The web presence of Glasgow storage company Aabsolute in text and pictures with no 3D glasses required.

Before I set about the site it had been hitting machines in a rather poorly coded fashion. The information was there, but with browser issues and design flaws it was not the beauty site of self storage. With the code cleaned up and made Google presentable the site hit the first page.

A site revamp with SEO in mind brought forward this little number. A lot cleaner in both code and layout it boosted through Google with off-site SEO and soon entered the search engines top three. A success as unique visitors had more than tripled and search engines saw it as a hotty for Glasgow self storage orientated key phrases.

Being in the top three was good, but being pushed for number one gives you something to strive for. With no promises made and the SEO run down given Aabsolute was sent on the journey of becoming top dog for its key phrases. Searching storage Glasgow, storage units Glasgow, storage space Glasgow, business storage Glasgow and many more give you the site as Googles top pick. It also comes in second for many other alternative key phrase searches like self storage Glasgow. However being top of both local and national competition for the main phrase Glasgow storage has been achieved and the site flourishes with an ever increasing web presence and monthly unique views. Recently it had a small design revamp and is now landing on peoples browsers with an even better visual appearance which the below screenshot shows.

Pretty much no posts over the last few months as I have been extremely busy. Been doing some large projects for the Boston Consulting Group as well as wrapping up my honours year project and papers. Expect to see a lot more activity now though!

Anyway my return to my blog is hopefully going to reach folks having trouble with their Lenovo X201 Tablet. I ordered one about a month and a half  ago but with delays due to faulty processors and  mother nature it took about four weeks to arrive, damn you volcanoes.

The X201 finally arrived and it was everything I was wanting and better. Photoshop on it is awesome and extremely smooth, boot time brilliant, pretty damn light and the main attraction 12 hours of battery life… if your battery works that is.

My Lenovo battery was playing hard to get. It would charge to about 34% and go no further, if you hibernated it and woke it back up it would charge some more. Battery maintenance options did nothing and Google search brought up nothing except for other cries of help. Updates for both Windows and Lenovo turned up dead ends and even the Lenovo tech team where a bit of a wall with the usual “have you tried turning it off and back on” sort of answers.

Eventually Lenovo sent me a new battery and I thought I would finally be free to run through fields for twelve hours playing minesweeper. No.

This battery charged to 88% out the box and through battery gauge resets eventually to  100%. However five days on and it is back to the 34% of doom.

So here is what I have found. The answer to fixing your X201 battery problems. The latest Lenovo BIOS update. Now the BIOS update isn’t part of the Lenovo laptop manager application so you have to Google it. Here’s the link I used:

http://www.userdrivers.com/Notebook-Tablet-PC/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X201-X201s-X201-Tablet-BIOS-Update-Utility-1-14-1-08-for-Windows-XP-Vista-7/

Downloaded, ran, it updated, restarted and too much enjoyment the Lenovo x201 actually started charging.

Hope this reaches someone else having the same issues .

Been having quite a bit of fun with the honours project recently and driving out the map editor for the multiplayer game itself. The game part is near completion to (code wise) with a round base system (similar to that of worms).  The editor is also rather neat with saving and loading of individual players maps which they own. Currently a small array of simple tiles and objects can be placed as well as start points for each teams minions. The only real thing left to do is some last bug checking and error detection.

The BeakW story:

In the near future both radiation and genetic manipulation experiments have destroyed civilization. Humanity has been wiped out and without supervision particles in man built tubes have collided ripping the earth apart through black holes. Vast pieces of empty land float seamlessly almost tranquilly through space unclaimed. Until now.

Mutated music playing rabbits, non-deteriorating radiation riddled tin cans, almost extinct water drops and anorexic looking aliens wage war on one another.

Select your side and wipe out your opponents. Destroy everyone.

Some Screenshots of the Editor:

Came accross this today http://jqueryui.com/and from first glance it looks rather epic. I’ve implemented the calendar tool into the Glasgow storage quote form and can say it was pretty simple to do.  I get the feeling I’m going to be using a lot more of the UI tools they provide and will probably be buying the book on it over the next week as well. Also now helping to support island state of Niue with my recent purcahse of www.beak.nu which is my new front domain for my web hosting after beakw.com became home for my university honours project.

What a year. I could list a hundred great things of 2009 but it would only get boring after the first three .  So 2010, in four months I will have my BSc honours which really isn’t a long time away in a galaxy far far away.  2010 is also the year I plan to start reading non-web related books again, improve on the spelling, blog more, draw more (get the laptop/tablet fixed) and relax a bit more.

When I write relax more, I really mean do less work related stuff on the net and hopefully get some more hours towards drawing and programming for fun… not that work isn’t fun but unfortunately no one is going to pay me to finish my flash ISO game …

Not sure if I did ever post something I was working on in my spare time but here it is in all its basic glory -

Basic game engine: http://beakable.com/game/013.html - Purple cubes can be clicked and moved around map using keyboard arrows, crates can be pushed and orange triangles are simple blind AI.

Basic game editor: http://beakable.com/game/E002.html – Arrrow keys to move around move map, mouse to lay tiles, white buttons bottom left of map display tiles and so on. Save feature in top left.

Till next time

Having apologised in my last post about lack of updates recently I come back again with my tail between my legs. Coming up for the last couple of weeks in my honours year semester at university now and just in the middle of wrapping up some large projects which is all peachy as I’m hoping I’ll get some time at the Christmas holidays and not need to be stuck to the box. Everything is going great though. Ages ago I had posted about doing SEO for a local Glasgow company and it really is time to blow my trumpet. On my first meeting they were failing to show up anywhere near the first page on Google, not even close. However after roughly six months on they are now 1st^, 2^nd or 3^rd for their main key phrases in organic results. Phrases such as “self storage Glasgow”, “Glasgow storage”, “Storage units Glasgow” and “Storage space Glasgow” as well as many other phrases has seen their average monthly hits tripled from below 200 to over 600.  I’m Pretty chuffed. The Glasgow storage company is http://www.aabsoluteselfstorage.co.uk.