Well thanks to this poster (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=750d52d4e1a2a835&hl=en#fid_750d52d4e1a2a83500047ea1dc5797e3) I now can! And I wanted to share this handy little tip with more people.

Simply open up chrome and go to Options, then under the Basics tab click Manage under the Default search section. Click Add to open the Add Search Engine window. Then type in the Name (I’m Feeling Lucky or whatever you like), set a shortcut key in the Keyword field (I use “\“ for convenience) and paste this into the URL field:

{google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s&btnI

And TAH-DAH! From now on, just hit your shortcut key and you’ll be able to search like this:

Note that this cool custom search engine also supports Suggested Results! That’s the bit I was really impressed with, and made me want to share this tip. Now go and enjoy your marginally faster searching!

1. The number one piece of advice anyone can give you is to keep your blog up to date! A stagnant blog which hasn’t been updated since February of last year probably won’t be useful to anyone. An entry every week or two will work wonders for search engines, they can’t seem to get enough of that fresh content!
2. Make it interesting! Will it add value to your site? Will people actually find it interesting or useful? If the answer to either question is no, then don’t waste your time. Instead, think of something which is going to be interesting to your target users.
3. It’s all good and well writing some kick ass blog posts which should generate lots of quality traffic, however what’s the point if your blog isn’t robot friendly? Ensure you have a tidy link structure – main navigation, sub-navigation, content. Simple right? Well don’t complicate things then!
4. Use catagories in your blog. You need to make browsing through articles as simple as possible for the user. So what better than to utilize tags? They only need view what is relevant to them. You can also take advantage of an archieve function to aid those who only wish to view recent posts.
5. Stick to the point. An article which covers various topics is useless for SEO. If its about wireless adapters, talk about wireless adapters, not how bad your ISP is! You can also check that your article’s URL contains the keyword you are attempting to optimise for. For example if we had an article about Cenix being awesome, our URL could be ‘http://cenix.co.uk/how-awesome-are-we/’.

Good luck optimising!

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Being a Blackberry owner I sometimes feel like I’m being ignored by mobile app developers, with the iPhone and Android stealing all the limelight. However, Dropbox announced a limited beta yesterday (first 500 users, later extended to 1,000) and I managed to quickly nab myself a download. A small download and a quick install later and I had it running in practically no time. I was presented with a nice splash screen and prompted to enter my Dropbox account details, after doing so I was fully setup and ready to start using the app.

First Impressions

On the home screen you’re instantly presented with all the files and folder within the root directory of your Dropbox folder. The first thing I noticed is that the interface is really sleek. Like, really sleek. It has a very “iPhone” look and feel, with big icons and well spaced lines for each item; not something you normally see on a Blackberry. Each folder type has it’s own instantly identifiable icon, and each file has a nice icon similar to what I’d expect to see on my desktop computer, and not on a phone.  When you go to open a folder a spinning loading indicator pops up as it loads the directory. On one occasion, for whatever unknown reason, the indicator kept spinning but it didn’t seem to be loading anything (I assume a bad internet connection) but, and this is something I’ve never seen done on any Blackberry app (native or otherwise), I was able to backup out of the loading process. No hanging, no delay, just the ability to instantly cancel loading. Straight away this is a big thumbs up in my book.

Good Points

Here are some interface touches and other features that I really liked:

• The photo viewer works well, and allows you to slide through a photo folder and download each file on the fly
• Ability to upload photos directly from the camera or from files already on the phone
• The .doc and .txt viewers work well (though I have a minor bad point about the .txt viewer that I’ll come to later)
• The downloader dialog is nice and shows file progress

Bad Points

I want to qualify these bad points first by saying that this is a Beta app, it’s free and as far as apps go for Blackberry, this has one of the smoothest User Experiences I’ve ever had. But, nevertheless, here’s what I noticed:

• It will not download files that it can’t open, and there’s no way to make it.
• It doesn’t like PDF files either, it will download these but when it tries to open them it gives an error. Though this could well be a problem with the Blackberry itself, which has other problems with PDF files.
• On 3 tests of the search functionality, I searched for files I knew existed, but once got an error, once got no results and only once got the correct results. It took around 40 seconds to find the files (For reference, I have about 2GB worth of files in my Dropbox)

EDIT (11/08/2010): I updated to OS v5.0.0.656 and was unable to recreate these errors when searching. I can’t say whether the update fixed the problem or not as I only experienced it the first time I used it.

• The .txt viewer acts strangely. Only about 3/4 of the screen real estate is used, and no scrollbar is shown, but regardless of that it is still usable and I can see it becoming very useful.
• Where are the files going? I didn’t set a download location, and there isn’t any functionality to set it, so I have no idea where the files I download save to.

In Summary

This is a great app from Dropbox, and my negative points really are a lot of nitpicking. This is definitely one of the best apps I’ve seen for Blackberry (alot of apps have a reputation for being buggy and poorly maintained) and I’m astounded it works so well on it’s first Beta release. Hopefully Blackberry will start to get more love from app developers one day, but I think more of the phones features need to be made available for developers to play with first. I’m sure I’ll get great value from this app, so many thanks to the Dropbox team!

You may have to wait a bit before you can get your hands on this app if you missed the Beta, but in the meantime, give Dropbox a try if you haven’t already.

Or you could use my referral link and net us both 250MB of extra space for free!

It would be very easy for me to rabble on about all of FreeAgent’s features. If you’re after an in-depth feature walkthrough, then this review makes for good reading. Here are a couple of our favourite bits along with three improvements which probably aren’t listed in other reviews.

Some stuff we liked:

1. One recent addition to the FreeAgent skill set is the ability to add notes to not only a client’s account, but also to each individual project. For us, I can keep track of all correspondence with a client by using this feature, adding even more value to this accounting miracle!
2. The overview page is a great summery of how your business is performing. It gives some brief details regarding finance, latest invoices and quotations and bank account details. There is even flexibility over customising the overview, including drag and dropping widgets into place.

Improvements:

1. However despite these benefits, we have also thought of a few improvements. Firstly email alerts would be very handy, informing selected users whenever an invoice is overdue or we’re 30 days off a tax bill.
2. Refunds on fully paid invoices aren’t currently supported in FreeAgent, which has never posed a problem for me since we’ve been using it (fortunately!), however I guess that it will become a problem at some point in the future.
3. Finally the largest improvement for me would be able to split an invoice in two, a deposit and a final invoice. An even further improvement on this would be to split an invoice into phases, allowing more flexibility over payment.

Why not give it a try yourself, and don’t forget to let us know what you think. Click this referral link for a free 30 day trial and a 10% discount!

Well taken into account our slogan, we want to know what you think. Take a read and vote now!

You can view the poll results here.

Adding your email account in Microsoft Office Outlook (2007):

Gmail

Adding your email account in Google’s Gmail:

Mozilla Thunberbird

Adding your email account in Mozilla Thunderbird:

	$("ul").each(function (index, domEle){
		$("li:last-child").addClass("last");
	});

I’ll explain what this does exactly.

$("ul").each(function (index, domEle){

This picks out each <ul> element in the page.

$("li:last-child").addClass("last");

And here we pick out the last <li> element within each <ul>. We do this by using the powerful jQuery “:last-child” selector. If we were to simply use the “:last” selector, we would only be selecting the final <li> element in the page, rather than in each <ul> element. Once we have everything selected, we simply use “addClass” to apply our class.

Finally, removing the border is as simple as editing the CSS for the “.last” class.

.last { border-bottom: none; }

Hope this helps!

We understand there are users out there, stuck with IE6 for whatever reason. Well just for those of you with no choice, we’ve made a text-only based version available for you, but no fancy styles for you, IE6!

We’re making a stand, fighting the evil that is IE6, and all the horrors it brings with it. No longer will we live in fear of its poor standards support and dreadful security issues! No longer will IE6 force us to be slaves! We will be free, free to browse the web and all the rich media it has to offer!

I beg every last IE6 user to upgrade! Don’t do it for us, do it for yourself! Why should I upgrade from Internet Explorer 6?

Upgrade Now!

Alternatively, why not give one of these browsers a try?