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UK & Australian Wine Shops (Re)Launched

When we spent our year in Australia - until December 2007 - we ended our trip with a gentle enough spell living in the idyllic Adelaide Hills region which, as is only human, we really loved. During that time, we were fortunate to live with and meet some real characters in the wine growing and producing world; to visit some excellent vineyards; and, importantly, to drink some thouroughly excellent wine - just in tasting size quantities of course.

From those little acorns, and several boozy and not so boozy meetings, discussions and debates, a few of us decided upon The Wine Blokes website, at least in principle.

What that site would entail, initially, would be a blog-based platform for industry insiders (such as my friends in australia - and around the world who produce and market wine) to speak about wine - and the industry - from their unique perspective. Where 24 Hour Trading fit in is to provide support with the technology and servers, and to generally make things happen for these blokes. Facilitating their ideas.

This proved to be a rather large chunk for all of us as one thing we sought to provide - which it was agreed is quite necessary - was a comprehensive listing of wines available online in the UK and Australia. No mean feat! This was particularly important for the aussies - even I can see that - as they are a little behind the times when it comes to guys getting up and running with the ball in internet terms, and also due to the fact the country is so damn huge that mail order is really the only way to shift wines that don’t happen to be on your very doorstep!

So, it is without further ado that I announce the arrival, in a much more user friendly format, of the following:

• UK Wine Shop ; and
• Australia Wine Store

Also be sure to lookout for the US one which we, ever suckers for punishment, have also decided to instigate in the not-too-distant future. You can find out a little more about these projects from The Wine Blokes themselves - be sure to bookmark their blog and subscribe to The Wine Blokes RSS Feed if you like to read (or watch videos) about wine.

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L’il Wayne Feat. Kanye West - Lollipop Remix

Ever since I first heard the ordinary version of this song playing on the radio, I knew it was going to be huge. Having heard Lil Wayne ’sing’ it live, its clear that the auto-tune doesn’t just mess about with the sound of his voice a bit, it is the song. Wayne essentially provides the voice sound, and the machine does all the notes. Man and machine in harmony.

Love the baseline. A very well produced turn from Wayne with a somewhat none-event of a feature from the king of featuring Mr Kanye West.

When I found this remix I knew I’d have to put it on here and let the people in their homes and offices, on their computers, listen to it by just pressing a button - so here it is!

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Office Supplies Shopping Site Progress

I’ve been working steadily on the new look for the Shop Online 4 site which will be ready to take us forward for the next 18 months or so, and will incorporate some great design aspects as well as comparison features.

One major aspect we wanted to improve was the ability to view a larger number of products from the search and category pages, as well as an easier Review process to allow for more people to submit their own reviews, as well as making it more obvious that reviews have been left.

If you visit the new office supplies section, please do keep checking back, as we will be changing it heavily over the next several days, though look out for such features as the “Related Posts” boxes on the individual product pages.

In any case, I’ll be sure to let you know when the new look is ready and rolled out across the entire website, at which time you’ll probably already have seen it in action anyway…

Get the sneak preview of the Office Supplies Shop here.

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Hepsi - Ask Sakizi - Music from Turkey

Hepsi are a Turkish R&B pop group that are also quite popular in Kyrgystan. Perfect for a diversion in the afternoon - try to learn the words:

Seni sildim telefon defterimden Read the rest of this entry »

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Do Russians Smash Bottles on New Ships?

I’ve just been watching K19: The Widowmaker and the boat (yes, I know, it was a nuclear submarine therefore boat) wasn’t properly christened with the traditional smashed champagne. I wanted to know, do Russians share the same naval superstitions? Would they smash wine onto a submarine? Comments welcome.

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Holy Spam Surge - Webmasters Beware dfgsdfgfr@r45t !!

We’ve been spammed. Hard. We’re still trying to work out how and why it occurred, and how we can best mitigate the problems it has already thrown up, but our rudimentary investigation has demonstrated one thing which has wider implications for the entire web population: at least 28,000 other websites have been similarly attacked!

This problem is potentially huge (as are most spam attacks alas) so please do share this news around and help yourselves and each other prevent the sorry state of affairs we found ourselves in this morning - here’s the story.

Our Story

Last night, just before I turned off the machines for the end of the day, I noticed that a great number of pages had lost their search ranking. However, this happens fairly often, so I was not too worried, in any case, it was almost past my bedtime, and I’d been looking at computers for far too long, and anyway, the pages I was monitoring were on a relatively new domain, which can often fluctuate a lot in the Google rankings as they find their natural position. Fine then. Will check first thing.

At the back of my mind I expected what happened in the morning. Which was this: almost all of the pages I was checking were completely invisible.

There were a couple of small changes I had made to the footers across several of our networked sites which could well have impacted the search performance, but not, I felt, this markedly, but, in any case, it was the best starting point to set off trying to diagnose and correct any problem which had caused this sudden marked drop in SERPs.

After a time, I came to the homepage for this very site - http://www.24hourtrading.co.uk/ - as soon as I opened up the html file and scrolled to the bottom to check for errors in the footer, I got a sinking feeling. There they were. Clear as day and bold as brass: tens and tens of links containing the spammers words of choice “Viagra” and Cialis” and other “soft pill” related words. All of these links were hidden from ordinary view with CSS. You can see what I found by looking at Google’s cache by clicking here - check out the source code on that page. Go to the bottom. Oh dear. That’s ugly. I’ll upload a copy of the exact text here when the google cache updates.

The last piece of text interested me, however - it was “dfgsdfgfr@r45t“. Strange, I thought, but I’ll tell you about that in a while, firstly, how on earth did that code get implanted in the first place?

How The Spam Was Injected

As yet, I am unsure, however, I note from my log files that it wasn’t FTP’ed in (which was my first suspicion). The injected spam was also limited to the index page (you can, I hope, only imagine how laborious the search for other instances were!). I would assume, since these homepages, not being particularly server intensive, are still on shared hosting, that any security breach occurred somewhere further up the chain (I would expect a root level access).

The page affected was a simple html page - not in php, or a wordpress page - so I believe that whoever did this targeted only pages called index.htm or index.html in order to ‘get at’ the commonly named highest ranked / most visited page of a site. I am also sure that these links didn’t come in by utilising any of our scripts.

So, in short, we’re still at a loss as to how it got in. Passwords have been changed, but we’ll be moving the entire domain elsewhere (and we’ve backed everything up as is!) to prevent a future attack of the same ilk. Unfortunately for our friendly shared hosting reseller, with whom I’ve been dealing since I started this game in my teenage years, this means the end of the line for our relationship, as the last of our sites will soon be gone from his stable. A shame.

The Scale of the Problem

As my introduction suggests, this appears to have affected a large number of sites (hence my assumption that it is either a large scale, or root level access(es) which has caused this) - have a look at this google search to see how many sites are now displaying the spammers viagra links in glorious technicolour. That’s over 28,000 web pages displaying this unique spammer’s string at the last count. Not an insubstantial number of sites which have lost (or are about to lose) their ability to pass on Google PageRank.

Google has clearly penalised our site - not its SERP, but the site’s ability to pass on PageRank to other websites. With our newest websites, this means a large amount of their PR is effectively wiped out in one fell swoop! The older domains we have (though we’ve only been online full time since last year!) are OK as they have had time to achieve more backlinks - however, it would be great if someone like Matt Cutts or similar could help with clarification regarding this (type of) situation: what happens here - will it be noted that this was a spam attack and not just a rudimentary spammy attempt on our part? Will our site be unpenalised? Is unpenalised even a word? And other such questions.

If anyone else has been affected by similar - or the same - feel free to make a comment. It would be great to get to the bottom of what happened here, and how we can avoid it.

In any case, our PageRank and search rankings have been seriously affected - don’t let this happen to you - tell your friends, and watch your files if you’re on shared hosting. Change your passwords regularly and avoid FTP. This sort of thing can and will finish a search engine reliant website! The main thing I want to do is get the word out to all those websites who already have hidden (or not so hidden) spam links injected in their websites. A couple I discovered even had all of their content removed. I, for one, shall be moving this entire domain to our own servers as soon as humanly possible!

Please pass on this warning to all who should or could heed it.

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British Food: Imports, Seasons and Gordon Ramsay

Gordon Ramsay has suggested that Britain should fine restaurants that use out-of-season fruit and vegetables. I’m glad he’s not going to fine me. Only this morning, whilst making the Great English Breakfast, I used a tin of beans. The beans in tins (haricot beans) are grown in the USA. Apparently, there is a very similar “field bean” of English descent but we just don’t bother. Although healthy in themselves, the sauce in which the haricot beans reside is usually saturated with salt and sugar.

I once consumed a home-made version of baked-bean sauce in Egypt and it was horrible. This is what happens when imports are approximated at home. Some would argue, though, that beans have no place on the British breakfast plate at all. My partner is among them. Meat, tomatoes and perhaps a field mushroom (in season of course). Are our old national recipes being bastardized by the availability of exotic new ingredients?

What of our great national drink, tea? And its happy cousin, coffee? We are a nation of importers saddled with the great hangover of empire. We can’t get away from our foreign delicacies because we are literally addicted. My brother recently gave up coffee (he was on about 8 cups of real coffee a day) and got the shakes.

Last week in Tesco’s, I noticed the country labels for the first time when choosing fruit and vegetables. I then attempted to buy only British produce. I came out with a cucumber, some tomatoes, spring onions, lettuce, leek, carrots and potatoes. Not a bad haul but I had to forego the peppers for my stir-fry / curry, the mushrooms from Poland, the mangetout /sweetcorn from Guatemala and the green beans from Kenya.

And yet, a report on the BBC 1xtra news said how excellent Kenyan agricultural exports are for third world development. They pointed to Gordon Brown’s comments about the benefits of trade for alleviating poverty - an argument known as “Trade Not Aid”. Instead of buying useless wooden statues in a Trade Craft shop, we buy green beans out of season, helping Kenyan farmers along the way. It seems a sensible option on the surface, except Gordon Ramsay calls it laziness.

So what should the concerned citizen do? If I buy Kenyan green beans, I am helping those in poverty but creating a massive carbon footprint. I’m also undercutting British agriculture. Another look at this morning’s fry-up: the bacon from the local butcher, the eggs from the local dairy (both who deliver), the hash browns from Tescos and the beans from the USA. Local and global contradict on my plate.

But what of British agriculture? With rising fuel costs, the price of fertilizer also increases. High fertilizer costs mean that, without imports, Britain cannot feed herself. British agriculture cannot produce enough to feed the population of 60 million without fertilizer. If we import all of our food, we will enter into a balance of payments deficit like Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Put simply, we will accelerate the recession by sepnding all of our money overseas.

On the other hand, Tesco is creating jobs to cope with the import sector. A new £50 million import depot at Middlesborough is under way. Councillor George Dunning, leader of Redcar and Cleveland Council, said:

That means we will be much better placed not only to recover quickly from any slowdown, but it may have very little effect on our area at all. The terrific news that Tesco is to create a new import centre here at Teesport, creating more than 800 jobs, will come as a massive boost to morale, not only for PD Ports but the area as a whole.

Jobs lost in British agriculture will be made up for in import management. However, jobs in agriculture are better for people than those in warehousing, logistics and factories. Farms are often owned by those who work there, or else by family or friends. Being employed by a giant corporation like Tesco can be alienating. I know because I’ve worked in a few myself.

If we do import our food and eat out of season, we could always make ourselves feel better with carbon off-sets in developing countries that will further support their economies. And when we have no money left, we can all eat hawthorn leaves which, of course, are currently in season. Check out your local hedgerow for more information.

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Volcano Meets Storm - amazing pictures

A Chilean volcano has erupted at the same time as an electrical storm was passing over head, resulting in some spectacular photos. Authorities thought the volcano was dormant because it had not erupted for hundreds of years.

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Kazakhstan People’s Unity Day - May 1st

As we’ve been showcasing the talents of Kazakhstani Idol, we thought it apt to mention that today is a national holiday for the former Soviet republic. Happy Unity Day Kazakhstan! Read the rest of this entry »

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Kazakhstani Folk Version of Freestyler

This video is absolutely awesome. I have always been convinced that a talented musician can pull off any song and this guy proves that with some sort of lute and a good voice, you can still perform “Freestailo” and make it sound good - without any drums, synthesizers or amps. Gowon, Kazakhstani Idol!:

And he obviously went on to some success with Fut-Fut-Fut-Freestailo and the crowd love him:

I thought this was a version of the Bombfunk MCs until I found the original with some sort of lute-playing ganster rapper - it’s horrendous and the video is even worse. This is the Kazakhstan where the gangsters are real (not just promoting banded merchandise):

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