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While I was writing the previous post recommending Registry Mechanic from PC Tools as a way of fixing laptop boot problems I went to the PC Tools website to check the price.  I was surprised to find that it was £29.95 whereas I had paid $29.95 for my copy.

After some investigation I discovered that PC Tools had determined that I was in Britain from my IP address and was therefore quoting me the price in pounds rather than in dollars.  This would be ok but they don’t convert the dollar price to pounds at any normal exchange rate, they just change the currency code.  At current exchange rates PC Tools are charging British customers twice as much as they charge US customers.

Fortunately there is a way around this.  If you go through a proxy server like proxify then the PC tools website can’t tell from your IP address that you are in Britain and quotes you the US dollar price of $29.95 instead.

I am happy to pay a fair price for software but I see no reason why I should pay twice as much just because I live in the UK.

I have an elderly Dell Inspiron 2500 Laptop running Windows XP, just about every time I apply Windows Updates I get boot problems. The laptop will partially boot but won’t get as far as the Windows logon screen. If I switch it off again and restart it sometimes fixes itself, but sometimes it doesn’t.

The problem seems to be caused by the Windows Update process updating the registry keys. Specifically HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Setup I don’t know if this is the only key affected but it was the most recent one I found.

I have managed to solve this problem by using Registry Mechanic from PC Tools Software to scan the Registry and then fix any errors it finds. You could do the same thing by using Regedit to edit the registry but Registry Mechanic is pretty reliable and seems to do the job for me.

I have now got into the habit of running Registry Mechanic after any Windows Update download. Sometimes I have had to resort to booting Windows in Safe mode to run Registry Mechanic but things have always come right after Registry Mechanic has worked its magic.

At the time of writing (June 2008) Registry Mechanic costs $29.95 and is available for a free trial download. If you are having the same problems as I have then it is worth the money.

There are other products which would do the same job just as well but Registry Mechanic is the one that I found when I initially discovered this problem and it has served me well since (but see the next post to avoid being ripped off by PC Tools).

The Problem

It has always been difficult to track when someone clicks a link on your website which takes them to an external website (a click through or clickthru if you prefer). The problem is that the resulting request is made to the external website and is logged there, it doesn’t get logged on your own website at all.

For the web designer wanting to log clickthrus this is a problem, the traditional answer is to put the code which opens the new site in a file. When the user clicks on a link some code is executed locally (and logged locally) which then makes the call to the external site. This works fine but it makes it quite difficult for search engines to follow the link to the external site, sometimes impossible. If Google can’t follow the link to the external site then you may be giving them visitors but you are not helping their page rank in Google.

This is obviously a problem that many clever people have been thinking about for some time, one of the best solutions I have found is Search Engine Friendly Click Tracking which uses javascript to log any click on a link to a file or database.

The solution

But while checking some details in Google Analytics I found a section on using javascript events to track outbound pageviews. This is essentially the same technique as mentioned above but integrated with Google Analytics rather than standalone. It seems to me that this little feature using the new version of the Google Analytics tracking code is the holy grail of Search Engine Optimisation!

All you need to do is;

1. make sure that you are using the new version of the Google Analytics Tracking code.
2. That the code is inserted in your webpage above any links that you want to track (I put it just after the <body> tag in my test page).
3. Add a javascript event tag to each link you want to track.

The actual tag is quite simple, this is Google’s example;

<a href=”http://www.example.co.uk” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (’/outgoing/example.co.uk’);“>

When somebody clicks on the link Google Analytics will log the click as a call to /outgoing/example.co.uk in your analytics report.

And of course the href code is retained in its natural form so it is easy for search engines to follow the link, you can give the target site the link love it deserves.

I think this is a brilliant development, a big thank you to the wizards at Google for their continued good work!

Bonuses from Google Analytics

Using Goals to monetize outbound links

In Google Analytics you can assign goals to pages which make you money, say the checkout page on your shop. You can do the same thing with your new trackable outbound links, so if you carry advertising on your site you can see exactly how much you are earning. You could assign a value of say 10p to any pageview in the /outgoing/ directory and use Google Analytics to work out your bills.

Tracking calls to images and PDF files

Also, this technique can be applied to any sort of link. I discovered it while looking for a why of tracking views of a PDF file. If you have a file, like a PDF or an image, where you can’t insert the Google Analytics code inside the file then you can do something like;

<a href=”http://www.example.co.uk” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (’/my_document.pdf’);“>

And you can track views of the PDF or image file just like they were a regular web page.

Thank you Google

Thank you to Google for another great tool. Now that I know the answer I have no trouble finding the solution with a search in Google but I hope this article saves someone else some time.

I am working on a website which contains sections which the client wants to be able to update themselves.  Not very difficult stuff, just updating their pricelist, special offers, that sort of thing.  Rather than a full blown CMS (Content Management System) I opted to have the content in HTML files which can be included into the webpage as required.

All quite simple really, but I needed a way for the client to be able to edit the content online, a simple HTML editor would do but it needed to be WYSIWYG as, while the client is quite capable of updating a formatted document they don’t really want to get into HTML markup.  After a bit of research I decided that FCKeditor looked pretty good.

Looking at comments about FCKeditor it seemed that it should be pretty easy to set up and indeed it was.  Installation was easy as was getting a quick sample page working, but could I figure out how to load a file into the editor?  No I couldn’t!  I knew it must be fairly simple but I just couldn’t find any example of how to do it.  Putting a string into FCKeditor using the Value parameter was straightforward but getting an actual file in there just confounded me.

After spending most of a day hunting around the internet I just couldn’t get it working properly.  I think I must just be more stupid than the average FCKeditor developer.  But the next day ( problems often look easier the next day) after a little more searching I managed to figure out how to load a file into FCKeditor.  So I thought I’d put the solution on this blog to save anyone else as silly as me a lot of time.

It is of course quite simple.  The value parameter for FCKeditor must be a string, this is then the starting text in the editor window, the trick is to make your file into a string.

Using PHP I prepared the following test page;

<?php
include_once(”fckeditor/fckeditor.php”) ;
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<title>Amend Pricelist</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action=”sampleposteddata.php” method=”post” target=”_blank”>
<?php

// Read the file into an array
$file_array = file(”pricelist.php”);

// Convert the array into a string
$file_contents = implode(’ ‘,$file_array);

$oFCKeditor = new FCKeditor(’FCKeditor1′) ;
$oFCKeditor->BasePath = ‘/fckeditor/’ ;

// Use the string as the initial value for FCKeditor

$oFCKeditor->Value = $file_contents ;

$oFCKeditor->Width  = ‘700′ ;
$oFCKeditor->Height = ‘750′ ;
$oFCKeditor->Create() ;
?>
<br />
<input type=”submit” value=”Submit”>
</form>
</body>
</html>

And it worked!  I had managed to load a file into FCKeditor.  There may be a better way of doing this, and I would love to hear about it if someone knows better, but it does the job.

I hope this blog saves someone else a bit of headscratching.

Wrong system disk

I recently solved a problem for someone using Windows XP. The computer tried to load Windows but couldn’t find some files and ended up at a DOS prompt.

I watched the messages as the system booted up and noticed that it was booting from CD, checked the CD drive and sure enough there was a disk in there. Normally you would just get a non-system disk error but in this case the disk in question was actually a system disk, for Windows 98. Removing the disk solved the problem.

If you have a boot problem make sure that there are no removable disks in the drives. You can set the boot order on most computers but they often check removable drives for a boot disk before checking the C: drive.

It is amazing how often a fresh pair of eyes can spot the solution to a problem.

Replacing the US K000047870 keyboard on a Toshiba Satellite P205D (running Windows Vista) with a UK K000050540 keyboard.

Finding the right keyboard

I recently bought a laptop for a friend. I bought a Toshiba Satellite P205D-S7436 on eBay from a vendor in the US. I was quite happy with the purchase, it is a good machine and the price wasn’t bad.

But of course being a US model it came with a US keyboard, so I needed to swap it to a UK model. With a regular PC this is a trivial task and there are any number of vendors selling compatible keyboards, but with a laptop it isn’t quite so easy. Even finding the correct model of UK keyboard for a US model laptop was difficult, hence this article, hopefully it will make the process easier for others.

To cut a long story short, I ended up buying a replacement K000050540 keyboard from http://www.topazsupport.co.uk/ their customer service was very good but they are quite expensive. My value laptop wasn’t such good value by the time I had spent an extra £55 on a replacement keyboard.

Changing the keyboard

Preparation

Shut down the laptop, unplug it from the mains and remove the battery pack, we don’t want any nasty shocks.

Make sure you are properly earthed, a wrist strap is a good idea. Any static electricity on you can do serious damage to the laptop.

Get out a small cross head screwdriver (I used a number 1), I also used a headtorch so that I had good light on the working area. A pair of tweezers may also be handy just in case you drop a screw, they are pretty small.

Removing the old keyboard

Open the laptop up and locate the plastic bezel which runs along the top of the keyboard. I was able to get my fingernails under the middle of this and gently lift it out, it unclipped without much trouble. If your bezel is a tighter fit you may need to slide something like guitar pick underneath to lift it.

Once the bezel is removed you will see 4 small screws (black on my laptop) along the top edge of the keyboard, unscrew these and put them somewhere safe.

Now lift the edge of the keyboard closest to the screen and gently pull the keyboard towards the screen, the back edge (the edge closest to you) will slip out from its retaining slots and the whole keyboard assembly will come free. Don’t pull too hard though, it is still attached to the motherboard.

Flip the keyboard over so you can see where the keyboard cable is clipped into a connector on the motherboard. You can unlock the connector by moving the 2 tabs on either side of the connector forwards (towards the screen), on my laptop the tabs are white. This releases the keyboard cable and you can now remove the keyboard fully.

Installing the new keyboard

This is just the reverse of the removal process.

Orientate the new keyboard so it is facing the right way then flip it up so you can see the keyboard cable underneath it. You will need to fold the cable back on itself to line up with the connector on the motherboard.

Slide the cable into the connector and move the 2 locking tabs back into place, the keyboard is now connected.

Slide the back of the keyboard (furthest from the screen) back into place with the retaining tabs fitting into place under the lip of the case.

The tabs at the top of the keyboard (nearest the screen) should now line up nicely with the screw holes. Replace the 4 little screws you removed earlier (you did put them somewhere safe didn’t you ?).

Orientate the plastic bezel so that the sloping edge is away from the screen and clip it back into place, there are tabs at each end so you will need to lift it in the middle a little to fit the tabs into place. Once located correctly it should clip back into place with a satisfying click, you shouldn’t need to force it.

That’s it! You have replaced the keyboard. Now you just need to tell Vista that you have a new keyboard layout.

Changing the keyboard settings in Windows Vista

1. Click on start
2. Control Panel
3. Regional and Language Options
4. Select the Keyboards and Languages tab
5. Here you will be able to add a new keyboard, click on Add to select from an enormous list of possible keyboard options, you want EN English (United Kingdom).
6. Once you have added your new keyboard you can Remove the old (US) one.
   If you don’t remove the old keyboard from the list of installed services you will be able to select which keyboard layout you want to use for Vista. Just remove the US keyboard option, you can always add it again if you decide to change back to the old keyboard.
7. Click on OK to save your changes, you will be returned to the Regional and Language Options page.
8. Click on the Administrative tab
9. Click on the Copy to reserved accounts button.   This will remove the option to select different keyboard types from the Vista welcome screen (before you login to Vista).
10. Click on OK.  That’s it!!