet you for an impromptu meetup. That’s the plan anyway.
To use, simply tweet the following:-
“#ukseohere [First Part Of Your Postcode] [Tweet]”
For example:-
“#ukseohere M1 Hello World!”
Most people it to describe what they are upto, rather than opinion tweets. Hashtags & links do work too as well!
It’s still in beta (heck, Gmail was for 5 years), but the plan is to add a few features on an ongoing basis. Have any suggestions? Contact me!
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