Daniel Dutton

Dear Reader,

Local Search Marketing is the process of getting your business as high up the Local search results as possible. The screenshot below shows an example of Google's local search results for the phrase "plumbers in Coventry":

This variation on search engine optimisation (SEO) has beome very common over the past 18 months or so as the big searh engines have integrated these loal search results into their main (orani) search results.

I've been working with local search business listings for a tear or two now and through tireless experimentation, I've picked up a lot of knowledge and tehniques for getting businesses high in the rankings.

Most of the advice on the Internet is tailored towards an American audience, so I thought I'd share some of my UK-centric knowledge in a new blog. Here's the link:

THE UK LOCAL SEARCH MARKETING HANDBOOK

Every week, I'll be updating it with tips and tricks to help businesses improve their local search rankings and make their business more visible on the Internet.

Until next time,

Daniel

Dear Reader,

I've been using Linux as my Operating System of choice for around ten years. I started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), then moved to Fedora Core which I used for a long, long time. Over the last few years I've been using Ubuntu (which I recommend everyone at least try out) and my new Acer Aspire One laptop (£150 from ASDA) is running a version of Linpus Linux.

I'll save the discussion about why I prefer Linux for another day (it's been done to death elsewhere, anyway).

I'm quite often asked by other website designers how I can design websites without Adobe/Macromedia tools, which prompted me to write this blog post. So today, I'd like to share with you the fantastic Linux software tools that help me to do my job.

Dear Reader,

Around mid-morning today, I flicked over to my Google Mail to check my inbox and was surprised to find the layout was all skewiff.

The left column, which contains all the inbox, sent mail, drafts et al. links filled up half the page, which meant the "message section" could only be displayed on the other 50%. As I have a small screen on my netbook anyway, GMail was quite unusable.

'Just a temporary glitch', I though so, because my inbox was empty, I continued with what I was doing. A little later, I went back to find my GoogleMail was still behaving inappropriately.

I found that if I downgraded by clicking the 'older version' link at the op of the page, Google Mail was fixed, but unfortunately my WiseStamp widget, which I rely on to automatically insert my signature no longer functioned.

I cleared my browser cache, restarted FireFox and restarted my computer all to no avail. What was this mysterious problem that had afflicted my GMail? Why had my left-hand column got so big?

After a little experimentation I discovered that the culprit was "offline files". This is is a Google Labs feature that I'm using so it's still in the testing phase. Basically, it caches my mailbox on my computer so I can access my emails and create drafts when I don't have an Internet connection.

This was confirmed over at Google Apps Support and Google have advised that they are looking into the problem and hope to have it fixed soon.

In the meantime, I have disabled Google Labs features using the url:

http://mail.google.com/a/shoredutton.com/?labs=0