Ben Spencer

I'm Ben Spencer, a web designer from Leicestershire in the UK. I am focused on creating clean, usable, standards compliant websites.

I am also a musician, a movie lover, and a football fan.

Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning fifteenth after Collision iceberg resulting serious loss life further particulars later J. Bruce Ismay - White Star Line Managing Director. Message to New York from Carpathia.

The first trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I’m not a huge fan of Wolverine, and I’m not sure whether the character warrants his own movie. However, this trailer has done a half decent job of trying to change my mind.

Setting a geographic target for your website in Google

I have had to produce many reports in the past detailing why certain websites weren’t appearing in the search engine results for Google’s country specific listings. The answer was always related to the geographic location of the hosting server.

Within Google Webmaster Tools, you can now specify a geographic target for your website. If only that feature had come along a little sooner!

Read more about geotargeting.

Removing index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs

By default, ExpressionEngine adds ‘index.php’ into URLs before the name of any template groups. This means that a clean URL like example.com/about becomes example.com/index.php/about. Pretty ugly in my opinion.

My preferred method of removing ‘index.php’ from ExpressionEngine URLs is to use the “exclude” list method as detailed in the ExpressionEngine wiki.