“Hi Pete, Thank you for your email regarding your Desire. This is a known issue with the Device. You may wish to regularly check for OTA updates. There might be one released that resolves this issue. Can I suggest a suitable work around for the time being is to manually change the location settings each time you travel? Thank you for contacting HTC. If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact me. With good wishes, Sam B HTC”

Setting it manually does indeed work, but it’s a bit of a pain if you move around as much as I do

You can do this using an FTP client like Filezilla but it can take a while for a big site. If you have access to the command prompt then you can navigate yourself to the relevant web folder and type:

find -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

These standard permissions prevent your web files/directories being overwritten by all but the ‘Owner’. This is a standard setup for a Joomla site.

The background to this is that the client wants to get into foreign markets (France, Germany, Italy). To do this they wish to create translations of their existing website. They have been advised that each website should have it’s own TLD (top level domain such as .fr, .uk, .de) and that the site should be hosted on a server in the relevant country.

This poses some immediate problems. Firstly, you need to have 4 separate hosting accounts, with 4 separate websites. This means you have 4 times the amount of work to maintain, which is not a good use of anyone’s time.

In general I’m talking about Google here, but I’m assuming that most SE’s work the same way. Google does indeed look at both the TLD and the IP of the website. The TLD will (should) take precedence over the IP. This makes sense if you think about it as many companies use cheap american hosting to host their UK websites. However, in the instance where you have a non-country specific TLD such as .net or .com, Google would look at the IP.

Thankfully in Google Webmaster tools you can associate a .com/.net with a specific country. So you could have the following setup:

(also used on sites like Nike.com)
http://www.client.com/fr associated with French content
http://www.client.com/de associated with German content

to go one step further you could setup sub-domains

http://fr.client.com

http://de.client.com

To do this, you would need to add several entries to your Google Webmaster account, which is easier than setting up lots of sites/hosting etc.

Ultimately, you don’t specifically need 4 sites to run 4 different language versions, just a way of assigning the relevant content to the relevant search. It should also be noted that this only effects ’show me search results only from the uk’ searches. I’d reiterate that the most important thing for any of these sites is getting country specific inbound links. Without that you’ll get the same old problems.

How do I implement this on a Joomla site?

I’ll tell you in my next article.

Lumiere Cheltenham

What with it being our anniversary and somewhere near Valentine’s day, we decided to treat ourselves to a meal at one of the restaurants we’d not been to in Cheltenham, so we chose the fine dining experience of Lumière on Clarence Parade.

Lumière is, by most wallets, at the more expensive end of the dining experiences so with our sights suitably set, we were looking forward to it (although maybe not receiving the bill!). Having eaten at several of the fine eating establishments in Cheltenham such as Hotel du Vin, The Queen’s and Merlot, (and having loved them all) I hoped that Lumiere provide us with a great night and more importantly, great food and atmosphere.

Having been shown to our ‘booth’ I was surprised as to how uncomfortable the seat was. It’s simple L shaped design gave you no support and was not exactly ‘fine seating’ to match our ‘fine dining’ experience. I’ve been more comfortable on a church pew at a boring wedding.

Trying to put my discomfort to one side, we ordered a bottle wine, which we were then told was out of stock so we chose another. Looking forward to having a drink before our meal, it was dissappointing to have the wine arrive with the amuse bouche. This was very nice though and set my appetite appropriately.

The thing about restaurants is ordering the right meal. There’s nothing worse that looking at someone elses plate (rude I know) and wishing it was yours. In this instance, my crab ravioli, compared to my wife’s pate made me do just that. It was a shame but there just wasn’t really much to it.

The main course (pork belly for me) again made me envy my wife’s plate. There was ample vegetables to go with the course however, which always ticks my box.

Between the main and desert, we have the most unusual and also tasty part of the meal. It was effectively parsnip milkshake (warmed). It was tremendous and something I’d never experienced before. Top marks to whoever came up with that. It was a shame that it stood out over my main course though.

We shared cheese for desert which was served with a nice chutney, but we skipped coffee as we’d already spent a fair chunk of money and we could have a coffee with the babysitters (grandparents) at home.

The bill was over £100 which was understandable given the courses we’d had but felt a little galling for me, having not thoroughly enjoyed my meal. My wife had a lovely meal though.

Would I go back there? Well I wouldn’t rush back with there being so many similar places in Cheltenham but if you’ve got over £100 to spend and want a different place to try, be my guest (or rather theirs)!

Micro Blogging is the new buzz-word on the web. If you ever thought that what you think while you daydream at your desk would be interesting to someone else, then Twitter is the tool for you. Of course, whilst Twitter is still little more than a tool for geeks like me to stay ‘in touch’ with everyone else, it will become mainstream. Just like 2 years ago, you couldn’t poke your friends Mum (if that ever was acceptable), people’s Mums are being poked up and down the country via Facebook these days.

Like a stepping stone into the world of the inane, the ‘What are you doing right now…?” box in Facebook has got its own website and it’s pushing its wares down every orriface it can. Apps are springing up on iPhones, Wordpress blogs, desktops that consume this dreary drivel. But to what ends?

The visionaries of the web will have you think that Twitter is a great marketing tool, and in many ways it might be. In a similar way to Google Adsense you can choose to ‘follow’ specific types of tweets, just as ads are targeted to what you search for. In fact, the similarity doesn’t stop there. The short number of characters means that the message is always short, although may have no point. In many ways, it’s identical, albeit not as quick to deploy or update.

So why bother?

At the moment, Twitter is a geek tool but it will grow in popularity. As it becomes more mainstream (Is your Mum a Twit who has been poked by me?) the tools that are available to customise what you see will grow. Those who are there first can sit on names and get an automatic following just by people trying to Twitter someone they recognise. Just think, we could soon all be Twittering your Mum!

Am I a Twit?

Of course I am. I am nothing if I am not inane

Looks like the bun fight has started at Woolies. I’d imagine that every Woolworths shop floor is currently awash with 10 packs of TDK tapes and ‘pick’n'mix’. Christmas shopping is bad enough, without that.