Archive for December, 2008

New Laptop Review Blog Launched

Its a busy week for new WordPress Blogs, but here is another blog laptopreview.me.uk (curiously on a me.uk domain) reviewing the latest laptops and notebooks with video hands on demo’s. At the moment the blog focuses on Acer Laptops including the very popular and compact Acer Aspire One Netbook A150-Ab Netbook which runs a user friendly version of Linux (XP can also be installed, but Linux is likely to be faster.

Whois Privacy for Domain Names Launched

Weycrest have introduced Whois Privacy for Domains Names. This is sometimes known as private domains or private registrations. One of the issues of registering your domain is that your personal data, address, email etc is stored in the Whois database for all to see.

This isn’t normally a problem, however some customers were concerned about identity theft issues. So now we are registering certain domains with privacy turned on by default, and customers can remove this if they wish. It is an ICANN requirement that your WHOIS lookup details are kept up to date. Our service provides you effectively with a private contact and email address and you are still the valid registrant for the domain unlike certain “secure” registration services.

We are currently offer this free, whereas the major registrars charge at least £4.99 + for the service, per year. Whois Privacy is only available on .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .tv domains.

New Online Backup Review Blog

Online Backup Review, is a new review site in WordPress blog form that specialises in the reviewing the latest online backup services such as Depositit, backup software and Portable USB External Hard Drives which can be ordered from Amazon. Might sound a bit boring, but its easy to forget backing up your important work data, music itunes until its too late. Indeed the blog also features a video showing a hard drive in failure.

Number One on Google within Five Days

Registered the co.uk domain for this case study on the 3rd December, then installed the WordPress Blog into some Weycrest hosting space. Although WordPress is Google friendly out of the box, we installed some additional “SEO plugins” and added our customised “ping list.”

I made a few blog posts, which were mainly theme related Youtube video’s with some comments, and added an affiliate widget from Amazon. Then I made a blog post from this blog (which is a “nofollow” link by the way).

By 6th December we were number one for our chosen keyphrase (or keywords). Here is the proof (click the image to enlarge):

Number One on Google

Will my blog stay in that position? Its unlikely unless other sites or bloggers link back to it fairly quickly, or we post some new content. Maybe I could add some killer content, book reviews and create some buzz on the social networking sites?

What is this blog adding to the overall visitor experience that couldn’t be obtained, by the visitor going directly to Amazon? I’m expecting the blog to slip to page two over the coming weeks if its not maintained. Google has picked up on the blogs newness, and will later on evaluate its overall “quality” but there is no doubt Google still appears to like WordPress Blogs.

Actually I think I could have got the domain indexed and ranked sooner. My normal approach would have been to bookmark the blog at del.icio.us, then use their RSS feed to automatically update this remote blog. However del.icio.us’s blog posting feature doesn’t appear to have worked. No matter. All I did was write a manual blog post instead. At the time of writing, the blog has just one page indexed and has yet to be deep crawled by Googlebot.

The more experienced “pro – bloggers” will realise, the number of competing websites for this niche is very small , perhaps less than 300 worldwide and less than 4 in the UK. However it shows what is possible, with a new domain bearing in mind, some people still struggle for months to even get their site indexed by Google, let alone ranked on the first page.

Of course whether there is any traffic for this niche term, sufficient for this blog to pay its registration fee’s and web hosting costs is another matter. Then again part of the fun and expertise required for what is loosely labelled as domaining” “niche” “seo” and “affiliate marketing” is being able to pick low competition “long tail” niches that have sufficient long term traffic earning revenue.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be revealing to our Weycrest hosting customers, how to configure their blogs for maximum results, and giving our recommendations for best plugins and themes.

Paul Lee

Ffmpeg Hosting

FFmpeg Hosting allows you to start and run your own YouTube-like Video Sharing Site. FFmpeg is a software utility that provides a complete solution to recording, converting and streaming audio and video.

It includes the libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled to run under Windows operating systems . If you need video hosting with ffmpeg support you would be better off going to a company that specializes in video and media hosting such as apthost, and because apthost are US based the bandwidth costs are much lower:

Apthost also install the following modules on their servers:

FFmpeg & FFmpeg-php
Libogg & Libvorbis
Flv2tool
LAME MP3 Encoder
Mplayer
Mencoder
GD Library

Apthost PHP Configuration as follows:

safe_mode = off
upload_max_filesize = 200M
post_max_size = 200M
max_execution_time = 6000
session.gc_maxlifetime = 14000
safe_mode = off
Apache mod_rewrite Enabled