Numerology

So long to 2008. No mega message but glad to see another year categorised safely into the mega system backups archive with all client data and Callisti details safe and snuggled up for the New Year.

Our online shop experiments are trading well and all our clients seem to getting what they need from our services without too much ado.

Can't say fairer than that...

See you at the London Search Engine Conference in February!

Opening the next gateway

Recently been looking at the Scottish Enterprise "Grow your business" initiatives. One of the challenges of working in the web/IT industry is that teams are often too busy to allow time for a clean development and testing environment pressure.

The now fragmented LEC now has a localised wing called Business Gateway to further spread the quango funding but their website does have a section of funding opportunities for development.

New Year, new thinking. Well, we'll see, but now that the set-up period for Callisti is mostly sorted and administration is ticking over nicely, it's time to look further afield to the world of possibility.

Video lackey

What better way to spend the day than working through a script and shot sequence for a DVD production project.

Getting out and about in the fresh air, meeting people, developing skills, intermittent manual labour, knocking off around 5pm,... sigh, sounds like a proper day's work.

Callisti is producing the Forest Sawmills Health and Safety Training DVD and we hope the new callisti website will feature this soon in the first quarter of next year. The website has been serving a very limited role since it's inception in quarter 3 of 2008 but we will be investing time in a more fitting web presence in the coming weeks.

Virtumonde malware

Watch out for the virtumonde trojan that's kicking about this festive season.

This infects using holes in Sun Java and gets into Windows registry and System 32 files. If you notice a randomly generated dll file name it's worth checking.

Common symptoms are pop up windows usually saying that you need to download software to fix the problem! Don't click on these popups!

This can be a sticky problem to remove as the infected dll's start when you boot up your machine.

Best solution if you're not sure, aside from checking your security settings, is to run Spybot to see if anything turns up, but this doesn't always remove the problem permanently. You should also try ATF cleaner to remove all temporary files on your computer and then run Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware. If any problems come up ensure that you check them all and 'remove selected'.

On restart the system may be slower initially but this will recover. You should then run HiJackThis to generate a log file and submit this along with the Anti-Malware report to an appropriate forum, such as Safer Networking.

You will get the best and most thorough advice from the experienced teams on these forums.

Using blogs for SEO

All the basic entries are now added to the Arts Festival diary on the wordpress blog and this has now been 'pinged' using PingMyBlog. Loosely, this is the blog equivalent of search engine submissions.

Running concurrently

Ah, the long winter nights.

Recently Callisti has been updating the experimental Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival wordpress blog site with the provisional festival diary.

Some of the events are tentatively booked so dates and venues may still need to be firmed up.

Updating wordpress blogs can take an age - I hope it's not as slow as that when you have a local server installation.

Anyhow, good to see the search results for "dumfries and galloway arts festival".

Now what was that about PageRank?

Christmas presents for boys and girls

It doesn't get more straightforward than this:

Christmas presents for girls and Christmas presents for boys.

We've found that implementing SEO recommendations does actually improve search engine performance. (check Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy and JBA Seed Potatoes) We urge all our clients to consider what they are aiming to achieve from their web presence.

Google Base products

Our client JBA Seed Potatoes now has competitive product listings on google's shopping search engine where you can submit product feeds and widen the range of possible searches that land on the client site.

It can take around 4-5 days from submission to insertion (oo-er) which has significantly increased in the last 18 months but there are more e-commerce websites using this service.

Be aware that Google base UK and Google base US are different and mess around with sessions if trying to switch between them.