Archive for April, 2010

Standing Up To What Twitter Throws At Us

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

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.

Basically the links went from this:-

<a href=”http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ukseohere”><b>#ukseohere</b></a>

To this:-

<a href=”http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ukseohere” onclick=”pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, ‘result_type’, ‘recent’, 3);pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/intra/hashtag/#ukseohere’);”><b>#ukseohere</b></a>

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!

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April Fools!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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.

Hope you liked it anyway!

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UKSEOHere Update – We need Your Help!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Okay small update, having recently got off the phone with the French embassy in London about their implications of changing the French postal system.

They recognise the concern from ukseohere as a group, but want to see how many people are actually against it.

So if people can tweet the following, you can add your name to the petition.

#ukseohere [postcode] No to French postcode changing! #cheeseeatingsurrendermonkeys

Together we can get this daft legislation changing!

Thanks, updates after midday, as the bill in Frabce becomes law at 3pm, hence the need to voice our disproval!

Cheers

Rhys

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Update To The Postcode & Geolocation Problems of UKSEOHere

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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.

Updates to follow.

Cheers

Rhys

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