tenpastmidnight blog

The very handy extension Flashblock for Firefox and Mozilla, which replaces Flash content with a button you can press to view the content if you want it, now has a 'whitelist'. This means if you add a site to the whitelist, you will see the Flash on that site automatically rather than having to click the button. This is very useful for Flickr, which uses Flash to display the larger versions of the photos on it.

To whitelist a site, right-click on the area containing Flash and click 'Allow Flash from this site', then when you refresh the page (or go elsewhere on the site) you will see the Flash content. Handy.

I'm fiddling with various search engine toolbars at the moment and Internet Explorer is now looking a little ridiculous:



(And that's with my normal 'links' bar turned off.)

It did cause me a moment of joy to find Alexa ranks Spider Test as the 377,520th most visted website on the net according to people using it's toolbar. Hey, it's not BBC News (29th) and the sample rate is a bit skewed (people who happen to have the Alexa toolbar installed) but it's not down in the 3-millions like my freelance site, and not 'No Data' like the Farm is.

I am doing some more research and have set up some more pages to help out: one, two, three and four.

Please don't link to these from anywhere as it might effect one of the variables I'm trying to keep locked.

I've been very busy recently with various bits of work: setting up automatic job transfers between two of my client's sites to three job portals, finishing an e-commerce shop, some link campaigning and some SEO consultancy today.

A good thing about all the work, apart from it meaning I can afford my rent and food, is I should have some articles to write for my work website, mainly about posting to forms and sending XML using ASP when using an old version of ColdFusion, but still using CF to control it. All I have to do is find some time to actually write them.

I've been tracking a client that researches homelessness in Europe and they've just made it in to the Google Directory having been in DMOZ for a couple of months, and now for the main search term it's found for it's dropped to a result down in the 330s. The technicians at Google have been changing things recently, with lots of sites popping up and down the results, so I have to hope things will calm down and it'll get returned to where it was.

My friend Geoff has been updating his site so you can easily find a guitarist for events or training, so I thought I'd give him a plug.

I've been very busy this week, especially yesterday - most of the day at a client's office, then a 3.5 hour meeting, then another hour meeting, then remainder of the time with my fellow freelancers. All this has been complicated by my toothache, which has been bad enough that I haven't been able to go to my client's today and have registered with a dentist at Seven Dials. They are squeezing me in later today, which is great, even though I'm having to do that privately - but as the pain's now stopping me sleeping and working the money is well worth paying to get it sorted fast.