I just took the time to investigate an issue I was having that would crop up whenever an invalid URL was access on the site. This was showing up from other sites that linked here to pages that either no longer exist or don’t exist in their old form because of the database intergration. Anyway, it’s been fixed and things no longer look out of whack when it happens. I’ve also put up a forum post about it on the Site Support section.
My other pasttime is flying RC helicopters. Between everything else there isn’t much time to fly but I manage here and there. My humble fleet at the moment consists of only an MX400. The radio system is a 2.4 Ghz Futaba 6EX with a Futaba GY240 gyro. I recently bought some parts to upgrade it from mCCPM to eCCPM so that’s going to be my project for the weekend.
At my day job I oversee the operations of a 200 node network along with printers, faxes, switches, firewalls, servers, etc. It never fails. Every time a users machine goes South I always end up thinking about the same thing.
If any other webmasters running a tech related site would like to do a link exchange with me, shoot me an e-mail using the contact form. My one and only criteria is that your site is actually tech (hardware/software/networking/etc) related and hopefully updated frequently.
I signed up with RegNow to hopefully intergrate in the site to allow an option for buying software but at this point I’m not sure it’ll be worth it. Right now there’s only a VERY small listing of shareware titles - most are freeware. So I’m not sure it’ll be worth it in the end. The main goal of doing this is to furture help the site support itself. Adsense is doing an OK job at the moment but until the site regains it’s popularity that it had at one time it simply won’t be as good.
I’m open to any ideas though. 
Yesterday I re-instated a section on the site that used to exist - the ‘Featured Download’. Every program listed on UtilityGeek is great hands down but this section still lets me put the virtual spotlight on a single product. I’m unsure how long I’ll leave each one up though. My plan is to code the ‘Featured Download’ bit in such a way that I can allow people to syndicate it on their own web sites. I’ll be sure to update everyone once that is done.
Along the way, Internet Explorer decided it didn’t quite like how my HTML was done. It was throwing a table out of whack and causing me some grief at the same time. To top it all off the site sat for probably half the day before I even noticed it (I’m normally running FireFox). In the end though I managed to get it fixed
After doing a bit of research on-line I discovered a major problem with many of my site pages (mainly the database driven pages). I wasn’t making use of…
<meta name=“description” content=“Page description goes here!” />
Now, I’d imagine that there could be much worst coding problems that could happen but for me this was major once I realized what was happening on search engine results.
I’ve done some major reformatting on the site over the past couple days. I’ve expanded my use of CSS (hopefully more to come) and I’ve made the text larger and the site itself wider. Hopefully these changes help to improve the readability of the site.
More changes to come I’m sure. I’ll post updates to the blog as they happen.
Enjoy!
Visitors can now post their own reviews (albeit short) reviews for any utility listed on the site. The coding that needed to be done is finished. The presentation of the reviews themselves may change but everything is operational at this point. Submitted reviews are checked over first before they are made visible on the site (24 hrs max).
You need to be registered on the forums first so head over there to get registered before trying to post one.
Do you have images or perhaps photos even that you’d like to be able to edit? Paint.NET might fit the bill. Although it isn’t new, I still wanted to mention this terrific application. It has enough features built-in to keep you busy for a while. Once you feel like you’ve out-grown it, then you can shop around for one of those paid solutions (Adobe/Paint Shop Pro/etc).
Most of my image editing tasks stop include basics such as resizing, croping and minor color manipulation. This handy app does the job and keeps me from shelling out my green. Now who doesn’t love that? Paint.NET does much more than what I use it for though. Download a copy of it and give it a spin. It’s free - what could you possibly have to lose?
