Hello all, just a quickie to introduce myself.

My name is Tim Grice and I am the new Search Strategist at Branded3, there is a chance you may have heard of me before or come across my blog SEO wizz, it has had the odd mention here and there

I am a real search addict, starting around 4-5 years ago when Adwords was first taking off, going through the affiliate marketing phrase, losing lots of money, losing lots of Adsense accounts (also having some success ) and well here I am.

I have been working freelance for the last 18 months slowly building a client base and expanding my portfolio with excellent results working with clients in the UK and US.

I got to a point where either I invested to take it to the next level or I looked to take my skills to a new company and more prestigious clients, Branded3 are local to me and after meeting with Vin and Patrick the choice was an easy one.

As I said I am passionate about search and am hoping to add a real bang to the online marketing team here at Branded3, hopefully I’ll have a few opportunities to fire some posts out here on blogstorm but if not you can catch me at SEOwizz.

Bye for now.

On Monday I spotted a strange issue with Blogstorm that was causing the blog to be displayed 4 inches down the page. I suspected it was a browser issue or some kind of hack but the source code was totally clean and it was displaying the same in multiple browsers which was strange.

After some investigation by one of our developers yesterday it turned out that the JavaScript file which powers the tab section on the right hand side of the blog had been hacked and an iframe inserted in the header. Luckily the iframe source was giving a 404 error otherwise my blog would probably have been flagged as a malware site and started redirecting all visitors to somewhere else.

We are still not sure how the hacker got into the blog but I am very careful to only use popular plugins and always update all plugins and Wordpress as soon as new versions come out.

Since I use a desktop PC at the office and a laptop at home I wanted a nice easy way to synchronise certain files between the two PC’s. You’d think this was easy but it’s actually pretty hard to do which is why so many people resort to emailing files to themselves.

Microsoft has a system called Windows Live Sync but it only works if both computers are online in much the same way as the excellent Log Me In does. I tried Dropbox but it gives you a new folder that you can drag content into when you want to sync it up rather than just syncing all the folders you want.

This week I finall found the solution – Syncplicity. The basic service is totally free and gives you 2GB of online data storage (you can get 3GB if you sign up using this link).

When you install the application you simply select the folders you want to share and it automatically synchronises them with the Syncplicity servers and your other computers. The files are also available by logging in to the website so you can get them from a public PC as well.

Read more >>

Last night I was complaining that my Servicing Stop post was taking a few minutes longer than normal to get indexed – with such a time sensitive topic it’s critical that Google indexes and ranks the content within a few minutes.

@ducedoon pointed out that it might be because of a new addition to Wordpress 2.8 which rather than sending pings when a post is published sends them once per hour in a batch process!

In an attempt to reduce the numbers of outbound pings a new undocumented ”feature” was introduced in Wordpress 2.8 (this change is not mentioned in the WP 2.8 release notes).

Instead of notifing ping services every time a post is published or edited, pings are now sent once every hour, at the most. Every time a new post is published, Wordpress checks if there is a ping batch queued to be sent within the next hour. If so, the ping is added to that batch. If there is nothing in the queue, a ping is sheduled to be sent after 3600 seconds (one hour).

Apparently this will be fixed in Wordpress 2.8.3, until then don’t expect fast indexing or speedy distribution of your RSS feed.

I’ve finally joined FriendFeed you can follow me here.

Some of you might have noticed a few changes with how we handle comments on Blogstorm and I wanted to explain things in a bit more detail. I will discuss the features first and the reason behind the changes at the end of the post.

In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.

The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link. Read more >>

Just received this scam email from the Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited. They are very kindly telling me that somebody wants to register blogstorm as a domain in Hong Kong.

I have a hunch that giving my credit card details to them would be a bad idea.

Richard.liu (Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited) wrote:
Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword

2 Apr. 2009

Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited which is the domain name
register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is
apply ing to register “blogstorm” as their domain name and Internet keyword
on 1 Apr. 2009.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been
in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark,
so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet
keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering
them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

Kind Regards,

Richard Liu
Tel:+ 852-31757931(ext.8021)
Fax: +852-31757932
Email: richard.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn
Website: www.hknsc.hk

An internet startup has been forced to settle out of court after they were threatened by a large law firm involving the way they were linking to pages on the law firms website.

Ars Technica reports on the rather strange case.

A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, “jonesday.com” is okay, but not “blah blah blah”.

I’m thinking of changing the name of Blogstorm to “SEO” and then threatening legal action against any sites that refuse to change the anchor text of my links.

In early January Sky News asked if they could interview me for an evening show about the latest Internet news. The show is going out tomorrow night at 7pm.

Unfortunately I won’t be on it because the person who arranged the interview didn’t notice the word “Leeds” in my email signature or company address and assumed I must live in London (doesn’t everybody?). The end result is that today when they rang to arrange everything and found out I didn’t live in London they told me that they didn’t want me on the show anymore.

If any Londoners would like to appear on Sky News tomorrow there is a slot available. I won’t be watching.

Now I wish I hadn’t told everybody to watch the show.