Geoff Jones

Geoff potential guests being led astray.

Posted on August 19, 2008March 8, 2017

I get an enormous number of 404 errors on this site (269 in last 10 hours), they stem mainly from when I migrated the old blogger posts to wordpress. On blogger the post url’s ended with .html when I transferred them to WordPress the .html was stripped off 🙁

So now if you click on an old google search term it comes up with File not Found (404) error. Not good for ones rankings.

I am using John Godleys redirection plugin but to make full use of it I need to learn how to create regular expressions, so far with no luck! (anyone out there willing to help, please). I have created a help topic on the regex advice forum and also asked John Godley for advice too.

Today Google came to the rescue with a neat 404 webpage that is customised to your site if you use Google Webmaster Tools. So now you get this useful little page:-

But I really need to get the hang of \b(https://geoffjones.com/2.*?)\.\w+/(?!\w) and its ilk plus how to add them to a .htaccess file….

Big heads and family history

Posted on August 18, 2008May 28, 2019

One of the curses of my life is being born with a big head, I need a size 60 or 7³⁄₈ hat and buying glasses is a nightmare requiring an extended temple length.

Today I discovered the real meaning of ‘pollard’ according to ancestry.com. Pollard is a “nickname for a person with a large or unusually shaped
head, from Middle English poll ‘head’ (Middle Low German
polle ‘(top of the) head’) + the pejorative suffix
-ard.” Which is obviously why the name is also given to pruning willow trees where a distinctive large crown is produced.

So I obviously have all those Heage Pollard’s to blame 🙂

The things I learn….

Twitter beaching the whale

Posted on August 14, 2008March 8, 2017

Very bad news from Twitter,. Twitters USP here in the UK was the ability to send & receive tweets by SMS (Text messaging) as of today, with no warning whatsoever, they have cut of receiving updates here in the UK by text.

Their so called UK number, actually its a number based in the Isle of Man, was outside most UK users calling plans (O2 it was included in the free texts) so most folks would not update their twitters at 20p or so at a time. However, incoming texts in the UK are free so Twitter was a neat way of sending texts to mobile phones from a PC. and also a way of amplifying texts 1 text to many. Alas no more.

The reasons given are cost they argue “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” Which doesn’t add up to me as Bulk SMS’s seem to cost between 2p and 1.3p according to Bulksms.org

Its interesting that they did not even offer an option to pay for receiving texts or even severely limit the number of texts per user? We are not all Scobles with thousands of followers.

Their alternative idea of using the internet on your phone is not so hot either, although Twinkle and twitterific work OK on the iPhone they cannot run in the background or alert you in the same way that texting does.

I think they have now left the market wide open for Google to come in with Jaiku, although the omens don’t look good on that front.

I guess the good news is that the twitter service may now be more reliable as users flood away leaving the fail whale beached rather than suspended.

Update:

First people trying to bridge the gap with tweetsms

Meanwhile over on AVC, Fred Wilson an investor in Twitter, wrote in reply to my comment:-

geofones 9 hours ago 1 point

Pity that Twitter has just hammered us in the UK. Just as i was getting my social circle to start using it via text on their phones 🙁
Also very poor customer service just chopping of SMS with no warning at all. Perhaps they hadn’t paid their texting phone bill!

fredwilson 7 hours ago 1 point

It will be back. The costs of supplying effectively free texting in the UK just got too high. People were abusing it with DMs

reply edit