I missed your face at our families table, brother. I wish you well in far away lands, can you hear me across this vast expanse of cyberspace? This is for you. This is all about 2012 and preparing for a good 2013 for all.

RIP Ray Bradbury! Will miss your awesome stories! Thank you particularly for Fahrenheit 451 and the Ray Bradbury Theatre! (‘The Wind’ will always one of my favourites!)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48K) ROM represented as a bitmap (visualisation) - humbling to think the entire memory now fits in a tiny square of your video display!! 4 Days until the 30th Anniversary of this great machine!

Rage Against the Machine is the ONLY music to listen to while codebreaking. WAR WITHIN A BREATH!

Hahahahahaha oh wow! Moron alert! @JonMwords claims:

SEO is about tailoring page titles, URLs, topic tags and body text to the words and phrases people use to search the Web. Google only has to match the keywords in the query to the keywords on the Web using a lexical database. That’s relatively easy, and it allows humans to game the system

Hahaha Protip: Learn what SEO is before writing a column for ReadWriteWeb and bringing both you and the news source into disrepute.  Another one for the album along with other great theologians like Derek Powazek’s “SEO is a scam”! blog post. I love you, sir. You just made my day :)

STOP #SOPA! rogerdavies.com, manchester-seo-blog.co.uk and michaelwharton.co.uk will be offline today in protest

The Internet has chosen tomorrow for a day of blackouts in protest of controversial new SOPA laws designed to combat online piracy. Wikipedia had mulled the idea over, Reddit came out and lead the charge while Wikipedia closely followed with many other notable websites coming along. Even Facebook is rumored to have a media event planned while Google says it will use it’s homepage to inform people of dangers of SOPA.

So if like me, you plan to join the protest, how do you black your website out without hurting your SEO and rankings? Simple, use a 503 Temporarily Unavailable HTTP response code. This will tell search engines that you are aware of the outage and even gives you a chance to indicate an ETA for when you expect to be back up and running again.  Google does usually aim to come back and index you shortly after the time you specify, though results will vary. If you are running Apache, you can achieve this by creating a simple .htaccess file in your web root (or simply modifying the one you have to read something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/sopa.php
RewriteRule ^ /sopa.php [R=301]

So that all incoming requests are rewritten to simply sopa.php. Then in sopa.php I recommend using something like:

<?php

header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable");
header("Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable");
header("Retry-After: 43200");
header("Connection: Close");

?>

Note that Retry-After: is an extra directive (EPOCH time in seconds) that tell search engines when they should come back. 43200 is the number of seconds in 12 hours.

A lot of great templates have been suggest and even templates for Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress and other good CMS systems.

Try including just one unsupported directive in the Apache’s .htaccess file and it is likely to take the entire site offline with: Internal Server Error 500. Yet this is rarely discussed in any SEO blogs when instructing people to setup 301 redirects this way.

The answer?  Simply slap the IfModule statement around your rewrite rules:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.someaddress.co.uk/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.someaddress.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
</ifmodule>

If Apache does not notice mod_rewrite.c module enabled, it will skip over the rules you put in place, making it a completely safe way to setup a 301 redirect from an .htaccess file.

In 99% of situations, you will probably have access to the websites files, and can easily take the lines out, but this is a neat trick if for any reason you are relying on someone else to upload the files.

Just treated my computer to a GeForce GTX 560 Ti Overclock (1Gb GDDR5) video card! Fantastic for gaming.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone and (like me!) absolutely hate iTunes with a passion - but are also frightened you may goose it at some point - leaving it non-bootable, do not fear!  Here is a quick and effective way I found to use Linux to create and export a disk image from your jailbroken iPhone’s filesystem for backup purposes.

• Firstly, ensure that you have SSH installed in your iPhone (see here for how to do this)
• Second, make sure you have SSH installed on your Linux system (most cases the command: `sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client` will do this for you)
• Then, simply SSH into your iPhone using your Linux system and run the following command:
• dd if=/dev/disk0 | ssh -l <username> <your Linux box host address> "dd of=~/myiphoneback.img"

e.g: dd if=/dev/disk0 | ssh -l thefraj 192.168.1.123 "dd of=~/myiphoneback.img"

As an added bonus you can ask dd to just export the master boot record (MBR) of your drive by simply doing:

dd if=/dev/disk0 | ssh -l <username> <linux host> "dd of=~/myiphoneback.img bs=512 count=1

Doing this will export the first 512 bytes of your filesystem - a neat way of just backing up the MBR on your phone.