Well today, the 14th March, is Mother’s Day 2010 in the United Kingdom. That’s why there is currently flowers falling from my website via my JR Effects plugin.

I’ve just found that according to a survey completed recenty, mothers believe that the best present to receive on Mother’s Day is a hug! That’s quite surprising, but is good to hear since it saves on some £££

Another interesting point is that according to the same survey, 66% of people believe that Mother’s Day has become over-commercialised. I totally agree with this. It’s the same with Father’s Day, Easter, Christmas and most other events. It’s a shame really, because we aren’t really celebrating the events in a traditional way, we’re just feeding into the big businessmen’s pockets with money.

Mother’s Day falls on different days in most countries too which is a bit strange, but let’s take a look at when they all are:

United States: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Australia: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Belgium: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Brazil: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Canada: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Finland: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Germany: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Greece: Second Sunday in the month of May.
India: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Italy: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Japan: Second Sunday in the month of May.
Turkey: Second Sunday in the month of May.
United Kingdom: Mother’s Day is called Mothering Sunday and falls on the fourth Sunday in Lent.
France: First Sunday in June or last Sunday in May
Much of South America (as well as Mexico), Bahrain, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates: May 10
Mexico: – May 8
Russia: – November 28
Poland: – May 26
Egypt: – March 21
Norway: – February 13
Sweden: Last Sunday in May
Norway: The second Sunday in February
Austria, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Taiwan, Hungary, Portugal, South Africa, Spain: First Sunday in May

Feel free to correct me on some of the dates or let me know dates for countries that I’ve missed off!

And thus ending this rather pointless blog post. Enjoy Mother’s Day for the people in the UK, and treat your mother well

When I first found out about this, I thought it was some sort of joke – But apparently it isn’t. Researchers have found a way to lip-read which could be implemented into mobile phones in the future. What this means is that you could have a phone conversation with someone, as normal, but without making any sound at all!

Let’s take a look at some of the science behind it. Basically, the technology measures small electrical signals which are produced by the muscles during speech. It can then work out what the person was trying to say, even if it couldn’t be heard through a normal phone conversation, and then produce a synthesised version of it. This new technology was announced in a German electronics fair earlier on this week, Cebit.

One of the main people behind it, Professor Tanja Shultz, said that the inspiration behind this was that she was fed up with people chatting on their mobile phones on the trains, which I suppose is a good point. Most people will have come across this at some point in time.

Of course this is only in the testing stage so far and isn’t ready for the mass market. Currently, to use this technology, nine electrodes need to stuck to the user’s face. Not the nicest thing to do, really. But Processor Tanja Shultz did say that in future it could be implented into mobile phones without needing these electrodes.

Other ideas that were mentioned was that a person who had lost their voice could use it to talk to people or this technology could even provide instant language translation, where a user first lip-talks into the phone, the message is translated and then played back to the other person. In the future, this could be built further and further to something truly amazing. We just have to wait to see what happens with it.

Samsung seem to be trying their best to build the best technology in the phone market that consumers want to buy. They’ve been trying various different platforms on their phones including Windows Mobile, Symbian and Vodafone 360. This time, on their new phone the Samsung Galaxy Portal, they’re using Google Android as the platform. Let’s look into this phone a bit more.

The phone allows the use of a MicroSD card to maximise the storage capacity – Which is a good job actually because the phone onlt has a mere 180MB of internal storage. Compared to most smartphones on the market today, this is really low. Phones such as the iPhone, leading the market, have an 8GB storage allowance.

The screen size isn’t too bad, though. With a display of 3.2 inch, it doesn’t look too bad except for the fact that Samsung have downgraded the quality a little – They’ve moved to TFT technology rather than OLED which they’ve used in the past. This means the colours don’t show as nicely and the screen is more difficult to see in the sunlight. This is just one of the main ways Samsung have managed to cut the costs down on their Galaxy Portal phone.

The phone also has a 3.2 megapixel camera. Again, Samsung’s cost-cutting measures can definitely be seen – Although the quality of the images aren’t too bad, the quality of them just isn’t the same as we’ve seen in the past from other Samsung phones. Photos do look quite grainy in places and not as vibrant as you would expect.

Samsung have however not downgraded everything from previous phones. In the Samsung Galaxy phone, a processor running at 528MHz was used which meant that sometimes the phone could be quite slow. In the Samsung Galaxy Portal, though, they’ve upgraded this to an 800MHz, making the phone much more usable and quicker.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a decent, usable phone running Google Android, you may want to try out the Samsung Galaxy Portal. Due to certain features being downgraded slightly, I believe you can get this phone for just £20 a month on a contract, which really isn’t bad at all. It all depends on how important a good quality camera, a decent display and a big storage capacity is when you’re using your mobile phone.

One question that I see being asked over and over again is “Why won’t my website get indexed?”. Some users make websites and, say, two weeks later, they’re still waiting for their website to be indexed by the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. I thought I’d make this post just to clear things up and show some very basic methods of getting your website indexed quickly.

The first step is to generate a sitemap for your website. Most webmasters already know about this, but to do so, you should use a sitemap generator website, such as xml-sitemaps.com. Once an XML sitemap has been generated, you simply upload this file to your web hosting account in the public_html folder (Most of the time). Then you need to let Google know about it. For this, you have to add your website into Google Webmaster Tools and then verify it. This is a really easy step to do which I’m sure doesn’t need explaining. Once you’ve submitted your sitemap, you can leave Google to do the rest.

The next step is to submit your website to Digg.com. Digg gets crawled really, really quickly so by submitting to it, you should find that your website also gets found really quickly. It’s very simple to do – Create a Digg account and then submit your website’s homepage through it. Within several hours, Google should find you. For now, let’s move onto even more steps which will help you get indexed quickly.

Another way you can get indexed is by simply visiting certain websites. When you visit the websites, a page will be generated which Google will crawl and index. This does help. Here is a list you can use:

http://whois.domaintools.com/[URL]

http://whoisx.co.uk/[URL]

Simply replace [URL] with your website’s domain name and then visit each link. This can take a bit of time but is certainly worth doing.

The final step of getting indexed quickly is to make a few comments on DoFollow, High-PageRank blog posts. You could do this on my blog, for example. These links will not only help you get indexed quicker, but will also benefit you even more in future because it should improve your rankings too. Make sure your comments are relevant though, spamming blogs will get you nowhere when you’re doing this.

In conclusion, if you want to get indexed, the tips in this blog post will definitely help you to achieve it very quickly.

Hi Guys,

I just thought I’d make a post saying I thank you all for commenting on the blog. Most of the comments I get on my blog seem to be comments regarding my plugins – Whether it’s regarding a bug or a feature request.

I seem to be getting quite a large amount of these comments lately so it’s quite difficult to keep up by responding to everyone. I am still going to try and respond to all of the comments, but it may take a while to get through them. All comments that have been submitted will be looked at, I’m starting to get through them now.

Over the next few days to the next week, I will be re-reading all feature request comments made on my blog and will be trying to implement as many of them as possible into my plugins and release a new major version of as many of my plugins as possible. If you have a new feature idea, it’s probably best if you make the request quite soon.

Regarding the feedback form in my plugins, again, thank you for using it. I have read all of them, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to respond to quite a lot of them. This is because of the scale I’m actually receiving them (Over 20 messages a day most of the time) which can make it pretty difficult. It would make things much easier if the feedback form was used properly though because I do receive a significant amount of junk messages (For example, advertising a service or messages that aren’t even in English). I’m not sure how clear I need to make it that I can’t understand feedback messages sent to me in non-English language. These will unfortunately have to be ignored since I don’t know what it actually says.

Thank you for visiting my website, I’ll do my best to fix all of the bugs mentioned and add as many new features to my plugins as possible.