A Time of Magic

Many people just start a website and really don’t do anything much to promote it afterwards then wonder why nobody can find it.

The first thing to start with is directory submission which is getting cheaper by the day with a number of free options available too. This is one area where price and return have very little relationship between them basically because you can submit to lots of free directories easily and those directories can improve their own ranking over time. Thus there’s usually little point in paying lots of cash for “quality” directories.

Worth doing and you can get multiple submissions done for you at next to no cost ($30 for 1000+ directories is easily doable).

My cousin has what seems a pretty archaic computer that he uses for everything but the problem is that it’s been getting extremely slow and has a rising number of problems culminating in a total cessation of Internet access.

That list of problems meant that there was no easy fix, particularly as over the years he’s lost all the software CDs and licences so it’s not possible to simply reinstall everything. Fortunately there’s another solution…. Ubuntu.

To avoid data loss, step one is always to take a backup of as much as possible. I say “as much as possible” rather than “everything” because it’s rarely possible to backup every file on a Windows system and on an old Windows system there are generally quite a lot of files that don’t get backed up. Next up is to make some space for Ubuntu which means defragmenting the drive in Windows. Ideally the defragmenting would be done outside of Windows but with an old computer that’s not always possible (anyone got a floppy disk to do this?). In practice, it’s better to boot up in Ubuntu and do the backup from there as that let’s you get the most complete backup. The defrag can take ages on an old computer and there’s the problem that Microsoft’s defragmenter doesn’t always shift all the files down so you won’t have as much spare space as you expect in most instances; run it a couple of times and it usually gets a little better.

Installing Ubuntu at this point is a breeze. It’ll let you take the maximum size of partition and will copy over all the files, favourites, etc. for you so you’re right at home when you’ve finished the install. Well, except that everything runs a whole lot faster.

In times gone by you’d be thrown into the world of commercial printers offices and all kinds of complicated choices as to how to print your stuff.

These days, it’s a lot simpler and there are lots of online printers who’ll handle things like postcard printing for you. Generally speaking it is things like postcards that stymie home printers as they just can’t handle card thick enough for postcards. Photos are generally fine these days (though expensive on home printers) but if you’d like a really large enlargement or something on canvas then you’ll generally need to do this via an online outfit as few home printers can handle odd papers or really large ones.

And none of this is anything like as expensive as it used to be. A high quality poster sized print is under £20 these days.