Dieting Diet has just been soft released to the public. We have high hopes for what this Diet and Weight Loss site can become. It currently allows its users to follow a range of their favourite diets and tracks their progress over time.

Each week a user has to weigh in and complete a milestone towards the completion of their diet. Progress is graphed against expected outcomes and shows if the user is on track to meet their target weight. This allows the user to focus on where they currently are in regards to where they should be at the current stage of their diet.

Head over to Dieting Diet now and signup.

Tags: diet, dieting, dieting diet, weight loss

Categories: dietingdiet.com

If you are with 02 (the UK mobile network provider) and need a number urgently … DO NOT CALL 118-118!

I used the 118-118 number the other day. The service is prompt – but that is exactly what you’d expect seeing as they charge your a highly disgusting amount for it.

Conversation goes like this:

118-118: Hi, How can I help you?
Me: Can I have the number for XXXXXXX please?
118-118: Certainly Sir. 1 Second please.
(5 seconds later)
118-118: the number is XXXX XXX XXXX. Do you want me to put you through to that number?
Me: Why yes – that’d be great thanks.
…. call forwarded.

I was then on the phone to the person I initially needed to talk to. I spoke with them for about 11mins.

Today I received my phone bill from 02 :-{

Call duration for 118-118 was tallied at 12 minutes and cost £15.319 (and hence rounded up to £15.32).

118-118 keep the call open on their line when they “put you through”. It is an scam beyond belief.

How many people are lazy enough not to lift the yellow pages or the phone directory when they are at home and instead call 118-118 for the number they need? I’d hazard a guess at 3% of the UK population.

How many people need access to numbers when they are out and about, hence using their mobiles? I’d go a lot higher than the initial number.

Where people have a choice (at home) I’m sure that 118-118 has a low cost. Their largest customer base sits squarely in the mobile arena and it is here that they are truly screwing every last penny out of anyone that dares call their service.

Be warned!

Categories: General

Ever get fed up of starting up Firefox just to get at ScribeFire so that you can unleash your next flood of pointless drivel creative masterpiece that will drive millions of page views to your site?

Well then look no further than here.

This is an excellent step-by-step procedure to set ScribeFire up as a desktop shortcut within Prism. Kudos to the writer. I tried to leave a thank you note on his website but the security on his comment form was way to restrictive …. Who has time to login???

So – get down and give me 20 soldier! I’ve just helped to increase your productivity!

Tags: prism, scribefire, ubuntu

Categories: General

Using a browser to blog feels very restrictive to me – so this may all read as completely irrelevant to you if you do not feel the same way.

Touting myself as a regular blogger would be lies – so I won’t do that – but when I do blog I like the freedom that I get by editing at my leisure offline in a non-browser client.

When I removed Windows Vista from my trusty laptop recently I installed Ubuntu 10.04 and have truly loved it so far. There had to be a down side though – right?

Here is your task:

Tags: blog editor, blogging, ubuntu

Categories: General, Linux

I have been an avid user of Aptana Studio 2 for some time now and have used SQL Explorer within it a lot as well – because lets face it – having an SQL editor within your development environment is extremely productive if you are a web developer.

In order to keep up with the constant motion of life long learning I upgraded Aptana Studio 2 to version 3 Beta.

It’s slick. I like it a lot!

However I did run into an issue where SQL Explorer refused to connect to my remote MySQL server.

The exact error message was:

Could not connect to your database alias; the exact message was:
Cannot connect to Dev/root. Check your URL

This annoyed me for a good long while – even to the point that I was considering rolling back to version 2 of Aptana. It turns out that the reason I could not connect was due to the fact that I did not specify the database name at the end of my connection details.

i.e my connection string was this:
jdbc:mysql://192.168.2.5:3306

But it should have been this:
jdbc:mysql://192.168.2.5:3306/mysql

See the difference? The second string has “/mysql” on the end. In essence “/mysql” could actually be any database contained on the server you are connecting to.

SQL Explorer in Aptana Studio 2 never made the database part of the connection string compulsory. This most probably has more to do with SQL Explorer than Aptana – but the two work in tandem so I cannot rule it out. As I cannot compare version numbers (my old Aptana Studio 2 install has been blown away) – I will never know for sure if this was simply an update to SQL Explorer or some Aptana interference.

It also seems like there is NO ONE out to the interwebs talking about SQL Explorer for Eclipse and Aptana – the reasons for which I cannot explain. I had tried searching for resolutions to this issue before but found very limited references to SQL Explorer.

So, there you have it.

Tags: aptana studio 3, beta, eclipse, sql explorer

Categories: General, Programming

So the landgrab came and went, you got your facebook username – didn’t you?

Most did, others didn’t.

I got mine - which is just my name. For some disgusting reason that I’ll never understand, others didn’t choose their names. Instead they grabbed buzzwords, keywords, trademarks and even other peoples names.

One instance of the stupidity that some people went to was for one user to set their username to “default.aspx”.

Yeah, yeah, I get the joke. Ha ha. Its the default page of a .NET web application. Of course only programmers and technology folks are going to get this – so if you hang around with anyone outside of this industry they are going to look at you funny.

It has been said that some people have grabbed the valuable keywords in order to sell the account later – but most people have actually built up a personal account already and then done set their username. What this means is that whomever purchases the account will then have 210 random friends, a tonne of useless and unrelated notes and updates along with numerous pictures of the previous owner on nights out on the tiles.

Effectively you have a mess. Which devalues the keywords dramatically and hence makes buying the account a non-starter.

For those that are not going to sell their accounts – they just thought it would be cool to set their username to something random like “musicnews” when they seem to exhibit no musical interest at all. On top of that, their privacy settings are set to only show the account to friends.

This makes me frown a lot.

The only reason to set your username to musicnews should be for SEO reasons. The keywords are valuable if your contents are musically inclined.

I’m sure, down the line, a lot of people will abandon their accounts and create new ones with their actual name as their username, so that they’d get:

http://www.facebook.com/theiractualname

The fad will fade, they’ll realise that their username is stupid and jump ship. Since Facebook doesn’t allow you to change your username after you set it, they are effectively forcing these people into creating another account. Maybe this makes their stats look good, but it costs them money to store the extra data – so they are getting bitten for no gain.

This in turn leaves valuable usernames dormant. They could have been put to better use on user pages – which are usually places that would actually warrant the keyword attention.

Take MusicReviewZone.com’s Facebook page, here, as an example:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Music-Review-Zone/93777063419

I wanted to make this pages username :

http://www.facebook.com/musicnews

… as the keyword value passed through to the domain would re-enforce that my site provides music news. Hence – great SEO. Instead, someone called Roberta Ferguson from Cleveland, with her locked down account has the username. Brilliant value.

When the username landgrab became available in April, pages with less than 1000 fans were excluded. Facebook stated at the time that these pages would be able to set their usernames after June 28th. That date has come and gone yet Facebook is still exluding them from setting their usernames.

So what gives?

Tags: facebook, music review zone, SEO

Categories: My Sites, SEO

…. A Wordpress plugin that allowed me to search Google Images for a certain keyword, with image dimensions – if I so desired – and bring me back the results i.e Just the images.

I’d then be able to click on the image I wanted, view it, uploaded it if I wanted and auto magically inserted it into the post that I am writing.

Now you are going to say “Insights” does this. But no. It doesn’t.

Anyone know if one already exists with the functionality I am looking for? Its a real pain having to leave the post editing window to trek off to Google, do the search, upload the file, insert it etc.

Hopefully I wont have to write this myself – but I’m thinking about it.

Tags: google images, plugin, Wordpress

Categories: Wordpress

Reddit and Digg are fairly similar in regards to this post – but I am going to concentrate on Digg.

When Digg started out it was hailed as a service to help bloggers market their articles/posts/thoughts/art etc.The simple math said that if something was good then it would rise to the top of the pile. It would stand out as todays must see/read.

It gave the little guy hope. Hope of finding an audience. Hope of spreading his/her words to an ever growing populous of avid readers.Hope of, dare I say it, significance.

See, the problem with blogging is that we really only do it with the vein hope that someone will give a rats ass about what we say and comment or start a discussion.

In the very early weeks of Digg people would find your voice and respond. They’d trounce your web server and have your hosting company screaming at you because all of the other little websites on your shared host are now out of action as well as your own.

It was a chance to get noticed. The entrepreneurial spirit drenched its pages.

Now, it is a decrepit, dying, corrupt beast gasping for its last breath.

At any one time on Digg’s front page you will find a story from one of the major news corporations. This is not surprising you may state – after all they announce the latest breaking news.

You can also find the same story posted many times with different titles by different users.

Teams of people with multiple accounts all get together to promote their wares. Companies exist to market articles from all sorts of companies e.g News Agencies, and Political leaders with agendas to push (I’m looking at you Obama).

When people are paid to market articles and they use Digg to do it – the whole site is no longer in the hands of the little guy. It’s been taken over. No battle was raged and no one died.The money just walked in and took what it wanted – namely – the front page and every other page that you could be bothered to look at.

The whole site is now so wrapped up by agenda pushers that it no longer holds any value to the small blog writer.

You could almost associate the way that big corporations and political parties have raped Digg and other social networking sites with the way the banks have screwed the financial system. They have no essence, no spirit and they have pushed aside all the little guys to enforce their command on the playground.

In their never ending quest to increase the number on their quarterly profit and loss reports they have stolen everything that made this past boom so great.

Social networking as it is now, is just one big scam to cram as many people into one portal as possible and then spoon feed them adverts – but I am getting off topic.

So why would you buy Digg? Any attempt to weed out the corrupt users will just lead to more ways for them to cover their tracks. If you have got users – they will never go away.

The money you’d have to fork out to buy the company would be completely wasted as the time it would take to break even would be well into Web 6.0. During which time your unique visitors will probably have dropped to like 3. You, your fake account and one other person who just hasn’t caught on yet.

Categories: Uncategorized

IT BRINGS YOU NO TRAFFIC.

Absolutely none.

I’ve had over 11,800 views on my profile on Bloggersbase.com and from looking at Google Analytics it seems that not even one person came from the site to MusicReviewZone.com.

I find it pretty perplexing.

So instead of using it to drive traffic I have now changed strategies and now use it for link building. The crappy part about that is that I have to dump links in at the end of my posts if I want to generate links. The site doesn’t appear to allow outgoing links anywhere else.

My profile doesn’t have a direct link to MusicReviewZone.com anywhere. So who uses this site and why?

Who knows…

Tags: bloggersbase.com, link building, traffic building

Categories: General

So, I have been recently trying to get back into Symfony. I had taken a break from it for a while to concentrate on Music Review Zone.

I bought a domain recently that I’d like to develop a Symfony application for and since my current knowledge base is with Symfony 1.0 – I thought I’d use it. Then I noticed the benefits of Symfony 1.2.4 and couldn’t pass it up.

So I started creating my project in the usual way:

php symfony init-project <name of project>

php symfony init-app front

I then setup my databases.yml file and completed my schema.yml file. I then ran:

php symfony propel:build-all

… and got the following output:

symfony propel:build-all
>> schema    converting "C:/wamp/vhosts/private/config/schema.yml" to XML
>> schema    putting C:/wamp/vhosts/private/config/generated-schema.xml
>> propel    Running "om" phing task
>> file-     C:/wamp/vhosts/private/config/generated-schema.xml
>> file-     C:/wamp/vhosts/private/co...enerated-schema-transformed.xml
>> autoload  reloading autoloading

  Phing was run before and used many custom classes that might conflict with
  your model classes. In case of errors try running "propel:build-forms" and
  "propel:build-filters" alone. This is due to a PHP limitation that cannot be
  fixed in symfony.

>> propel    generating form classes

  Cannot fetch TableMap for undefined table: location.  Make sure you have the  
static MapBuilder registration code after your peer stub class definition.

[?php

/**
 * User form base class.
 *
 * @package    ##PROJECT_NAME##
 * @subpackage form
 * @author     ##AUTHOR_NAME##
 * @version    SVN: $Id: sfPropelFormGeneratedTemplate.php 12815 2008-11-09 
10:43:58Z fabien $
 */
class BaseUserForm extends BaseFormPropel
{
  public function setup()
  {
    $this->setWidgets(array(
      'id'                           => new sfWidgetFormInputHidden(),
      'username'                     => new sfWidgetFormInput(),
      'location_id'                  => new sfWidgetFormPropelChoice(

I am beat as to why this is occurring.

My schema.yml file creates a user and location table, among others. Each user has a location which I state in the YAML as :

user:
    _attributes    { phpName: User }
    id:            ~
    username:      { type: varchar(50), required: true, index: unique }
    location_id:   ~

I also define the location table as:

location:
    _attributes         { phpName: Location }
    id:                 ~
    name:               varchar(50)
    created_at:         ~

So I do not know why ‘symfony propel:build-all ‘ is failing.

When I run each of the commands that makes up the ‘build-all’ option – each succeeds. i.e:

• build-schema
• build-sql
• build-model
• build-filters
• build-forms

So is this a bug or are your fresh eyes noticing something that I am missing?

Tags: symfony, symfony 1.2.4, tablemap

Categories: Programming, symfony