I’ve just sold my signature link to Chris who runs Big Web Links Directory and after I’d had a look at the site I decided it might be an interesting resource to those who read my blog.

 Some of the keypoints include;

• - All links are permanent
• - The site is being very heavily promoted to deliver both traffic and link value for listed web sites
• - Category options are affordable and excellent spots are available.
• - For those interested, the top 10 bid listings are shown on the homepage and the top 20 are shown on the top links page. These are very prime positions.
• - All listings include a details page with an additional link back to the submitted site.
• - All links are 100% search engine friendly.

This definitely looks like it could be another successful directory along with Site Sift, Aviva and the Alive directories. Well worthwhile getting a link while they are still at a good price!

Big Web Links Directory is a search engine friendly web directory that offers a unique approach for directory listings. Instead of sorting listings by popularity, Page Rank, or alphabetically, the listings are sorted by listing bid amount. This allows webmasters to easily control the position of listings in the directory. For example, if a webmaster wants a listing to be on a category’s first page, the dollar amount can be adjusted to the amount needed to achieve this goal. Listing contribution increases take immediate effect. As an additional benefit, the top 10 listings are shown on the homepage, while the top 20 listings are shown on the top links page. A listing details page dedicated for each listing is also provided, which makes a total of 4 links possible in the directory.

For those living in the UK, many of you will have noticed that a new £20 note is being released shortly and the man to figure on the note is none other than the brilliant economist Adam Smith.

Born in my hometown of Kirkcaldy in 1723, Adam Smith built up a reputation in the areas of philosophy and the political economy, before writing a volume of publications, at the age of 53, on ‘Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ which basically argued in favour of free trade as many governments were trying to regulate commerce and trade.

According to some reports, only 25% of the UK population have heard of Professor Smith and a poll was held which concluded that approximately 50% of the population had voted that Winston Churchill was a more favourable candidate for the new £20 note.

I however, a Kirkcaldy man, am in favour of the decision made as Adam Smith is one of the few claims to fame for my hometown.

Other claims to fame for Kirkcaldy include;

• The longest traveling street fair/market in Europe
• Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer is the MP for this town
• Going back into the last 2 centuries Kirkcaldy was famous for its linoleum manufacturing

After the 1-0 defeat to Manchester United where the goal scored by John O’Shea was scored in the last minute of the game, Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez was quoted as saying

“I would have trouble explaining how we lost that in Spanish; in English I find it almost impossible.”

I found this story pretty interesting yesterday and until I worked out the figures I thought it was just another big money deal for another football player.

So Beckham is now 34 and where most players are retiring at this age and looking forward to possible coaching positions or for the odd player a managerial position of a lower division club Beckham has just signed a 5 year deal to play for LA Galaxy in America.

To put this in perspective, Beckham is going from probably the most famous football club in history Real Madrid to a club who’s country ranks football (or soccer) as it’s 5th or 6th most popular sport.

It was reported that Zinedine Zidane was getting around $400,000 - $500,000 a week at Real Madrid which was estimated to be around $200,000 more than any other footballers pay cheque.

Now, Beckham who is at the end of his career is netting more than $1 Million a week for LA Galaxy for the next 5 years.

Is there any limit to how many times Beckham can beat his own record for income? 

I would just like to take this opportunity to wish yfs happy birthday today.

He hasn’t been posting much on forums recently so please feel free to wish him happy birthday here and perhaps we’ll lure him out to at least leave a post on a blog!

Marketing my own business website is something I’ve never really spent a lot of time with but since I wrote a blog post a few months back about nuisance phone calls I’ve been monitoring the stats and watching the number of hits for phone numbers escalate as we near Christmas. It wasn’t until this morning that I noticed I had received another 40 extra hits for 08713105191 that I realised there must be millions of people out there getting nuisance calls from this number over the Christmas period.

Perhaps I just need to start targetting some keywords for the services which we offer.

After 4 years of coding commercially, recently I had a look at the services Weirfire offer now and compared them with what we knew when the business first began. The services we now offer range from complex ecommerce content management systems to flashy AJAX tabs and again to SEO and internet marketing services.

 So how did it all happen?

Around 7 years ago I started a Computer Science degree at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland where I learned languages Java, C++, C, Prolog, Perl scripting, shell scripts, XML, UML, JSP among strategies for problems such as sorting lists and going back to Alan Turings notion of what is computable.

During my third year at university I had a distraction from Northern Ireland in the form of my now wife Grace but managed to get through the year and passed everything. Instead of going back to university for my 4th year I took a year out and went to live in Northern Ireland to work for a year.

The job market was very tight in Northern Ireland at the time I moved over and even with a degree there were no employers keen to take me on. The main problem was that I had no commercial experience in any of the languages which these companies were looking for candidates which had the necessary skills. I decided to work voluntary for 4 months in an IT support position in a training college for the disabled. It was this that then led me onto a 4 month contract with Securitas as a field engineer rolling out PC’s to Royal Mail staff within the entire country of Northern Ireland in a huge £40,000 mercedes transit van. The biggest thing I’d ever driven had been a Kia Shuma 

While starting the voluntary work I also decided at that point that I was going to have to make my own experience if I was going to get one of these jobs so I started teaching myself web tecnologies and the first tutorials I did were from www.w3schools.com where I learned HTML, CSS, MySQL, PHP, XHTML, Javascript, VBasic, ASP among other bits and bobs. I then moved onto www.php.net where I learned the bulk of my PHP knowledge.

When the field engineer contract ended I decided to start my own web design company and was only really looking to build web pages in HTML, CSS with a little bit of PHP for contact forms.

Joining www.digitalpoint.com/forums/ was probably the biggest factor in our services growing wings as this is the place where I drastically expanded my knowledge in PHP and learned in depth information on the search engines and how to market your websites. I think I remember asking “how do I get my website onto Google?” and proceeding to go to the Google page where you can submit a website to their index.

Towards the end of 2004 we got our first ecommerce client by which I built an entire ecommerce system custom made. This no longer exists as I moved over to oscommerce at a later date but this project was certainly a huge learning curve particularly with the HSBC ePayments CPI which has over 1000 posts in problems on the oscommerce forums.

Projects such as www.reggaetonline.net and www.hodgedup.com were other noticeable projects by which there were steep learning curves and in particular Reggaet Online we had our first real taste of project management with 4 other coders working for us for around 2 weeks to meet a deadline.

We can virtually offer any web service there is now including graphic design, web development and marketing.

I’ve written this post for those post graduates or people just out of school who are wondering how they are ever going to get into programming or web design. Go make your own experience.

 

If you own either a phone or a computer, the chances are you have heard of VoIP. I have personally become quite a fan of this new technology; not for geeky reasons, but simply because it has saved me a great deal of money.
 

VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is a new way of making phone calls. Rather than using the traditional telephone network. The great advantage is that all VoIP to VoIP calls are completely free, and VoIP to standard calls are generally considerably cheaper than their traditional alternatives.
 

If you are interested in using VoIP, or are just a little confused as to what it is, then you could do much worse than visit a website called VoIP Sol. This great site is packed full of articles covering every VoIP-related topic. It is well-written and informative, and best of all it is independent - so you know you are getting a fair view of the technology.
 

VoIP Sol looks at aspects of this relatively new advent from a practical and a technological point of view, catering for just about every level of knowledge. If you are new to VoIP, I can heartily recommend reading their article entitled ‘How Does VoIP work?’
 

VoIP Sol is run by Andy Boyd, and can be found at www.voip-sol.com.
 

 

I still see so many people getting confused between the historic term copyrighting and the more recent commonly used term copywriting so I thought I would take it upon myself to explain what the difference is for those that are still learning the terms.

Copyrighting: Claiming non-perpetual exclusive rights to use a certain creative production.  

Copywriting: Writing “copy”, writing any text usually for advertising or promotion of an idea, company or product.If I’ve not got this right or write then someone please tell me.

Consequently we offer copywriting services if anyone’s interested.