Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is paying off for me.

I have an unfortunate name. Tim Miller is a pretty common name. So when you do a Google search for me you cant find this Tim Miller, instead you find a whole bunch of other people. This is part of the reason I have promoted my blog as SpyJournal. Its a unique name and its the name I use for most of my social websites and so on. Our business names also of Jethro Management and Jethro Consultants are pretty unique.

  So when I do a Google search for SpyJournal, every single entry on the first page is me. Jethro Management is the same, and Jethro Consultants has the second last one only as not me. 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 results is pretty good. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting found with my company name. By the way I would be interested if readers in other countries could try the same thing and let me know in the comments what you find. Feel free to use other search engines, though Google is of course the main one. I cant remember the time I needed  to try a different one!

The next step for me is to keep working on my keywords, specifically Drupal and Excel and Excel VBA.

I have received numerous jobs recently through from people who found us with Google searches here in Australia. More in the last 6 months than in the rest of our business history so far.

Just when we had nearly finished the last round of security upgrades Drupal releases a new set of upgrades for 5 and 6 sites. Fortunately we have this process down pretty well now so it looks like aManda is going to be busy for a while performing upgrades.

One really cool module we have found for version 5 sites is the Update Status Module. This feature is included in Drupal 6 core, but had ben missing from Drupal 5. Now we can be notified whenever contributed modules are upgraded and go and replace them.

One of the main reason for the security patches is the chance for users of the BLOGAPI feature to upload malicious files. This includes users of Live Writer and other applications that take advantage of this feature. This fortunately is not too much of an issue because site administrators should only be providing this feature to users they trust anyway.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office