Sembee

Today we have launched a new web site - statuspages.co.uk. This is a development of an internal site that was built in a hurry after the Paddington exchange flood in March 2010 and is our first all new site launch since exbpa.com was created in December 2009 - all others have been existing content spun out to their own sites.

At the moment it is simply a list of links to the status pages for most of the biggest ISPs in the UK, along with BT, and some other internet based services. Not all ISPs have status pages, so where they cannot be found they are not included.

If you are supporting clients on multiple ISPs then this page could be useful, as it is a single location for the list, which we intend to keep up to date.

The site may be developed over time, but we believe it will be a useful resource in its current format.

Related Links

Statuspages.co.uk home page: http://statuspages.co.uk
ISP Status Pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/isp.asp
Phone Services Status pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/phone.asp
Other Internet Services Status pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/others.asp

Web Sites Web Sites, StatusPages.co.uk

For some time, I have had a web site called kbsearch.info, which was created a few years ago when I first discovered Google Custom Search. It was a result of playing with this new (at the time) service from Google and creating search engines for some IT vendor knowledgebase.
The site was rather basic and I didn't do anything with it.
The site wasn't published, but Google found it, and it has had a trickle of traffic ever since - usually much less than 100 visitors a day.

However at the end of last year I started to split off some of the content from amset.info out to their own sites. This was content that wasn't core Exchange or Outlook related, but was responsible for a significant proportion of the traffic. A page I wrote six years ago as a getting started guide to the Command Prompt received more visits a day than the next five pages put together. It now has its own site at http://dosprompt.info/
With these additional sites, I implemented a common core design across them all. This design needed to be applied to kbsearch.info, and it was then I realised how poor it was and that the site needed some attention.

At around the same time, I was starting to play around with Windows 7 in some more depth, including the accelerators that are built in to Internet Explorer 8. The Google search tool was very useful, but there wasn't one for the UK version of Google. I found one for Canada, so I pulled it apart and modified it for the UK.

I therefore wondered if I could combine this newfound knowledge of IE search Accelerators with my kbsearch site.  The reason for this was that I had created a custom search that was simply a web search engine, so that I could search Google without getting results that were mangled with their tracking information when you copied the result. An example of the URL that is returned is this:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&ved=0CAsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fkbsearch.info%2F&rct=j&q=kbsearch&ei=IW2lS5Voi7LSBP-KpPoJ&usg=AFQjCNFqOtghxR4pAS8Cum8pSB6xyKpRBQ

The custom search is here: http://kbsearch.info/google/default.asp

I found that you could indeed create an IE search accelerator for a Google custom search engine. What this means is that I can take a term and search for it through my own version of Google.

I have written exactly how here:
http://www.amset.info/ie/custom-search-accelerator.asp
And the resulting accelerators are to be found here:
http://kbsearch.info/a/

amset.info, Web Sites amset.info, Web Sites

I am pleased to announce that the domain exbpa.com has been saved for the Exchange community.
This was a domain that Microsoft first used a few years ago to point to their (at the time) recently released Exchange Best Practises Analyser. There are thousands of links to this domain across the internet as well as in books and magazines.

However Microsoft recently decided to allow the domain to lapse and early this morning it was finally deleted.

Fortunately I was able to register it myself through my consultancy company Sembee Ltd and therefore kept it out of the hands of a domain squatter. 

I have uploaded a slightly modified version of the list of Exchange resources that I maintain at Daniel Petri's forum, which as well as the links to the Exchange Best Practises Analyzer, also contains links to other Microsoft tools, blogs etc.

http://exbpa.com/

While it is not the best designed web site in the world, it does the job. Hopefully the Exchange community will find it of some use.

Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, MS Exchange Server, Web Sites, Amset IT Solutions Ltd. / Sembee Ltd., Exchange 2010 Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, MS Exchange Server, Web Sites, Amset IT Solutions Ltd. / Sembee Ltd., Exchange 2010

Last year I was playing around with Google Custom Search, to try and improve the search functionality on amset.info.

While I was experimenting, I built custom search engines for the knowledgebase's of Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Palm, Apple, Adobe and a few others.

Rather than waste the work I had done, I put them in to some rough web code I use for basic web sites, registered a domain name and put it on its own virtual server on the same server that hosts amset.info and this site.
The link initially appeared in one place only, on this site. You will find it in the side bar. I have subsequently added it to my profile on Experts Exchange. It will most likely appear linked to from amset.info when I eventually get round to a design refresh for that site.

It will now appear in a third place, here: http://www.kbsearch.info/

If you look at the site you will see that it isn't the prettiest of code. It was built on some standard asp that I use if I need to throw together something very quickly. I use most of the asp as place holders for a real design to be done at a later date.
I did some basic meta tags, put in the Google Adsense code and left it at that.

Came as a bit of a surprise then to look at the logs for the web site a few weeks later to find that not only has Google indexed it, but it was for a time also at the top of the results (at least on Google UK) for a certain keyword - Symantec KB. It now seems to vary between 1 and 3.

If you believe some of the hype around the Search Engine Optimisation community (SEO) what has happened should not have happened. I should have had lots of links to the site, monitored my keyword density, done the research, crafted my meta tags, used the keywords in the title etc. I also shouldn't have the site name in the title.

I did none of the above. I have probably got lucky with what I did use, but it was just luck. I am not aware of any inbound links (except from here) and the pages are not optimised in any way.

I am not saying that SEO is a waste of time and money, just that it in this scenario it was not required to get the site in to the search engines in a good position.

Web Sites Web Sites