theo: Eaton Bray

Woo Ajax!

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:34:01 GMT

Well I've had a fun few hours finally getting to grips with Ajax, and with the help of the zXml library and Professional Ajax from Wrox, it's turned out relatively easy to hook everything together . Admittedly I'm supposed to be on holiday, but with no car due to a completely dead battery which won't charge, and the only other choices being housework or walking in the rain, I thought it was about time I get on with a few things that have been hanging around in my head taking up space for so long.

So Eaton Bray now comes with ajax comments (oh, and a major overhaul of the design too!) Now to see how the spammers get on trying to get past the checks - fingers crossed I've done enough this time to make sure they don't get their grubby links through.

So, if you're bored, please go break Eaton Bray for me.

Sunshine in Eaton Bray

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:16:42 GMT

I'm so glad to have a couple of extra days off this week to enjoy the sunshine. Amazingly I managed to spend a couple of days out in the garden getting things sorted after leaving it all to get a bit overgrown for the past six months or so. Eaton Bray has managed to stay quite sunny all weekend, altho once I'd finished digging, the clouds started coming in making things a tad chillier.

Soooo... Lewis Hamilton strikes again! It is good to see Mclaren back at the top, and to finally have a British driver up front again. Pete has mentioned a fantasy F1 league a coupla times, but I'm still not quite sure what it's all about; perhaps I'll get onto that after Bahrain...

Well this was supposed to be a post solely about Eaton Bray, but I guess I wandered off topic a tad there. Who's for some Catchback?

Fidding's great!

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 20:33:26 GMT

Woo! The fiddling worked! Six months of trying to get eaton-bray.co.uk up the rankings and within seven days of switching over to eatonbray.com, Google suddenly thinks it's worth putting the site at 4th when searching for eaton bray.

It's a good start, so hopefully it won't be too long before the new Eaton Bray site hits the top spot...

Fiddling to the max

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 14:05:47 GMT

OK, well having not really had much joy with getting eaton-bray.co.uk up the rankings after wasting it in its early life, I've gone and done the stupid thing and completely changed the domain name. Everything on the Eaton Bray website and all other sites now points at eatonbray.com.

It helped me out when I did it to theogray.com a couple of years ago, so lets see what happens now...

Finding out the hard way

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:22:39 GMT

Back in October 2004 I decided to register eaton-bray.co.uk with the intention of creating a useful village website for Eaton Bray.

Stupidly though, I then never got round to doing anything more than putting 5 links on it - way back machine, feb 05 - until something like May/June of last year, and by then, even archive.org had got bored of checking it.

Unfortunately it looks like during that time, Google took a severe disliking to the domain (not suprisingly), and it's taking a lot to recover from. Since June I've managed to get the site listed properly in DMOZ, and many other places, but still Google has hidden the root of the domain away in some unearthly page 200 or so of results for the obvious search of "eaton bray".

Luckily the pages within the site are doing ok, with searches like "eaton bray parish council" coming up with the right results, and at one point I'd even managed to get the basic "eaton bray" onto the first page, but that was only on certain google servers, with the rest still dumping the root of the site very low down.

Even MSN Search which had the site at top spot for a while has decided that the old Eaton Bray site (run by someone else and hardly ever updated with a front page nicked from ukvillages) is more relevant than a site regularly updated with News and Information about the place.

This is definately the most disatrous search engine ranking I've had up to now with a site, as others have usually jumped on to the first page and usually up to first place quite quickly for the search terms I'm interested in; hopefully this Eaton Bray site can recover over time, but I'm obviously gonna have to work damn hard to get it up there.

So the moral of the story is - when you buy a domain, put decent content on it, or feel the wrath of the search engines!

Eaton Bray - Version 2

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 18:52:28 GMT

Following my initial design for the Eaton Bray website (the old version can be seen here), I have now finally redeveloped a few ideas in it to create a brand new, much cleaner layout.

Those of you who know your websites may have realised that my previous designs have taken some inspiration from an old SimpleBits design, especially in terms of the navigation.

Well, you won't be too suprised to hear that the new Eaton Bray design is in some ways inspired by the work of others, and in this case that would be A List Apart. Hopefully in both cases I have done a good enough job of only using ideas rather than blatantly ripping them off.

Please wander along to www.eatonbray.com, take a look around, and let me know what you think.

Eaton Bray website gets internal news

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:01:14 GMT

The Eaton Bray website which has news and local information about the village, has always been slightly disjointed with all the news stored and accessed via blogspot.

Finally I've made the switch so that all of the Eaton Bray News is now under the eatonbray.com domain.

Maybe one day I'll get round to keeping my personal blog under theogray.com... one day in heaven or hell!

Eaton Bray Weblog Updates

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 21:17:11 GMT

This Eaton Bray site has become a great place to try new things out, and having set up Feedburner, the latest of those is to finally submit to google ads and see what happens.

I was happily suprised just how simple it was to setup - the main problem was working out where to put the adverts so as to keep them as unobtrusive as possible. Hopefully I've succeeded, with adverts on each blog entry, and below the text for some of the main site content; let me know what you think.

Eaton Bray - New Layout

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:43:00 GMT

I've been planning a layout for the Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire website for a while now, based on the new Carnival one, and integrating the Eaton Bray blog with much more information, but hadn't quite figured out how to get the latest blog entries to appear on the front page.

Step up Feedburner! Having just gone over there to convert my blogspot Atom feed to look nice, I suddenly spotted their "Buzzboost" script and everything was solved.

So with a quick graphic (I know it's not wonderful but it'll do for now), it's all up and running, and finally makes it worth me buying the eaton-bray.co.uk domain in the first place!