SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Here’s a quick Outlook tip!   When you open an email with pictures, or view an attachment, the picture is first saved to a temporary folder so that it can be scanned for viruses.

It appears however that this folder can become full – which means that you can no longer view images in emails.   Instead, you’ll just see a red cross where the picture should be.

There’s apparently a limit of 100 on the number of files with the same name, so for example

image001(01).jpg

image001(02).jpg

etc..

The easy fix is to just clear this folder out periodically as it’s not automatically emptied.

The folder can be found here (using Windows XP as an example):

For Outlook 2000 to 2003:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK*.

For Outlook 2007:
C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\

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Tags: Outlook

Good news!  The popular video streaming service Netflix today announced that they’re expanding their video streaming service to Canada this fall.

There are no pricing details yet, however Netflix have said they’ll offer unlimited movie and TV downloads.

Unlike the American service which offers both video streaming and mail delivery of DVDs and Blu-Rays, the Canadian service will offer streaming only.

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Tags: Netflix

Following the recent changes to the BBC news website there has been some talk in the SEO community about the affect this has had.

A tweet from @tomcritchlow of Distilled this morning had me wondering how the transition to the new site was going:

I first noticed that the PR of the new www.bbc.co.uk/news website is currently 0 – though this is understandable as the PR updates are fairly infrequent.   It’s interesting though that a 301 redirect doesn’t transfer the PR value of the original source page?

Next – I thought I’d take a look at the cached page that Google have for the new home page to see how recent it was.   Here’s the surprising result:

Odd?   Are Google not indexing the new home page?   A check of their robots.txt file didn’t show any problems?

Looking at the robots.txt file – I noticed that the news site has it’s on sitemap:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news_sitemap.xml

Looking through the contents of this file – it looks like there are entries for most languages on the site – but oddly I could not see English in the list?

Is this an oversight or are the BBC just relying on in-links and internal linking to ensure that Google indexes the site.

Here’s the (albeit rough) stats from Google on the number of pages of each site in their index:

Quite a difference!   It’ll be interesting to follow this over the next week to see how the figures change.

What was also interesting was the pages shown in the index.   For the old site, the home page and the top category pages are showing top of the list:

However for the new site – only deeper article pages are shown, which matches what I saw earlier with the home page not showing in the Google cache.

We’ll have to keep an eye on the results over the next few days to see how the statistics change.    It’s certainly a brave move on behalf of the BBC to undertake such a widespread restructuring and maybe the results will help others in similar situations?

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Tags: SEO