Category Archives: Tools

01 Mar

Adding a Solid State Drive to an Old Laptop

OK, when I say old, about 2 years old, but it was showing its age. It was taking nearly 5 minutes to reboot, and closing Eclipse could take a minute or two.

I decided to invest in a SSD . Not a state-of-the-art SSD, one that’s a little older, but only cost $118 for 480GB. My old drive was 1TB but I had only used about 300GB, so I figured 480GB would keep me for a long, long time. I ended up purchasing a SanDisk SSD PLUS 480GB Solid State Drive (SDSSDA-480G-G26) because of the brand name, and the reviews were good.… Read the rest

17 Mar

Chrome Slow to Open New Tab

I’ve been having plenty of problems with Chrome being really slow to start or slow to open new tabs on Windows 8. After finding the solution once, the problem then reoccurred a few months later and, of course, I couldn’t find the solution again!

So, what is the solution?

  1. Open a command prompt as an admin user – Windows Key and X, click “Command Prompt (Admin)”
  2. netsh winsock reset
  3. Restart your PC

And that’s it! This solution points to the problem being a winsock issue. But if the browser is working you can leave it alone until it next goes wrong!… Read the rest

30 Mar

Migrating to Eclipse IDE – Importing Sites into Eclipse

I have been a big fan of the Dreamweaver IDE for many, many years and have still yet to find a better IDE integrated with FTP. I moved to Eclipse a year ago for a PHP project I was working on and found it really easy to use and the intellitype function definition help was so much better than that in Dreamweaver that I decided to  move to Eclipse full time.

I still prefer Dreamweaver for creating HTML (their WYSIWYG is awesome) and the FTP integration is superb but one of the reasons I moved was the version of Dreamweaver I was using didn’t handle SFTP well so I ended up using FileZilla for that anyway so the main reason to keep on Dreamweaver went away.… Read the rest

01 Mar

How to Work Out Share of Voice

Disclaimer – I wrote the Sycara Share of Voice system so there will be obvious bias.

One of the seemingly obvious questions in SEO is ‘who are my competition’. As the video says it should be obvious but it’s not always obvious. It also changes, for one set of terms your site might be in competition with companies a, b and c, for another set it might be x, y and z.

So how do you work out share of voice? For each keyword you grab the top 10 sites ranking and assign each position a certain number. You can assign linear numbers (position 1 = 10 points, position 2 = 9 points, etc) or based on click through rates (position 1 = 42 points (42% click through rate), position 2 = 16 points (16% CTR).… Read the rest

02 Dec

DropBox High I/O Issue

DropBox is a miracle, allowing you to share files and keeping all your files up to date without the need to install a file server. This problem happened when I tried to install DropBox on a Windows Vista laptop – an old Dell Inspiration 620. The symptoms reported by the user were slow application response times since DropBox was installed.

I had a look and the machine had a few gigs of disk space but DropBox was stuck reporting ‘Downloading 10 files….’ though it never seemed to do anything.

I had a look at the Resource Monitor application and sure enough DropBox had really high read/writes and the hard disk was running at 100%.… Read the rest