What is Spotify?

Spotify offers you legal and free access to a huge library of music. All you need to do is create an account and download our streaming music player. For more details have a look at our video or introduction page.

Spotify’s dream is to let everyone listen to whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want.

Spotify is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. We hope to launch in more countries in the future.

FAQ

Do I need to pay to use Spotify?

No, the advertising-funded version of Spotify is free of charge, however, for now it requires that you receive an invite to register unless you are in the UK. Visit our invitation page to sign up to the waiting list. Alternatively, you can pay for an ad-free premium subscription to Spotify.

What bandwidth does Spotify need?

We recommend 256 kbit/s. Spotify usually works well on a 3G connection. Plenty of free disk space also helps keep the network requirements down as it enables more caching.

Can I download or buy music in Spotify?

We have links on a large number of albums and tracks that you can click to purchase mp3’s from our download partner. To purchase tracks right click on the track or album (control click on Mac OS) and select “Buy From”. Downloading is currently only available in the UK, Sweden, France and Spain.

How much advertising will I be exposed to?

There should be significantly fewer ads in Spotify than you’d find on commercial radio. We are trying to strike a balance between artists who want to be paid and providing the best possible user experience.

Is paying for Spotify online safe?

Yes, Spotify’s payment partners are PCI-certified, which is the global industry standard ensuring compliance to strict security and data protection standards.

Using Spotify

Why do I have to install Spotify?

By installing Spotify as a stand alone application you get a much better user experience and audio quality compared to web-based sites.

On what platforms can I use Spotify?

Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Windows XP or later. You can also run Spotify in Wine on Linux.

Can I use Spotify from multiple locations?

Yes, you can install Spotify on as many computers as you like. You may be logged in to Spotify from several computers simultaneously, but you can only play music on one computer at a time. The music at your other computers will automatically be paused. If you want to install Spotify on more than one computer simply download the program again and login with your existing username and password, there is no need for an invite token.

Can I share music with my friends?

Yes, you can drag and drop any track, album, artist or playlist to your email or instant messenger which creates a link to your favorites that you can send to your loved ones. They need to have Spotify to listen, though. Read more about sharing and collaborative playlists in our blog.

Why do you have two different link formats?

The spotify: URIs are the real Spotify addresses. The http://open.spotify.com/ URLs are a workaround to give you clickable, blue and underlined links in instant-messenger and email applications that don’t yet recognize the Spotify URI format. When there is a choice (such as when you are creating your own hyperlinks on the web), always use the spotify: addresses. What happens when you click an http://open.spotify.com/ link is that a page is opened in your web browser that redirects you to the real address (the spotify: equivalent). When you have control over the links, that’s a redundant step. And if you’re a software developer, please consider auto-detecting the spotify: URIs in your applications.

Can I make more advanced searches?

Yes, you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop. You can do the same thing with release years for albums by writing year: and the year you want. You can even specify a range, like year:1979-1982. Other searches to play with are artist:, album: and track:. There are some more examples in this blog post.

What happens if I cancel my premium subscription?

If you purchased a Spotify Premium subscription and then decide to cancel, your account will automatically revert to a Spotify Free account after that month’s subscription period expires. You can find out more about Spotify’s paid for services in our Terms & Conditions.

Chalet Petit Bechar Prices 2009/2010

* Only on Chalet Board basis ** Chalet Board (based on 10 people sharing) *** Exclusive use on Premium Board (based on 10 people sharing)

http://drupal.org/node/164506

Simon Lorkin is very pleased to announce that in 2009 he is now celebrating 23 years experience in traditional antique restoration and French polishing.

He is also celebrating his successful relocation to Normandy in Northern France four years ago, after thirteen years succesfully running his own business in Shere in Surrey.

Simon has an excellent reputation for his fine restoration and conservation skills and he always undertakes restoration to the highest of standards. He continues to be passionate about the furniture that he restores, whether it is a small occasional table or a five metre dining-room table. He always prides himself on the attention to detail in both the preparation work and the French polishing.

Restoration can be carried out on all types of period furniture including:

• Dining Room Tables
• Chairs
• Chest of drawers
• Clocks
• Bureaux
• Davenports
• Canterburys
• Classic Car Dashboards
• Linen press and Wardrobes

We’ve been looking for someone to help look after our chamonix chalet when we are away and came across Chez Vous Chamonix. We’re hoping to find a company who can take responsibility for our property and assets and here is what they say:

Chez Vous – Chamonix is specifically designed to look after you and your property.

We are an established and experienced company offering a wide range of services to home owners in the Chamonix area. We aim to provide the highest quality service, offering our clients everything from private concierge to keyholding, cleaning and laundry services to a tailor made package to suit individual needs.

Chez Vous specialises in property management and we customise our services to suit each of our clients individually. We listen to what you need and how you would like your property to be managed. We then discuss the options and ideas together and finish with a solution that is tailored specifically for you and your individual needs.

We understand that your time, family and friends are precious. We are an English and French speaking company with over 12 years experience within the corporate world, ranging from the French Alps to Private Yachts in the Mediterranean, USA and Caribbean. Chez Vous strives to be your personal assistant, ensuring that your stay in Chamonix is enjoyable and relaxing. Our local knowledge and trusted local suppliers will ensure your stay is within the hands of professionals.

You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.

Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.

Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.

I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.

Google Analytics is rapidly becoming the industry standard for measuring website traffic. At this stage we will set up a google analytics profile for the website. This is done either on the client’s own Google account, with us granted access to view the statistics, or if preferred on our own Google account with the client being given access to their statistics.

The analytics code will then be added to the entire website and tracking started. We will also set up conversion goals in the Analytics account so we can also start to measure the effectiveness of converting traffic to our goal actions.

What the hell is a blogroll anyway?

A blogroll is a list of links. Generally blogrolls are part of a wordpress installation. A default installation will have a Blogrolls section.

This is where WordPress site-admins can place link to sites that they want to promote. Sometimes they want to promote their friends and relatives.

And somethimes they have several thousands pages indexed by google which you would do well to link from.

Someone with enough nouse to be using WordPress in this way would probably have experimented with various ways of making money from their website.

This is a good thing. These people have blog which they know the value of.

And know. Without question. That a coupla hunnert is a damn good price for dropping a site-WIDE link to ALL your domains. Innit.

1. Page titles

A vital key to search engine ranking are well written page title tags. The tags must contain a good keyword density for targeted phrases and accurately represent what is to be found on that page. Page titles should be unique for each page.

2. Navigation

There must be clear navigational paths for spiders to follow through the whole site. These paths must use plain, well written HTML as opposed to javascript or flash (which is invisible to spiders). This is achieved with footer navigation link blocks and other similar methods.

3. On page Optimisation

Every page needs to have a good amount of targeted keywords on it. HTML images need to have well written alt tags. HTML formatting needs to be made as clean as possible. And most importantly, the page’s content must be analyzed for correct keyword density and other factors.

4. New content creation

An important factor in good SEO is well written copy, ideally with fresh content being added all the time so that when search engines crawl the website it appears fresh, updated and vibrant. Depending on the existing site content we would consider such additions as blogs, auto-updating news feed content and language translation to increase the website’s visibility. Some of these additions may incur extra costs to the client, so at this stage, we are only recommending these options.

Some changes are going to be needed to any website starting the SEO process. Websites are crawled by search engines on a regular basis once they are included in the engine’s index and there are many basic ways to make a website as attractive as possible.

To do this we have to consider how a website looks to the spider robots used by the search engines and adapt the website to help it as much as possible. There follows a short, but not exhaustive list of the things we will look for and change on a website as part of this step.

Ceros. Being a part of the original development team of the Ceros product has certainly been one of the high points of my career. Even though I’m only loosely involved with it these days, it still gives me a great feeling to see it go from strength to strength.

A recent article on mequoda.com

talks about ceros’s leading position in the market and outlines a vision of the future for digital magazines in general. Here’s an excerpt

How Ceros Media is creating digital editions that “draw upon the best qualities of the Web”.

Digital editions are quickly creeping up on the magazine industry. If you are a magazine publisher and haven’t looked down this avenue, you might have another thing coming. You might think that users prefer paper, but you’d be surprised to know that users now prefer to have both, and you don’t really have a choice unless you’re prepared to be the underdog.

The 2007 BPA-Certified Digital Magazine Reader Survey found that:

* Digital magazine reader satisfaction rates remain high, 88% of readers are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their digital edition, an increase of 3% from 2006.
* Digital magazine readers are highly engaged with the digital edition; 89% read the digital edition the same week and 42% read it immediately or the same day.
* Digital magazine readers are reducing their use of print, making digital magazines critical for reaching these readers. Over 44% of respondents have decreased their use of print in the last twelve months. This is an 11% rise from the 2006 survey in which 33% of respondents had decreased their use of print.

Today we’d like to introduce you to one of the larger digital magazine providers, Ceros Media. They publish the digital editions for clients such as Marie Claire, BBC, and National Magazine Company. To see specific examples, read the interview.

With their platform, all individual pages of each magazine are optimized for search. If you google “miss gobbledegook”, you’ll find that the number one result is page five in Monkey Magazine. According to New Media Age, Monkey Magazine has recorded an increase in its ABCe figures to a new high of 271,667, up 10.7% month on month. It is the third successive month Monkey’s ABCe has climbed.

Something else we’ve noticed about the Ceros platform, in comparison to other digital magazine providers, is that their look is extremely clean and their interface is intuitive. Not only is it search engine optimized, easy to browse and delivered digitally, it is as classy and elegant as the brand it is representing.

We had a chance to talk to Dominic Duffy, co-founder of Ceros Media to ask him about Ceros and the future of digital magazines…..

read more here >>

If you’d like to distinguish between your subdomains, you can create an Advanced filter for your profile with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Advanced
Field A: Hostname
Extract A: (.*)
Field B: Request URI
Extract B: (.*)
Output To: Request URI
Constructor: /$A1$B1

With this filter in place, the previous examples would appear with the subdomain attached:

www.example.com/index.html
help.example.com/more.html

Once a website’s goals are established the next step is to research the current search engine rankings for the chosen phrases and refine our goals to create a final list of phrases to target.

E.g. During this stage, it might be found that the phrase ‘video production’ is highly competitive, with many heavyweight companies with big advertising budgets competing for the traffic. This makes it unlikely for our basic SEO service to be effective for that phrase. The research might also find that the slight misspelling ‘vidieo production’ has a good amount of search traffic which is not nearly as competitive. Targeting this misspelled phrase could yield much better results.

Working together with the client we refine our list of phrases to get the best result from our SEO effort.

We then analyze the existing website to see how well it is suited to achieve those goals. If we are trying to rank a site for a particular phrase, the phrase must be present at the correct density compared to the rest of the content in order to make it attractive to the search engines.

The start of video content to the blog. I have always enjoyed the extra impact a video can have as a blog post, and like the fact that google open up the API to their youtube offering.

Here’s the new Listings Lab YouTube Channel. Blog digest version 1.0

Global Economic slowdown? Good! Why do we we want everything to be so fast anyway? Everyone’s running round as mad as lorries as it is! Slowing everything down a bit can only help. Housing market crash, pension time bombs, recession, credit crunch, blah blah blah. Forget about it. It’s self-perpetuating media hyped bullshit anyway. Focus on what’s important. What are you having for breakfast this morning? Will you enjoy it?

Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This short tutorial will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.

You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.

It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings – be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.

Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.

Free Search Engines.

The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising – you can do it in as little as an hour.

If you have just put up a website, you probably all ready have heard words like: keywords, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, SEO. Adwords, Adsense, SEO have one thing in common – Keywords. How important are keywords? Very Important. Google Adwords

Adwords, be it through Google, Miva, or any pay-per-click search engines, you need keywords. With Adwords, you create a three-line ad – 25 word title, with two 35 word lines of ad copy – then you create your keywords. To get the hits, you have to brainstorm for different keywords, that are different but relevant to your target audience. Sound easy? It’s not. It takes time, patience, constant tweaking, and hoping that the product you are selling is not already saturated — to much competition, makes it a little more difficult for the novice to make a profit.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is an advertising program created by Google, and which is beginning to be explored by other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN – that allows you to put targeted ads on your website. If someone clicks on the ad, you earn a small amount of money. These ads are keyword driven and are relevant to your webpage or website.

Sounds simple? Well, not really. There is more too it than just putting an ad on your website and expecting someone to click on it. What’s involved? Let’s see – color, position, style, to name just a few.

SEO

Search engine optimization – this for me has been a time-consuming process – since I am still learning. SEO is keyword driven – the search engines pull the keywords from your web copy – not, to my surprise, from the meta keywords tag. Granted, I still use the meta keywords tag, but maybe in the near future, I will slowly eliminate the tag from my webpages… The search engines do, however, pull information from Meta Description, Meta Title, and the content of your webpages. Thus, content does reign supreme.

Since content reigns supreme, each page should contain useful content and most importantly, your most relevant keywords that you want to emphasize. Secondly, it is best to try and base your keywords around a central theme. I have found that when the keywords diverts away from the main theme – that sends a red flag to search engines. So, if you want to look at your keywords and the density of the keywords on your webpage or webpages.

To conclude, keywords is one of the main ingredients that leads people to your website, product, service and/or ad. …AND, keywords based around your quality content will help with your positioning on your website.

There’s a technology which has been on the horizon for a while now. Something I’ve been very interested in. location based services. In a nutshell, your mobile phone signal can be triangulated to identify your actual location. This concept can seem slightly disturbing to some. It might have overtones of Orwellian big brother about it, but imagine this….

Emergency Number Service – say you’re in an accident and you call the Emergency services. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to find you and get help to you if they could read your exact location straight from your phone call?

Or in business. With the massive growth in delivery services due to shopping online, wouldn’t it be great to be able to monitor the location of all your delivery drivers and be able to redirect them to your customers more efficiently?

There are so many uses for this, it’s difficult to imagine that it won’t become one of the most important new technologies of the decade.

My dad doesn’t have much luck with computers. He’s always breaking them and loosing all his software and photos etc. He asked me what to do about it, so I did a little research and decided on the PC Magazine editors choice award winning Ibackup. It does everything he needs to back up his home PC, even though it’s really aimed at small businesses.

It’s an Online Backup service which supports open file backups, which is perfect for backing up things like Microsoft outlook and other ‘in use’ data. It’s the best of it’s kind I found, and at only $10 per month for 5GB of backup it’s a great solution for my own small business too.

I have seen some great developments in the credit card industry recently which I would lie to share. Firstly pre-paid credit cards. Often times you can’t use cash anymore, but not everyone can have a credit card. Especially useful for your kids as an emergency measure, these pre-paid credit cards are going to open up a whole new market.

Here are some useful links for you if you’d like to read about the subject further

credit cards – http://www.cardguide.co.uk/
compare credit cards – http://www.cardguide.co.uk/best_buys.html

low interest credit card

Of course, the traditional credit card market is still incredibly strong. It’s an easy way to borrow. It can be expensive in terms of paying back interest, but that’s not how credit cards should really be used. The best thing to do is to use the credit and clear your balance every month.