I have found another excellent and very handy, especially if you are involved in a web based application that needs to locate the distance between two postcodes. It contains all of the major postcode areas, as well as some co-ordinates that zero in off the coast in Cornwall.

My hat goes off to the guys and girls at easypeasy.com for providing this excellent postcode database, which has just potentially saved at least one of my clients over £75,000!

It is available to download now at http://uat.cc/3f09d so make sure that you don’t miss out

To do this you will need to source the following components;

4x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Hard Drives designed for SATA II

a 4 drive NAS enclosure with dual network ports for better connectivity.

For this example I have sourced all of these products from eBuyer.com!

The hard drives are available at

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/183971

The NAS enclosure is available at

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132657

This comes to a total of £528.72 plus delivery at £11.50

Putting these hard drives into the NAS enclosure is a fairly simple process, with effectively being slot and go casings, which makes the whole process a lot easier.

Once you’ve put everything together, following the included instructions I was able to get everything setup in a matter of minutes, using the web based interface.

In order to get the maximum out of your drives you should use a RAID 0 configuration, however I normally use a RAID 1 configuration which only gives me 4TB of space, but does provide a high level of redundancy should one of my drives ever fail! It is something that I would always recommend you do. This NAS enclosure also supports RAID 5, which would give you 2TB of usable space, but a lot more redundancy protecting more mission critical information.

So there you have it….for under £600, you can build a new 8TB NAS and have it up and running within as little as an hour.

Many operating systems, including Ubuntu, CentOS and OpenSuSE offer torrent versions of their DVD distributions. These enable them to lower their bandwidth costs by allowing users to help with the distribution of the files that make up these operating systems!

(http://mirror.centos.org/, http://software.opensuse.com/, and http://www.ubuntu.com/)

Download out of copyright films via http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com

This website provides you with access to out of copyright content, such as films in loads of different formats. There isn’t a central repository through, so it is best to stick to recently added content.

Download Bootleg Friendly music via http://bt.etree.org/

This website hosts live recordings of bootleg-friendly artists in the FLAC format, which is lossless, and excellent for those who want to listen to the best!

Download legitimate torrents via http://www.legittorrents.info/

This website hosts a whole range of different freely available torrents for people to download and use.

TorrentFreak is well known for its up to date coverage of the BitTorrent scene, but the site also has its own tracker and regularly features legal downloads like the official BitTorrent release of the movie The Corporation.  TorrentFreak is available at http://www.torrentfreak.com/

And whilst the doctor’s don’t want me to actively try to lose weight because it might interfere with my tablets, I still have been finding myself taking steps to try and lose weight the natural way.

I currently weigh in at 137.4KG (or 21.6 St for those that prefer the old imperial measurements) and have already started to see a difference from being over 23st at Christmas.

I tried losing weight by eating less, got down to one meal a day, and actually found I was putting weight on rather than taking weight off, physical exercise is rather limited for me, but it is something that I try and do as much as I can. After realising that I had started to eat more to go back to normal, I found that two meals a day, and drinking loads of water has helps tremendously when trying to lose weight.

To think that 12 months ago, I weighed just 18st, I have a lot to lose, but I am sure that within no time at all I will have managed to do it, and that I will have sorted out the associated problems.

I am hoping that by the summer I will be relatively thinner at 19st, and by Christmas this year to be back within “normal weight”. I don’t doubt that it will be challenge, but I don’t think it’s unachievable. Considering the amount of weight to come off, the first few weeks should see a significant weight loss, followed by a slower reduction in weight loss. As long as I am able to keep to what I have said, I will be back down to a 36” waist by Christmas!

Weight is something that most people feel very aware of at some point during their lives, and in the case of Gay men, it is known to have a large and profound effect.

With weight loss being one of the most spoken about topics on television and radio at the moment, it is important that you do not try and lose weight because you feel you should. You should be losing the weight because you have a genuine reason for doing so. If you have put on a few pounds over the winter and want to lose it, then go for it, but if you’ve not changed weight in a few years, then the chances are that you don’t need to.

I’m not a medical professional; you should always seek their advice before starting a diet, or major change in your calorific intake.

However with the cost of IT equipment falling, I am finding that more and more commercial organisations are throwing their computers away to go to landfill or to other commercial entities rather than doing their bit for the charitable sector.

In Brighton this seems to be particularly awful, especially considering the amount of charities, and the amount of people that genuinely need help within the area. Given that the businesses and individuals in Brighton are generally wealthier, I doubt it is something that comes into most minds on a daily basis. However without the support of the people of Brighton, these charities will suffer, and in many cases they already are.

I may only be interested in helping them out when it comes to IT resources, but even so, if everyone did just 2 hours a month, then Brighton would have enough volunteers within the working age community to man every charity up and down Brighton twice over.

Volunteering needn’t be something that you do at their offices either, maybe you go shopping once a week, and wouldn’t mind picking up some groceries for other people. There’s a load of charities in Brighton that would love someone to help with that.

Maybe you go to the post office every day in your normal job. Would it be so much more hassle for you to pop into your local charities office and ask them if they’ve got any post to be sent out? It’d take you an extra 5 minutes in front of the cashier at the post office, and will free up the charity to concentrate on things that it really needs to do, like helping people!

If you do a car-boot sale, why not agree in advance to donate some of the money you make from it to a charity? You could put signs up if you ask the charity, and it will make you feel really good. Most charities will have items that can go to the car boot sale as well, so your table will look even fuller!

Just by doing something as small as this, you can have a massive help on charities and the help that they are able to provide to the rest of the community. If you are not in a position to make a cash donation, then little things like I’ve mentioned above can make a huge difference to the charitable organisation, and can make you feel really good while you’re doing it.

Why not give it a go today? There are loads of charities out there in Brighton and Hove looking for volunteers!

Well there are a few solutions to this problem, but my favourite is a solution that will set you back around £70 a year, and if shared with a few of your friends will allow you to resolve all of your email problems easily.

It is unfortunate that my partner and I appear to live in the only building in Brighton that is not equipped to deal with Virgin Media connections. Whilst this is a shame, it has left us in a bit of a pickle. We can only get an ADSL connection to the Internet, and whilst the majority of the network is behind several different routers (there’s three between this PC and the Internet alone!) it is still not particularly good practice to expose your home network to the Internet.

The other problem we have is that the broadband speeds are particularly low for ADSL connections down here in Brighton. We are around 4MB here, which whilst they will seem high to some of you, both my partner and I are used to the speed provided by the 50MB package from Virgin Media (http://www.virginmedia.com).

In order to resolve the problem of getting emails to and from the server (aptly named Marge, after Marge Simpson from the classic cartoon “The Simpsons”!) we made a decision to setup a small low-cost, very low end VPS server with Server 2003 running to handle all of our domain names email flow. This has graciously been provided by the guys at ServerDeals (http://www.serverdeals.org) to ensure that our emails are held if they cannot be sent directly onto Marge. ServerDeals charge $101 dollars per annum for their basic Windows VPS, which is more than sufficient for what we needed.

Setting it up is a breeze. Using the SMTP server part of IIS, you are able to add your domains and setup everything that you need with a minimum of fuss, and have incoming and outgoing emails working in a flash. A free download is then installed to perform virus scanning on everything in and out, which ensures that we are protected and are providing protection to the people that we are emailing.

From the server going live, to being able to send and receive emails, took less than 20 minutes, and now all I’ve got to do is wait for the domain name that will be mapped to the server to propagate across the Internet and we’ll be set for another year!

I will be publishing some of the recipes that we recreate over the next few weeks. I will not necessarily be publishing them here, but that doesn’t mean you will miss out! Make sure you are following me via my Triond account (http://www.triond.com/users/Christopher+East) to make sure that you don’t miss my latest blog articles. I recently published a particularly helpful article on SQL statements and how they are formed. It is available online now (http://computersight.com/software/an-introduction-to-sql-statements/) and is something that if you are new to SQL I would recommend you read.
I have new articles published almost every week, and there is guaranteed to be something for you!
If you are interested in reading, then why not sign up today. They publish only unique content, use this link to sign up to Triond today (http://www.triond.com/rw/202075), the link is a referral link, and it will help both of us out! For more information on how, see here (http://www.triond.com/info/how-it-works)
My partner and I are also intending to watch Social Network this evening, as he was brought it for his Birthday. I shall post a review for it tomorrow, and I might even use IMDB to post another review for the world to see.

I also decided to take up an old habit of mine recently, I started cross stitching again, and this is something that I haven’t done since I was around 12, but I seem to have gone back into it very easily. Having decided that this will be a long term thing, I have invested in a sewing box, and have started on this year’s Christmas presents. I have a few to do, and they do take some time to complete, but I do find them very relaxing, so I am glad I have decided to pick it up again.
I am also considering a small home business selling my cross stitching once it is good enough, however we will have to see, as I am not convinced it will be good enough at the moment to make any money, let alone cover the costs of what it takes to produce one piece.

So for now that is all that is happening. I am sure that I will be updating my blog over at http://www.consultantchris.com in a few minutes with some very exciting news for everyone in the IT world!

Over the next two or three days, I will be reviewing three of what are the most widely reported Linux operating systems, as well as both of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The versions of Linux I will be testing include, Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Desktop, OpenSUSE, and Fedora.

I will spend three hours testing each one, and will grade each operating system between 1 and 10 for each of the following areas.

• Usability
• Ease of installation
• Availability of applications
• Interoperability
• Pre-Installed features
• Ease of access to accessibility features
• Gaming potential – This will be split into games for children, games for teenagers, and games for adults.
• Hardware performance

Each of these 8 areas will be given a score out of 10 for each operating system. Once this score is calculated, I will then award up to 20 points for my own experience while using the operating system. Points will be deducted for each task that I cannot complete using open source software on each of the operating systems.

I am looking to have this all completed by the end of this week, and will look to be able to publish one operating system each day during the remainder of this week.

Make sure you stay tuned for updates and more about this relook at all of the modern operating systems available on the market today.

However today I decided it might be worth writing an article about writing articles! Writing a blog article on a daily basis can be a significant challenge, but this is one of the best ways to ensure that you regularly obtain increases in visitor numbers and as a result the intrinsic value of your website.
Firstly, write about topics that you know a great deal about. If you know a topic inside and out (In my case, this is mainly IT related, but there are a few others) it is a lot easier to write about it, and you will find it easier to answer any questions that people will raise with you.

The only problem with this is that you can be given questions that you may not be able to answer. If this happens then be honest with your reader. They will value your honesty and will keep them coming back time and time again. If you feel confident looking up the answer, make sure you reference the website you obtained the answer from.

Ensure that you include images that aid your blog article. These improve readership as they help readers understand the purpose of the article that you have written. Make sure that the images you use are images that are either copyright free, or that have copyright in place that allows you to use the image for commercial purposes. This is purely because if you decide in the future to use your blog to gain interest or earn money for a commercial project/interest then the images you have chosen could be potentially leaving you open to a court case for the usage of the image.

When using images, the format those images are in is very important. If the images are in a format that is not normally suitable for the Internet, then you may find that some readers are unable to see them. There are free tools to convert images into web friendly formats. Try to use PNG or JPEG formatted files where possible as these can be read by the widest possible amount of web browsers. Try to avoid GIF and BMP images.

Keep the articles short and simple, as they will help with the readability of the articles and with the amount of people that can read and understand them. It also helps a great deal to keep the language used as simple as possible. This ensures that as many people are able to understand your blog article as possible.

When writing your article, using the tips above, you should be able to steadily increase your readership and help improve your website’s effect on the Internet.

SQL statements are statements that allow interaction with a database. In my case the most frequent database type I access is MySQL, however the statements I use every single day are usable across most of the major database solutions in the world. As a result I thought it would be good to publish a basic introduction to SQL and how it can be impliemented for your website, and how it is not overly difficult to update SQL queries, or to build new queries from scratch.

The first and the most common SQL statement that I use on an almost daily basis, a SELECT statement, it is used to obtain information from the database, and it is something that is regularly used in order to get the information required, normally this is done to gain content from a database controlled content management system.

It is typically built up of three different parts, and surrounded by a structure that allows the server in question to be able to process the query very quickly indeed. Let’s look at a basic SELECT statement.

SELECT * FROM tblUsers WHERE User_ID = ‘5’;

This select statement will return all of the fields from the tblUsers table where the User ID equals 5. Let’s break down this SQL statement into bits so that you can gain a basic understanding of how it works.

SELECT

This part of the statement tells the server what type of statement will be being performed. There are a few keywords that are used, the top four are SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE.

 * FROM

This part of the statement tells the server that you want to receive all of the fields in the rows of the database that will be retrieved.

tblUsers

This part of the statement tells the server what table to look in for the purposes of this statement. This table name is not case sensitive.

WHERE User_ID=’5’

This part of the statement tells the database what to look for. The part of the statement immediately after this will tell the database exactly what to look for. In this case, the statement is looking for the row or rows where the field User_ID contains exactly the number 5, and nothing else.

Once you have put all of this together the database server if there is something for the database server to return, then it will do so. In order to gain access to the data contained within the database, you will need to perform an additional function, but this is unfortunately different in each language used to create your application or website.

Well that is a basic SELECT statement. Next we will move onto a basic INSERT statement. INSERT statements are designed to insert data into the database. This is a longer statement, but is one that is crucial when creating a new website. Let’s look at the statement below.

INSERT INTO tblUsers (‘User_ID’, ’User_Forename’ , ’User_Surname’, ’User_Email’ ,’User_Password’) VALUES ( NULL,  ‘Christopher’, ’East’, ’me@christophereast.com’, PASSWORD(‘password’));

This INSERT statement is longer than the SELECT statement; however it is still a simple statement that you can replicate quite easily. Let’s break the statement down so that it is easier for you to understand.

INSERT

This is the keyword that tells the server what type of statement is being used during this access of the database. There are a few keywords that are used. The top four are SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE.

INTO tblUsers

This part of the statement tells the database server what table you will be attempting to insert the data into. The table name itself is not case sensitive.

(‘User_ID’, ‘User_Forename’, ‘User_Surname’, ‘User_Email’, ‘User_Password’)

This part of the statement tells the database what fields you want to fill in. It does not specify what type of information these fields will accept, and it is down to you to ascertain this prior to writing the INSERT statement. These fields are required, and will also have to be required to be present in the database table. These fields are also case sensitive.

VALUES

This part of the statement tells the database server to expect the values that will be entered into the fields previously specified. The fields will be filled in, using the order that they were provided in the previous section of the statement.

( NULL,  ‘Christopher’, ’East’, ’me@christophereast.com’, PASSWORD(‘password’));

The values above are the values that will be entered into the database in the order of the fields listed earlier in the statement. The last field entered is unique in that it uses a function provided by the MySQL database server to encrypt the password before storing it into the database. There are several ways of encrypting passwords stored in the database, some accessible via the database server itself, and some via the programming languages used to create the systems that use the databases.

The final character on all statements is a semi-colon, this tells the server that the statement has finished, and it can process it and provide a response.

The Insert statement has to be, like all of the other statements in this basic introduction character perfect. The next statement that we will tackle is the UPDATE statement, which is similar to the INSERT statement, with one minor difference.

Let’s look at the statement now.

UPDATE tblUsers SET User_Email = ‘me@christophereast.me.uk’ WHERE User_ID=’5’;

This statement is very similar, and can be easily expanded to update multiple fields, and as per usual has a delimiter to finalise the statement so that it can be processed by the database server. You can update multiple fields at the same time using the UPDATE statement. Let’s break the statement down into bits.

UPDATE

This part of the statement provides the keyword to the database server so that the server knows what to expect.

tblUsers

This part of the statement tells the database server what table it will be updating.

SET User_Email = ‘me@christophereast.me.uk’

This part of the statement tells the database server what to update and what to replace it with. It is organised by field name, and the replacement value is set immediately afterward. If you want to update multiple fields, you can do so by repeating this part of the statement and separating each part by a comma.

WHERE User_ID=’5’;

This final part of the statement tells the database server to look for the record or records that have a value of exactly 5 in the User_ID field.

Well there you have it. The basic UPDATE statement, it is somewhat similar to the INSERT statement in that it has to assign values to the field names. It is worth noting that you cannot add data to the database fields being updated, it will in fact replace all of the data within the field. It is therefore sometimes worth using a SELECT statement and storing the results so that if you need to run an UPDATE statement you can use original entries into the database to compare to what is to be updated.

The next and final statement that we will be dealing with is the DELETE statement. The delete statement will delete one record or a range of records from a table stored on a database. Let’s take a look at the DELETE statement now.

DELETE FROM tblUsers WHERE User_ID=’5’;

This delete statement will delete the record or records where the User_ID equals exactly 5. It is followed by the delimiter that tells the database server that the statement is finished and can be processed. Let’s break the statement down.

DELETE

This part of the statement gives the database server the keyword that tells the database server what to expect from the rest of the statement. This keyword is always followed by FROM. This double barrelled keyword is specific to the DELETE statement.

FROM tblUsers

This part of the statement tells the database server what table or tables that it should look in to delete the record or records.

WHERE User_ID=’5’;

This final part of the statement tells the database server that you want to delete the record or records where the field User_ID matches exactly 5 specified after the equals sign. It is of course finished by the semi-colon telling the database server that the DELETE statement is finished, and can be processed.

Most people are members of a few forums. If you are a member of any of the larger business forums, then you will in most cases be entitled to a link back to your website. On some of the better managed websites (in my opinion of course!) you will be allowed a link to your website in your signature. This is typically a very good way to get links back to your website.

Normally there are specialist forums depending on the type of business you run. For IT companies there are literally hundreds of forums, and most of these will have facilities to allow you to link to your website.

By adding a link to your website to these forums, especially if you are an active member of these forums, you will gain as your website will not only be seen by the search engines but also by people reading the forums.

These types of links are typically a lot better for your website, as they are seen to be naturally occurring and google and the other search engines will look more kindly on them. There are two things that can help you establish how reputable the website you are placing your links on. Whilst some people think that any links are good and that can be true, the better the quality and reputation of the website, the more credit it will be given by google and the other major search engines.

If you are paying a third party to put links to your website all over the Internet, make sure you take the time to double check their work. Some links will regularly get removed, and in some cases, I have even seen links that were removed a long time before the report was produced telling the customer about the links in question. Obviously if you have paid for the links and they are being removed only after a few hours or days, then they are not going to benefit your website.

The two things to check about a website to see if it has a higher reputation is the Alexa Rank (provided by http://www.alexa.com) and the PageRank which is decided by Google. The Alexa rank is a rank given to every website by the Alexa Internet Company in America. They rank each and every website based on a complex formula, however each website is only given one rank. i.e. there can be only one website at number 1, and only one website at number 2, etc…

The Alexa rank for ChristopherEast.com is 472,678. This has gone down from 19,797,646 over the past 6 months. This is something that I have been consciously working on in order to improve my Alexa rank. This is something that takes a considerable amount of time, and a lot of hard work.

The PageRank is a ranking system that ranks each website between 0 and 10. Each website is ranked and there are several different websites that enable you to check the website. It is very difficult to obtain a PageRank, and as this formula is calculated by google, it is something that is used to rank website’s importance and reputation.

The PageRank for ChristopherEast.com is currently 0/10, which whilst I am not overly happy with the PageRank, it is something that I believe will improve over time and with some further hard work.

In order to obtain excellent links, you need to interact with many different websites on a regular basis, and become a member of the website’s community. It is only once you have done this that you will be in a position to obtain links that are excellent.

Those people that pay for hundreds of links to be produced only to find them removed a few weeks later may experience a temporary surge in the search engine rankings, but you will have to permanently pay someone in order to maintain those rankings, which is not very effective now is it?

In order to achieve excellent search engine rankings, you are better off writing excellent high quality content, than paying someone permanently to achieve something that is only temporary.

I found this image online, and thought it seemed apt!

I have spent many months fighting my health problems, and this week it does appear to have gotten the better of me. So for the moment until I get my health back on track I will bid you farewell. I shall be updating this blog, but unfortunately not as much as I would like.

I’ve managed to sell two of these at £18.50 each (including p&p), which compared to some of the other resellers on eBay is quite cheap. Whilst this so far is the most popular product (I’ve only managed to sell a few items on eBay so far). I am quite hopeful that the rest of the products that will be listed on eBay over the next couple of days will be enough to help boost sales significently.

There will also be a minor change, in that the viability project will be managed from my commercialchris.com website. This is mainly so that I can manage the project with greater ease and more productivity for everyone involved. I am also hoping to improve the product range on the cornershop pets website, which will hopefully mean that a few sales can be made from their as well.

My projects page on the commercialchris.com website provides you with updates and status reports on how the project is progressing, and what profit has been made. At the moment it is unlikely the project will make an overall profit for quite some time. However I will be adding enough products onto the site in order to achieve the desired profit margins to cover the financials that need to be committed in order to achieve the level of profit whereby a donation can be made to the Help 4 Heros charity.

Make sure you stay tuned to the project page on the commercialchris.com website!

If the differences between two countries can be so great, despite Egypt being seen as the leader of the Arab world, then how long will it be before other differences, not necessarily technological based, become more and more apparent and push the divide between the arab states and the more technologically advanced parts of the world?

I personally believe that this gap is already getting rather big and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing, let alone moving towards being more technologically advanced. This is rather concerning for almost everyone involved, as they will normally be in a position to lose out, quite considerably in many cases.

So what do you think? I’ll publish any responses received here!

The website is going to have 8 pages, and a section for me to blog. No doubt I will be blogging frequently. I will be spending some time this weekend producing some introduction lessions for Microsoft Office Word 2010, which is something I have provided in the past and they were a smash hit. I am also hoping that the new design will also go down a storm. The website has taken me just a couple of days to get right, and it is running on a WordPress backend, which is even more exciting for me, as this is the first wordpress theme I have produced.

It currently only scores 8.6 in nibbler, so I know I have a lot of work to do in order to get the website up to the same standard as this one is. However with a bit of time and a lot of effort I am absolutely certain that I will have no problems getting the website up and running. I also hoping to then be able to finish some of my older projects, and bring some of my projects that I have been neglecting somewhat up to date.

I am now also making a conserted effort to practice my theory and hazard perception tests for my driving license, as I would like to pass that at some point over the next couple of years. I am hoping that my health will improve significently that I will be able to sit the test in a normal car. However I am fully prepared for the eventuality that I may have to sit the test in an adapted car. Speaking of disability and being friendly, I must take my hat off to the staff at the ASDA in the marina down here in Brighton. They have always done the extra mile in order to help me do my weekly shop, and this is something that I hope they get some credit for.

Overall it has been an extremely productive day, and hopefully I will be able to continue this long into next week. I haven’t weighed myself for a week now, so I will have to do that tonight and let you all know!

I will be opening up some beta testing places on one of my projects next month, so if you are interested, then please get in touch now, as the spaces tend to go very quickly. It will be for the MyBills application which I am currently developing. There will be 100 spaces open, and if the last beta I did was anything to go by there will be a lot more than 100 applications. I will put an application form up onto this website in a couple of days, but for now, just drop me an email to be added to the list. Places will be awarded on a first come first served basis.

As a result of this, I end up having to make loads of plans in order to sort out the future of my career and the future of something a lot more general; My Life. Over the past few months I have been lucky enough to work within several different companies in the capacity of an advisor. Whilst this work is not always the nicest work in the world, it most definately is very rewarding. Having spent most of my early 20′s working with young companies, that I wanted to decide whether or not to continue in this industry. Most of the work I have completed has been within the IT sector, and I am wondering whether or not I should change and broaden my portfolio into other sectors of the SME market.

So in the future I will be working in other sectors of the SME market, to help them with their business problems. So the next time that you are in need of some help with your business, then look no further than this website, and the services that I have been offering consistantly for over 4 years. My contact details are on the contact me page. In a couple of days I will be launching a new website dedicated entirely to my commercial engagements, which I hope will encourage more of my clients to recommend me to their friends and colleagues.

We sold another few products on eBay recently, most recently we were able to secure yet another wholesaler to provide in the region of an additional 3,000 products for the website and for the eBay store.

Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to see some of these products added to the store. I’ve already worked out the first 20, which will appear on both eBay and the online store website in the next few days. Most of the new products will be toys, which is something as of yet we have been lacking in the project as a whole.

I’ll no doubt keep you updated!

Well some of you will have noticed that the day after I posted the first how to create a URL shortening service script, I actually posted my very own URL shortening website. This was done purely for the purposes of providing myself with the ability to break the script down to help me in providing you with those valuable tutorials.

So here we go, part 2;

In the last session we covered the basics of the table that was going to be used. We also covered the basic form that was going to be used for the website in question. Now we have to cover the more complex part, the PHP code used to generate the code.

This code is fairly simple, and should provide you with a unique code every time it is used. The first and most important part of the script, is not actually PHP based, but without this the script wouldn’t work properly.

The file is a .htaccess file, which interacts with the server in a way to allow the code to be made easier to understand.

In order to sort out the issue of ensuring the code is clean when it’s sent to the server.

You need to enter the following into your newly created .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %[REQUEST_FILENAME] –d
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ rewrite.php?fdg=$1 [L]

Once you’ve entered all of this into your htaccess file, you will be in a position to get your script running properly.

The RewriteRules used on this script allow the shortcode to be processed by the PHP script.

The next page we’re going to work on is the script that will translate the shortcode to the full URL to be visited.

I have called this file rewrite.php and stored it in the  same directory as the .htaccess file.

However in the interest of keeping this blog entry readable and short enough so that you won’t fall asleep, I’ll be covering this next time!

In this day and age, there are hundreds of smartphones available on the market, however the two most popular are the iPhone 4 and the BlackBerry Torch. According to the figures the most popular is the iPhone 4, however I personally think that the BlackBerry with its physical keyboard and more classical telephone design is easier for users to understand.

However the iPhone 4 cannot be faulted for it’s design and ease of use.

Overall though, I prefer the Blackberry Torch, but as a person with two mobile phones, and the other being an iPhone, I cannot really fault either of the phones!

The specifications of the iPhone compared the Blackberry are relatively similar, however I have consistantly found that the Blackberry responds much better than the iPhone. The one massive up side to the iPhone is the amount of applications available to the phone. These applications seem to contain everything. However some of the more popular applications are propriatry which, in my humble opinion is something that needs to be addressed in order to convert more people over to their platform.

Normally this type of report will cost you as a business around £100 pounds. However for this week only, I will provide you with these reports for free on as many different websites as you want. Send me an email or use the contact form on my website to get in touch.

These reports establish what you need to do in order to improve your website and it’s commercial success. Once you have seen your report, you may need help impliementing those changes into your website. I am fortunately in a position to be able to do this. For a small charge I can explain to you the best way to impliement those changes. If you would like me to impliement those changes for you, then this can also be arranged. As a special offer for businesses in Brighton, I will do this for just £20 per hour, which is considerably less than my normal rate.

Make sure you get in touch today so that you don’t miss out!

As a consultant that currently works exclusively with UK businesses at the moment, I am going to deal with all of the issues that a UK business will face.

The average UK business is required by law to make any method of entry into the business accessible by the disabled community. In terms of a website, this means that visually impaired users should have the same access to the website as those without visual impairment. This is achieved in many different ways, normally by planning everything that you produce on the website, and having alternative wording for images that you intend to use. This website for example does exactly that. But yet it still does not comply with all of the AAA standard required of most websites belonging to businesses in the UK.

So when you start the planning process you need to be aware of the images that you are using, and have alternative text ready to be used when the user cannot see the image directly. One of the biggest problems that visually impaired people have with websites, is when a technology called Flash produced by a company called Adobe is used. It is virtually impossible for visually impaired users to read anything that is flash based, and therefore it would be illegal for any UK based company to have an entirely flash based website. Most flash based websites also have a normal version of their website available for those who are visually impaired can view the website as well.

The next step when producing a good website suitable for UK businesses is to ensure that the text size is changable and doesn’t break the website when the text size is changed. This is something that you website development company or person will happily work with you to ensure it works.

Once you have taken into account these technical challenges that your website will face on your behalf, you are then able to start looking at the most important aspects of your website and how it can improve the sales for your business.

As a first step you need to look at what your customers are looking for, and how you can deliver this to them through your website. In most cases you can do this quite simply by providing information that your customers will want, however, you will need to establish the goals of your customers, which will frequently be very different to the goals your business has.

For example, if you run a website development company, your goal will be to get customers to contact you, and to commission you to do some work. However your customers will have a different set of goals. They will be interested in having some website development work completed, but first they will want to know if they can trust you, if you are any good at what they want, and whether or not you as a business will get the job done. It is only after you have managed to satisify all of these conditions will your customers actually become interested in your company and what you can offer your customers.

The next most important thing to consider is how the information you want to present to your customers will flow. This is called the information flow. This is something that you need to consider during the development phase of all of the different parts of your website. In order to get this right you need to consider the following;

• What groups of people will be visiting your website
• What does each of those groups want to achieve whilst they are on your website
• What information do you need to provide for each group to achieve this?
• What might put each group off achieving this goal?
• What information can you provide to ensure that your website doesn’t put the group off.

Once you have worked out the answer to each of these questions you will be able to put together a flow chart that will give you a list of each of the pages you need to provide for each group, and what information those pages need to contain. You will also be able to establish how best to group these pages together.

Make sure that you realise that some groups will need to see more information than others before they will react in the way you want them to. It is only by providing this additional level of information, whilst not overloading the information being given to the groups that do not require this information.

Once you have established this, you need to work out the best way to lay out your website, on a typical website, there is normally a way to contact the company in question straight away, and this is normally in a prominant position on the page. Remember that most users look across the top of the page from left to right and then go down the left hand side of the page. Placing any content in these areas will make it prominant and stand out from the rest of the content.

Once you have established all of this and it has been developed then you have one final thing to achieve. You need to ensure that you conduct a excellent level of usability testing, to ensure that your website is compliant and able to display in as many of the website browsers as possible. In addition to this, you need to ensure that your website has some level of usability testing with the disabled community in mind. This is normally done via WCAG testing. You can test most of this for free, however I am also fully able to test for some of the more complex issues, which I will happily perform for £35 per website. For this you will receive a full report with suggestions on how to improve your website, and what you can do to ensure that you achieve your goals by making your customers feel that they are also achieving their goals.

You need to ask yourself, when you are testing the website, or having the website tested, the following questions;

• What is the point of the website
• If you are on the homepage, where do you click, and where would you click after that?
• Does this website provide you with the level of information that you need?

So there you have it…everything you need to help you plan your next website. If you are still not sure what to do, then feel free to drop me an email. I will always answer emails, and will always give some advice to you before you start the journey of planning your new website.

Check it out today at http://UAT.CC created by the nerd in Brighton.

In order for the URL shortening service to work correctly, the full URL needs to be stored in a database, and the shortened URL provided. This service will not allow you to choose your own URL, but it will provide you with a shortened URL that you can distribute to your friends and family safe in the knowledge that your URL will not be distributed to third parties.

I created a database with the following structure.

url_translations (

url_divert_to (text)
url_short (varchar(13))
url_counter(int)
url_createdon(time)
url_createdby(varchar(18)

)

Of course this is only the representative of the table that I am currently using on the website. The website then needs the form on the mainstay of the website that allows the shortened URL to be produced. Unlike many of the other commonly available services online at present, this one will not expire after so many uses, or after a specific length of time.

This form is constructed from three basic pieces, the surround of the form, the input field for the URL to be shortened, and the button that submits the form to the script that performs the shortening and returns the shortened URL.

<form action=”/” method=”POST”>

URL to be shortened: <input type=”text” name=”full_url”>

<input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Shorten me!”>

</form>

If you want to, at this stage, you can make the form look pretty, and should be in a position to do so via CSS and inline styling.

Once you have the form created you need to create the code that does the shortening itself. I will cover this tomorrow for you all!

So I thought it was about time I gave you all some feedback on the shopping cart solution and it’s administration section. After all, it is the part of the website that you will be using on an almost daily basis to sort out your orders, and as a result it is crucial to ensure that this part of your website works as well as is possible.

Magento does seem to have one minor bug before you even get into your administrator console. Once you’ve typed your username and password, and clicked on login, you seem to almost always get a 500 error (internal server error) but when you refresh the page it normally goes away. (This doesn’t appear to the case on Firefox on MacOS)

When you do finally manage to login, the dashboard is excellent and definately one of the best I have ever seen. On the left hand side of the screen it lists in quite a considerable amount of detail, the lifetime sales figure, the average order figure, and the last 5 orders, the last 5 terms that have been searched, whereas on the right-hand side a seperate order details pane, alongside an amounts pane, and at the bottom of the dashboard several other figures relating to the general day to day use of the website sales.

The CMS part of the system is all neatly contained within one menu towards the end of the menu bar, which is unusual for a fully fledged e-commerce website, which in my experience do not normally have any CMS pages available.

The catalog part of the menu provides direct lines into the products listed on the website, as well as the categories. Getting categories can be a bit awkward to use to begin with, especially if you haven’t read the instructions on installation. However once you have managed to sort out that information, then you are ready to go!

The other areas of the menu system are pretty much straight forward, and as a result, they make it easier for you to navigate around your website and ultimately whilst I have yet to have an order placed onto the website, I am fairly certain that the way the system has been laid out will make processing those orders a lot quicker than I had previously expected.

So this is how far I have managed to get with the Magento shopping cart solution, next week I’ll hopefully have had a few orders and will be in a position to be able to confirm or deny how easy the system is to use when processing orders.

I’ve decided that at the moment I will continue on advertising on eBay for a second chance at the viability project, but I don’t hold out any hope to be honest.

I am hoping that in the longer term  I will be able to use both the website and the eBay store in order to achieve the goals that I have set myself. I keep on reminding myself that it is the most frugal time of year, so I have to be patient in order to achieve those goals.

Well what do you think? Is it too early for me to be calling off the eBay viability project? Drop me an email and let me know.

The first option, and in most cases the most preferable option, is to gain investment from family and friends. This is the easiest way to gain investment, although if the business fails, or has serious problems where it cannot meet it’s repayments in a timely manner, can put a very serious stress on the relationship with the investor. Some times it can be several different friends investing relatively small amounts to form their own Angel Investors.

The second option, and my personal preference, is bank funding. However given the current financial climate, it can be extremely difficult to obtain the funding. In order to do this, you’ll need to prepare a very good business plan, and (if they are still around) it may be worth contacting your local business link, and getting their advice and support before you take your business plan to your bank manager.

The third option, is one that you will have no doubt already seen on the television via programs like Dragon’s Den, and the Money Show (no longer with us unfortunately.). I am of course talking about Angel Investors. These people normally act as silent partners in the business, but provide the capital needed in order to get the business off the ground. Having done a viability test for this is vital compared to the other avenues of investment, however, it is just as important to have a strong and well defined business plan to present to any angel investors that you encounter. Be aware that many angel investors will only give away a certain amount every year, and will normally have 5 or 6 times that amount in terms of applications for investments.

So all in all, it can be very difficult to get the funding you need, but once you have it, it can be very good for all involved, especially if you make the profit you anticipate, but remember, businesses are extremely hard work, and can be even harder work if you don’t put 150% in right from the start.

ATS Distribution (http://www.atsdistribution.co.uk) is one such wholesaler, who have positioned themselves directly for the eBay market. I am currently using these guys for the eBay viability project, and so far I have not had any complaints, nor have I had any problems with the way that they work.]

Another wholesaler worth looking at is the Sweet Wholesale company (http://www.sweetwholesale.co.uk) , designed more around the retail end of the market, providing you with sweets in large enough quantities to be able to provide your customers with loads of different sweets at prices comparible to the major high street chains.

Finally it is also worth looking at Bennies (http://www.bennies.co.uk) , a wholesaler of shoes, most of which you cannot find in the shops any longer. You buy the shoes by the box, but this doesn’t seem to be that bad an idea. I am yet to test these guys out personally, but from the reviews I have heard by some of my colleagues, these guys seem to know what they are doing, and seem to be able to do it well!

So there you have it, three different wholesalers, all targeting different markets, and all of them are there to help you achieve the same thing….profitability. Why not give these guys a go when you start to think about your next venture!

None of which are particularily profitable, but it does go to show the eBay route seems to be rather drying up again, I am holding up that it will take off again, but for the moment I have had to all but give up on eBay.

When dealing with suppliers, most people think that you are okay to leave your invoices until their first reminder notice before they are paid. In the current economy, if your supplier isn’t lucky enough to be ex-state funded, then this can have a serious effect on their cashflow. Potentially you can put a supplier out of business if you and somewhere as little as 15% of their customers wait until the first reminder letter before paying their invoice.

If your supplier however is  one before that last part of the chain, then there can occassionally be times when you need to withhold payment. However in these circumstances, I would always recommend paying part of the invoice (if any of the invoice is not in dispute, then paying that part off can be a big incentive to the supplier to sort out the problems with the rest of the invoice, so that they can receive the rest of the payment.

A supplier of food can be very important to keep onside, as they can be responsible for day to day deliveries to your place of business, and without them it can be very difficult to maintain a good customer relationship if one of your suppliers isn’t delivering the products that they normally like to enjoy. It can also be a negative for your staff as they will notice the supplier isn’t delivering as usual as it can have a massive impact on staff morale.

If you make regular deliveries to other people then keeping those deliveries on time, and with the stock that you would normally use to make those deliveries, this makes you a supplier to those customers. Those customers will depend on you for those deliveries, and for some of them you may be a lifeline. The elderly are especially reliant on deliveries, and even more so during the winter months.

So if you are a supplier, or have suppliers, then don’t annoy them, they can be your lifeline, and more so during these turblerent times.

If you’re not sure what a foaf.rdf file is, then check out http://www.foaf-project.org/ for more information and a guide to making your own file!

Enjoy!

Hopefully as I reported this bug to the person who created it, so in future it will be resolved.

I’ve spent some more time on the eBay viability project today, and have managed to list another 7 products on the new look website. (Check it out at http://www.cornershoppets.com) I am aiming to get the website up the Alexa ranking, which currently stands at 2,952,657 (from 3,140,661 yesterday!). I will do some work on the Nibbler score for the website, but unfortunately I don’t feel that this site will ever be able to achieve anything with Nibbler. This I believe is mainly down to the way Nibbler is coded. However it still has a score of 8.2. I was hoping that I would be able to get the score up to 9.5, which is the same as this website currently performs, but it has become clear that this may not be possible with the way that Nibbler calculates it’s scoring.

So a good evening to you all!

Fortunately a bit of editing of the feed-rss2.php file, seems to have corrected the problem for the moment. This did have a small effect on my Nibbler rating, although this seems to have been resolved now.

So a heads up for anyone who currently has a Word-press website. Make sure you double check the validity of your RSS feeds before you release them to the general public.

Hopefully you won’t have the same problems! If you do then please get in touch and I’ll send you the revised file.

http://nibbler.silktide.com – This website is excellent for website developers and one that I hope will start to see a lot more attention over the coming year.

http://www.shareworld.co.uk – This website seems to be excellent for share based information. Although it’s owners may not be the most delightful people in the world (see my article of random nibbler comments at the beginning of the year for more on this.) The site itself seems to be very good and something that no doubt people will be relying on all year to make their share decisions.

http://www.klout.com – This website measures your “Klout” with social media. I definately think that this is something that we will be seeing more of over the next 12 months. I only have a Klout score of 21 at the moment, but I am sure that it will improve as time moves on.

http://www.groveshark.com – This website is all about streaming music, it looks like it’ll be an excellent website and should improve in popularity over the coming year.

http://www.foursquare.com – This type of social networking website is set to take off this year, and whilst I haven’t always been it’s biggest fan, there is no doubt that it will take off this year.

W3C validation errors, errors with the way the website looks compared to what you’d wanted, etc…

I had to spend some time working on the magento website, I found a theme that was similar to what I wanted, built my own based on it, and realised that it wasn’t W3C compatible. So I spent another few hours making the new theme W3C compatible. This is what I’m talking about. Most CMS based websites suffer from the same problems. I have therefor come up with a few suggestions as to the best ways to avoid these problems.

Ensure that when you code your initial template, it is totally W3C compatible, not nearly there, but totally compatible. This will mean that when it is turned into a theme for the CMS that you are using, it will have a much greater chance of being W3C compatible.

Work to provide your codebase with an established set of rules. This is especially important when working on a new or unknown system. Having rules that you and potentially other developers can use in order to construct good pieces of coding if you have to hand the project over to someone else.  In my experience this rule on it’s own have saved me on many occassions, and it is one that unfortunately a lot of developers do not adhere to!

Those two tips are the first of many that I will provide over the coming weeks, make sure you keep on checking back for more tips and tricks when working on new websites!

Well as it turned out there wasn’t one that quite did everything I wanted it to. However I settled on Magento Community Edition, as I felt it would provide everything that I needed, plus hopefully a little more!

But during the course of my evening I ended up testing several of the open source offerings at the moment, and thought that I would share my findings with you. In this modern age of cross browser compatibility and accessibility laws, I tested all of the following open source shopping systems in the following three areas;

• W3C Validation
• Ease of use
• Ease of adaptation for visually impaired users

Surprising out of the 6 that I tested only Magento provided all of these features out of the box. I tested the following shopping carts;

• OS-Commerce (http://www.oscommerce.com)
• ZeusCart (http://www.zeuscart.com)
• OSCSS (http://www.oscss.org)
• Magento (http://www.magento.com)
• NOP Commerce (http://www.nopcommerce.com)
• And finally an old classic CRE Loaded (http://www.creloaded.com)

OS Commerce (Version 2.3.1) worked just like I had remembered OS Commerce to work previously, except the installation was significantly improved. However the usual problems of no URL rewriting out of the box, and very little support for visually impaired users left me feeling rather lacklustre almost straight away. On the plus side, the current Alpha 5 of version 3 is something to be watched, as it appears to resolve a lot of the problems that version 2.3.1 suffers with. It is also worth noting that OS Commerce, like most of the shopping carts tested this evening does not support UK sites out of the box. However in its defence, several patches have been released by users of the software to rectify this. This solution failed the W3C validation with a shocking result of over 300 errors on the default template, several of which would need parts of the code to be rewritten in order to resolve them.

ZeusCart (Version 2.3) is a spin off from OS Commerce, and uses version 2.3.1 of OS Commerce as a base. Overall this solution performed a lot better than OS Commerce, but no support for UK sites or URL rewriting, it quickly came to fall next to its native OS Commerce in the rejection pile. This solution failed the W3C validation with over 40 errors on the default template.

OSCSS (Version 2.1.0) is a brand new solution from the French. Its installer is only available in French, which thanks to a GCSE in French from my school years; I was able to navigate without too many problems. However this system fell at the first hurdle as I was unable to login using the newly created username and password. Weirdly this system creates the password for you, but does use your email address as the username, which is a bit of a security trade off. This solution however did not pass the W3C validation, with only 1 small error, which could be easily fixed with a bit of effort from the coding team at OSCSS!

Magento Community Edition (Version 1.4.2.0) is another fairly new solution, this time from a company in the USA. It is the largest at over 80 megabytes unpacked, which is over 4 times the size of any of the OS Commerce based solutions, but you certainly see why once you have the system running. Installation is a breeze, much like the OS Commerce installations. One major difference you notice straight away is that the system seems to be designed for the UK. It even features an absolute gem in the language settings that allow you to change between Americanised England and Queens Standard English. The URL rewrites leave some to be desired, as they force you to have a file extension, which is out-dated by the most modern programming techniques, but the compromise is a system that doesn’t let you down in any other respect. It has a built in caching system, which I would imagine will become annoying over time as it continually asks to be refreshed. Overall this system, whilst being the poor cousin of a commercial shopping cart solution, is definitely the one for the serious online store owner. Within an hour I was up and running. The themes are quite pricy, but a few very good ones are available for free, unlike the other carts, in which almost all of the themes are very pricy. This was the only solution to pass the W3C validation for XHTML 1.0 Strict!

NOP Commerce (Version 1.90) is the only ASP.NET based solution I’ve looked at this evening. However it doesn’t suffer as a result. Built as a collaboration between developers in the UK, USA, Russia, and China, this system pretty much ticks all the boxes, and other than its overall cost to run which on most hosting platforms will be twice that of the others, it is good. The URL rewriting again forced a file extension, which isn’t ideal. The one item that let this system down is the lack of ability for it to be used by visually impaired users. It may seem like I keep on banging on about this, but it is a legal requirement in the UK for all customer facing portals, be that a physical shop front or their website, to be disability friendly. Whilst I am not aware of any prosecutions to date over a company’s website not being disability friendly, I am sure that we will see these as more and more of the UK go online. This solution like almost all of the others, did not pass the W3C validation.

My final contender was CRE Loaded (Version 6.4.1a) which is another independent shopping cart solution. This is another poor cousin of a commercial offering, which is PCI compliant, but at the moment this is only required by HSBC’s merchant banking solution, so not a major worry for most businesses looking to start their online store. The URL rewriting from CRE Loaded was poor at best, and failed with 2 out of the 3 products that I added to the store. The disability awareness was actually surprisingly good considering the URL rewriting was so poor. However this system failed the W3C validation checks on a core level. This was due to a URL contained within the footer of the solution. Unfortunately this meant that the solution was moved straight to the rejected pile.

So there you have it. 6 open source shop cart solutions, after testing; only really 1 of them is usable in the UK by businesses! Hopefully I’ve saved you some time, so that you are not stuck testing and finding these same problems yourself!

Social media is a website or other medium used for social interaction. Normally this is done using readily available methods, such as twitter and facebook. Web based social media uses these and other websites to provide short updates to the world about what you are doing at that time. You may have even arrived here as a result of social media!

Most social media is user generated, however some more clever people are writing software applications (also known as social media apps) to generate content for them.

Social media by it’s own defination is available to anyone, and for anyone to publish their own content. This means that anyone, you, me, your mother, or your sister could be publishing what they are doing at any time! Some of the information provided may be provided by traditional media, such as newspapers or television, who are using social media to deliver the content that traditional media has been delivering from years.

One of the main advantages of social media is that it is instant, whereas traditional media is time delayed (newspapers have to be printed, and news broadcasts generally have to wait between being filmed and being aired, or they have to wait for their slot at 6pm etc…). This means that you can tell everyone what you are doing straight away!

Twitter and Facebook are the two biggest websites associated with social media. Both allow you to update your “status” in real time, and twitter even allows you to do it from other websites, meaning that you don’t actually have to be on the twitter website to update your account. Other websites such as MySpace and Bebo are some of the more commonly known websites that interact on a social media based style.

So there you have it. My defination of social media! I hope you enjoyed reading it!

This is something that most websites battle with on an almost daily basis. Now whilst I have a lot of time on my hands (due to my constant back and leg problems) and can work it out with a bit of research, within a day or so. The problem that most web developers have with this is that if their code is already W3C compliant, then what else do they have to do in order to ensure that their website is cross browser compliant. Sometimes it is as simple as doing nothing, on other occasions it can be a case of providing two different versions of the page to make sure that the website can be viewed by as many people as possible!

So I went onto the web to find some links to other websites that provide cross browser compatibility tutorials and guides. I found one at the jQuery website, http://docs.jquery.com/Browser_compatibility which shows some of the compatibility issues in the jQuery libraries.

Another one I found came from QuirksMode (http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html) this document shows the different CSS styles needed in order to make a website cross browser compatible with as many browsers and operating systems as possible.

One thing that I did notice and have experienced several times in the past, is that the same browsers will behave differently on different operating systems. (i.e. firefox behaves very differently in Windows than it does in Macintosh)

Working out your finances for the year ahead can often be a challenging thing, especially with the finances of a company being so unpredictable given the current financial situation of the UK economy.

However it is now more than ever important to look after your finances, especially if you have staff on payroll and they are no doubt relying on the companies stability for their continued employment and financial spending power. So whilst you are looking over your personal spending plans for the next twelve months, make sure you look over the financials for your business too!

In other news, today has been the first time that I have been able to use my desktop to complete some of the much needed work on the commercial website for the Cornershop Pets which will give some more enthusium for the project as a whole. I am hoping that by the end of this month I will be in a position to launch the new website, which will largely follow the new design of the current website, but will allow for much more options in terms of purchasing and the provision of services.

My website is continuing to move up the Alexa rank, now standing at 945,687 overall. It is still moving forwards, and it is something that I will continue to persue over a longer period of time. My long term goal is to move the website into the top 100,000, which will not be an easy task, but it is a task that I am confident will be more than possible within a 6 month period.

Unfortunately it is the time of year when my health normally makes a u-turn and starts to deterioate, and this is something that will effect my ability to post or manage any of the projects that I am currently involved in. So if I don’t get back in touch straight away, then this is most likely why.

I’ve had a chance to have a play with the new App Store from Apple and am pleased to report that their easy to use interface first used on the iPhones and iPads. The billing system is exactly the same as on the iPhone and iPad, and completing the process of buying an app, is just as simple, (completed in 3 clicks!)

So all in all this is an excellent upgrade, and one that I would recommend for anyone who wishes to use their mac as a source of entertainment. It does mean that some of the larger applications are available via the store, and these do take a long time to download. There has been no statement as to the desktop versions of applications already purchased for either the iPad or iPhone, so we will wait and see what Apple has to say about that.

Long term this seems to be an excellent move for Apple, and one that should pay dividends when converting people from Windows into the Apple based environments.

In other more important news, the eBay viability project seems to be coming on leaps and bounds. A few more sales achieved, and therefore I should really list a few more products into the mix to give some more varity into the mix!

The overhaul of the  office and my desktop is now completed. The office looks a lot better, and the desktop feels a lot faster. The desktop is currently the showpiece of the office, but it has left me contemplating the upgrades that I will no doubt want to do during the course of the year. I’m currently running (for the more technologically minded of us) 6GB of triple channel DDR 3, and a 64GB SSD drive, with a 1TB sata drive to compliement it. There’s also a couple of 1TB western digital external drives, which I am hoping to make into internal drives over the next couple of months. In addition to this, I’ll also no doubt want to double the RAM and add a few more hard drives, so that my machine cannot be beaten. I no doubt will at that point be forced to consider water cooling or something similar.

Overall though it has been a quiet weekend, and one that I have spent relaxing and sorting out the hub of this house….the office. I suppose it’s a very early form of spring cleaning!

So it came around and I decided to produce a list of all of the software that I needed to reinstall. Everything from Microsoft Office and Visual Studio 2010, to Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s browser Safari. I started at around 5pm this evening, and only now am I really able to use the Internet with any real power. I still have over 30 applications to install, and suspect that I will be up for many hours yet!

Below are some of the images that have made their way onto eBay as the graphical representation of the products now listed on eBay! Don’t forget to check out http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Cornershop-Pets and http://www.cornershoppets.com for the latest items to be listed for the benefit of the project as a whole!

None of these tasks seem to be coming to fruition at the moment, so I thought I’d post a blog article instead. I am currently charting my progress through the Alexa rankings on a spreadsheet, and I will at some point turn it into a graph that all can see and use as a benchmark for their own websites in order to work out it’s performance against mine. It takes a lot of hard work to get a website into the top 100,000 viewed websites online, and just as much hard work to get it within the top 1,000,000 viewed websites (according to alexa at least). I am fortunate enough to be able to say that I have nearly crossed the threashold for the 1 million mark, and am on a strong footing for the 100,000 mark. I am hopeful that I will make it into the top 100,000 within the next month or two, however I am very aware that this is quite a challenge and can only be done with your help!

I am hoping to be able to restart my product testing section in the next couple of months, so if you have a new IT related product that you would like to get some additional exposure for, then contact me and we’ll work something out (normally all I ask for is the product itself, as this is the best way to test the product, and also because I, like a lot of brits, love a freebie!)

I am hoping that this afternoon will be a lot more productive for me!

So as I embark on my journey through the world of Mac Applications and the development environments therein, wish me luck! I am hoping that the first application I build will be one that is rather close to my heart, and to do with dispensing medication. So I am hoping that over the next couple of months the first application of mine will be launched in the App Store! So at 00:27 on a what will no doubt be a busy Friday, wish me the best of luck!

I am hoping that by achieving this via my website, I will be in a position to be able to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that this brings. I will also be doing this on another website, that has not been established as long, and doesn’t have as much reach as my website currently does. However this will be some weeks, as I still need to finish the programming on it.

All in all I think that with a lot of effort everyone is able to build their website’s alexa rank up to within the top 100,000, and hopefully mine will be within that ranking list within the next few weeks!

Firstly, we have now in total sold 6 items via the eBay store, and so far none via the website. Unfortunately we have had to change the name of the project twice in order to ensure that we are not stepping on anyones toes.

The value of everything sold so far is just under £25.00, making a total profit of £1.50 all of which will go towards the fundraising efforts of the charity ‘Help for Heros’. It is a small amount, and a much smaller amount than I was hoping to have achieved by now. I am currently programming a new website for the cornershop pets domain, which is something that I am hoping will boost the sales from the website so that at least some of them are being made via the website.

All in all the website side of the project seems to be rather lackluster at the moment. However once the new website is launched, I am hoping that it will be in a position to be able to gain more following and hopefully more sales as a result.

There is one minor amendment that I must make to the project. I will be making a small widthdrawal of £25,000 over the course of the year in order to cover the costs incurred both in time and effort on my part. It is a very difficult decision to have to make, but it is something that I am sure you will understand has to be made given the current economic climate.

So overall, a total of £1.50 will be given to the charity ‘Help for Heros’ over the next couple of days. Whilst this is a small amount, it will help the ‘Help for Heros’ charity foundation.

Today I am going to walk you through what in my opinion, are some of the best systems for doing this and how best to achieve this without having a negative effect on your social media standing.

Topsy (http://www.topsy.com) – This website provides access to twitter, and allows you to lookup how many times your keyword or website has been looked up. The wonderful guys at Silktide use this on their Nibbler application. It does appear to have some bugs, but this is something that I am sure that topsy will work out with a little bit of help from Silktide. The system uses a credit based system to ensure that it is fairly used by everyone with access to it. For the larger users, there are also commercial options available, which by the looks of it are fairly reasonable in terms of price!

The Developers section at Facebook (http://developers.facebook.com) gives you the option of looking up the amount of times that your website or keyword has been searched for or used on the facebook website.

After this,  there are several different twitter analytics, and there is even a rumour going around that twitter is in the process of creating it’s own app.

A good example of this is a website that sells childrens toys, and in order to access the pages to buy those toys you currently need to remember a URL like http://www.ilovetoys.com/index.php?cat=games&toy=4356 could be converted into http://www.ilovetoys.com/games/xbox/ which is a lot easier for people to remember. The search engines will also enjoy looking at smaller and cleaner URLs and will therefore give you a higher ranking when it comes to your preferred search terms.

Another thing to consider is the content on your website. Many search engines rely on this as a the basis for which to assign your website a ranking. In addition to this, it is worth considering meta tags and a meta description.

One of the last things to consider (and it is only the last, because it is best to be done after you have assembled all of the parts together. Validate the website against the latest W3C standards as well as the disability friendly standards at WCAG and Section 8.

Once you have done everything I’ve mentioned here, you should be on the way to producing an excellent website, that is capable of getting to the top of your chosen search engine.

Creating a website that is reliable is one of the first and in my opinion one of the most important steps to creating a website that is capible of selling. At any one time I may be working on 3 or 4 different projects with various aims. One of those aims will almost always be to create a website that can sell the product or service in question better than their competitors do at the moment.

In order to do this, and beat your competitors (even if it is only a temporary gain.) you need to update the content on your website, and update it regularily. Your competitors will pick up on this, and will no doubt start updating their website more regularily. By doing this, you will give yourself some work to do every day, it will also help your customers see that you are always thinking about them.

If you website is a product based one, then adding new products on a daily basis is one sure way of  keeping your website being seen as being updated and this wil help both your search engine rankings and your customers see that you are checking your website regularily. This, believe it or not will help your website pursuade customers to buy from you.

If your website is service based, then keeping a blog updated on a daily or at worst, weekly basis will again pursuade customers to part with their money, as they will see that you are actively pursuing their business.

Once you have grasped the basics of updating your website on a regular basis, then you can move onto something that is very very important, and will need to be decided a long time ahead of your actually publicising your website. Choosing a relevent domain name, one that not only is easy to remember, but also one that has some of the words that you would expect your customers to search for. For example there is no point having the domain name, humagic.com for a company that sells dog food, unless your website was also your company name and this is something that you will be publicising heavily, whereas the domain dogfoodproducts.com is something that will make your website appear an awful lot more attractive to search engines and as a result to your customers.

After you have your domain name sorted, you need to think about how people will navigate around your website. This can be tricky as there are many different methods that can and do work on a daily basis. At present I favor the left hand menu option, were as some of the more commercial enterprise websites favor the top menu option. Both are very valid, but the links that are produced by your menus are almost as important as the menu’s themselves. Having a link like dogfoodproducts.com?category=tins&product=bakers looks terrible and will be almost impossible for someone to remember compared to dogfoodproducts.com/tins/bakers/ which you are a lot more likely to remember.

I always say as a general rule of thumb you should never go more than 3 levels deep on your menus, as this is about as much as your customers will remember, especially if they have to type some things in manually.

This is something that your website developer will normally be more than happy to help you with. Alternatvely send me an email and I’ll be happy to provide you with all of the advice and tips that you need.

I would always recommend checking the website, and encouraging users to use your support system before leaving the website. Over the Christmas period, I always make sure that any businesses I am working with have my mobile telephone number, and that I have regular email access. In todays soceity it is not overly difficult to achieve this. I use my Blackberry Torch in order to achieve both of these with little to no fuss. (I normally have my blackberry on me anyway, so it’s not a huge issue to me!)

As my website is currently gaining in popularity, (According to Alexa at least!) I wouldn’t ever dare leave it alone for longer than necessary, as to ensure that the website doesn’t suddenly take a turn for the worse!

So these are my thoughts on keeping your website going, and how it can keep your customers flowing as a result!

But I am still seeing a daily improvement in the Alexa rank for my website, which is good news, and something which I am hoping will continue to improve over the coming days and weeks.

I haven’t been posting as much as normal over the past couple of weeks, but this is something that I hope to rectify as soon as I can.

The 2012 versions of both Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Office are both looking likely to be released during either late Q2 or early Q3 of 2011. This will mean that for early adopters, it is time to think about hardware upgrades again. For the small business customers, you will likely have another 12 to 18 months before the newer versions of SBS are released.

However those looking for the minimum specifications for the 2012 software, are to be disappointed if they think that the hardware requirements will remain similar to those for the 2008 editions. As per usual Microsoft appear to be moving the barriers again, although rumours are that Microsoft are betting heavily on the cloud computing environment.

I will of course be asking some of my contacts within MSFT at Reading for any news that they are allowed to give out about the up and coming releases, but I am guessing that many organisations will want to look at setting up their own cloud services, as this seems to be way Microsoft have decided to go.

This year, I aim to be able to get around a lot more freely, and to be able to not have to rely on my walking stick. This is something that will require a lot of time and effort, but it is something that I feel will be well worth the wait. I will have to start by eating somewhat healthier meals, and carrying out more exercise, most of this will be home based to begin with.

I currently weigh in at around 135kg, which is obese, and something which I intend to do something about. For Christmas we got a xbox Kinect, and I intend to get the EA sports trainer, which I will use on a daily basis, to help me lose the weight, combined with hopefully something more healthy. I will post the results every Saturday, so that we can all see the ups and downs of dieting.

In other news, we had a minor glitch with the xbox today, but after a little bit of patience I managed to resolve it. We have two different versions of LIPS, which is a great singing game, and with 4 microphones, we will no doubt be having a few house parties in the future.

All in all I do hope that you are all setting sensible new years resolutions. Mine may not be the most encompassing in the world, but it is one that by the summer I hope to be thin enough to be able to wear shorts, and t-shirts that don’t make me stand out from the crowd like a huge heffalump!

My experiences at normal gymnasiums have always been less than successful, so I am hoping a bit of home schooling will do the trick.

Busiest month for my website (http://www.christophereast.com) was December, with 399 different IP addresses viewing the website, and over 65,000 hits.

The slowest month for my website (http://www.christophereast.com) was October 2010, with 109 different IP addresses, and just 7989 hits for the month. Not quite sure what happened in October 2010, but something odd as it was the my busiest month in terms of business.

I had 5043 people add me to WLM over 2010, beating the 2009 record by around 2000.

The record for the most emails sent to me goes to Mr Miller from London. You know who you are, and despite your questionable ethics and the questionable motives around your decisions, you did come first in the amount of emails sent to my various email addresses.

The record for the most emails sent to my personal email address goes to (excluding automated emails) my partner, Mr R Lowe, who has sent me just over 1000 emails in 12 months!

The person who rang me the most in 2010 on all of the mobile telephones and land-line telephones that I have had over this past year again goes to my partner, Mr. R. Lowe.

So all in all a lot of increases this year, and not many decreases to speak of.

As for new years resolutions, I’ve decided that I’m not going to make any this year, as they almost always seem to fail, and no one wants to fail.

I think that statement says it all. At the tender age of 23, I am definitely starting to feel old! I know that all of my friends and some of my relatives will be out partying tonight, but all I want to do is grab a hot cup of cocoa and go to bed. I’m currently sitting here watching the Sound of Music, thinking about what I have achieved this year, and other than finding that special person that I want to spend the rest of my life with, I haven’t actually achieved that much. (Or at least I don’t think I have)

As for new years resolutions, I gave up on making any of those a few years ago, as I never have been able to stick to them. I will make the effort to encourage my partner to go out this evening, but he has already made it clear that he didn’t want to go out unless I was going out with him. Unfortunately I am not in a position to oblige as he really does need a break for me and from everything else going on around him.

I hope that whatever you are doing on this New Years Eve, be it holding a party, or going to one, that you have a great time and enjoy yourself doing it!

So far I have managed to get the basic templating system similar to the one used in Smarty, along with the file configuration similar to Drupal. Hopefully this will bear fruit and whilst I have coded around 100,000 lines of code over the past 24 hours, I do hope that it will be finished within the next couple of days so that I can have something to show off to all concerned.

However having had no sleep overnight, I am rather tired, and will be retiring to my bed somewhere about now!

I will be contacting the owner of the store sometime over the next couple of days to give them the domain names if they want them. I don’t see why I should stand in the way of a company progressing further into the realms of online trading.

Personally I don’t see why people have to go into the office and can’t instead work at home, it works out a lot more cost effective, and allows your staff the time that they need to be able to fully relax before the new year rush which happens every year when all of the senior members of staff get back from their longer holidays.

I will be spending the next three days working out what I will do doing for the rest of the year with my various enterprises and how I can make them benefit the community the most.

For most small businesses not in the retail sector this can be one of the most difficult times of year, and by following some simple rules, you can minimise your costs and maximise your staff producivity.

1. Allow your staff to work at home over the Christmas and New Year period, then save a few pounds by turning off all unnecessary equipment (Lights, Computers, and even the coffee machines tend to get left on at this time of year, which can waste over £100 in the 2 week period around Christmas).

2. Setup a ring group for relaying urgent messages. This can not only save you loads of time, it also encourages your staff to maintain contact outside the work enviroment, making it a lot easier for you to allow your staff to work together, and to work at home during more serious weather problems.

3. Work out a rota to allow those members of staff with children to get priority over the Christmas period ensuring that they have sufficent time to be able to do their Christmas shopping and wrap the presents.

4. Run a Secret Santa that includes everyone in the company, not just per department. It will encourage your staff to get to know each other. This will come in very handy over the Christmas period if you need to deligate or provide information to specific members of staff as your staff will at least have some knowledge of the indivdiuals concerned if it is that type of message.

5. Do a survey for those staff members that come into the office via public transport and which modes of public transport they use. If there are known problems with public transport early in the morning then be very prepared to take the decision to tell the effected members of staff to work from home until the service that they use improves. Alternatively you could attempt to arrange carpools (This is all dependant on how close the staff live to each other and how well they get on.) to the office, this will not only encourage bonding within the office, but it will also mean that you get a larger quantity of staff into the office each day.

6. On really cold days, encourage your department heads (or you personally if it is a small company!) to go out and do a lunch run. Go out in teams of 2/3 and the quickest department could get a reward once a week (if shops are within walking distance then no cars should be allowed!). I’ve introduced this in several companies normally with the reward being that once a week you get your lunch paid for by the company. This may sound costly, but it really can improve productivity.

7. Encourage the use of social media to communicate between your staff, setup special Microsoft Communicator accounts for each member of staff, and allow them to use it on their laptops, which most companies now issue to their staff as a matter of course.

8. Make sure all members of staff have a company laptop, or at least have access to their computers at work. This is becoming commonplace in most companies today, and is something that will help your employees feel valued.

So there you have it, 8 tips on what to do in order to help your company over this cold weather. I hope you can make some use out of these tips and that your company doesn’t grind to a halt over these cold weather periods.

I’m intending to spend some time this evening working on a new CMS based Drupal inspired website that will give users the ability to buy products with no fuss and using a system that makes sense to everyone that uses it. Keep on checking back for more updates on this one, hopefully I should have some screenshots to show off by the end of the week!

In addition to this, I’ve started to look at adding another 40/50 products onto the eBay store for the SussexPetStore site, which I am hoping will provide some energy as to move that project forward on a more steady heading. I am hoping to be in a position to be able to carry some stock myself by the end of January, and all being well this will mean that prices can be reduced significently!

Whilst I normally do enjoy putting together flat pack furniture (not many people can say that!) but these latest purchases have left me boggled. It just seems to be the same few parts put together in different places and in a different order.

We’ve spent nearly 4 hours working together in order to get the first cabinet put together. I don’t think we got every piece in the right place (there is one peice at the back of the cabinet that looks out of place, but we had gone too far by then to be turning back!

All in all whilst the flatpack part of the day wasn’t overly enjoyable, we did this to a background of putting Christmas tree’s down, and working on many different things around the house to ensure that it is tidy for the impending visit of my partners mother and her partner.

Hopefully we’ll be in a position to be able to have a spare bedroom available for when they arrive.

The 3rd sector (Charities and voluntry organisations that provide some of the functions of local/central government) will prepare over 4 million christmas styled dinners today, and will hopefully see all of those eaten up.

So whilst you are sitting at your dinner table, spare a thought for those who are less fortunate than we are, and maybe consider making a small donation to charity.

Today I received several rather nice Christmas presents, including a new watch, and am forever very grateful for. However I can’t help but think that it is all rather excessive given the circumstances.

I spend most of my Christmas’ alone or volunteering in the 3rd sector to help provide Christmas meals to the homeless and those less fortunate that myself.

Anyway, enjoy your Christmas, and I will take the opportunity now to wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year.

I hope that everyone has been in a position to enjoy their Christmas and will be spending their Christmas with the people around them that mean the most to them.

This Christmas many people will be left alone, and will not be in a position to do anything about it. If you have neighbours that you think might be alone this Christmas then please do spend 5 seconds of your time going to see if they are okay. With the addition of the cold weather, it is especially important that you check in on your neighbours if they are vaunrable.

I have some important news for the eBay viability project! With the name change to the Sussex Pet Store in order to make it more realistic for all to see.

So with all of this weeks events, I set about designing a new logo and ended up with two different designs. Rob liked one of them, I liked the other more, so I thought the only reasonable thing to do would be to put it to the public vote in an X-Factor style! Your votes are all important, otherwise we will have to go down to stalemate and I’ll have to get someone else to make a final decision.

The two logo’s are below. Email me with your choice!

Unfortunately for me, Christmas has not always been the best time of year for me. I have spent many Christmas’ alone, and even more without any presents sitting under the tree. I’ve become so accustomed to it that this Christmas is actually rather daunting.

What do you think? Do you think Christmas is something that everyone should be able to enjoy, or something that people over-value in todays ever more seperated society.

This year I’ve had to buy 20 odd presents, and we’ve still got to take them up to Rob’s parents, which is definately going to be the fun part of it.

In other news, I’m currently working on a few new projects. I will be rebranding/renaming the eBay viability project, as it appears that it does need a bit of an overhaul, the same self-imposed rules will apply (i.e. the two different donation pots), but the profit levels, and hopefully the resulting profit will increase. I already have redesigned the logo for this, and will be in a position to be able to launch this shortly after the new year. I do hope that this will also help to achieve some of the better targets I have set.

But with the bad weather effecting trains, trams, buses, and all forms of public transport (even the london underground transport service appears to be suffering as the result of the weather). I am left to wonder if we can achieve anywhere near the amount of sales that are needed in order to keep this economy in growth.

What do you think? Is the economy going to suffer yet again because of the bad weather? Are we too reliant on the weather to control our own activities. I think that we may be falling fowl of this, and with comparisions between the UK and Russia, and the airport closures, as well as road closures and the ability to use grit in a proactive way.

I am seriously considering a move to Russia, because even if really bad weather takes hold, then I will be safe in the knowledge that the local government will be capible of ensuring that the whole country doesn’t grind to a halt.

On another note, I have created a new twitter account, dedicated to the arrivals and departures from Brighton train station. I am going to look at automating this over the next few days so that you can have your departures and arrivals from Brighton straight onto the twitter account. Hopefully this will help to boost the productivity of businesses in and around Brighton, Think about it…a live feed straight to your mobile giving you the latest details about the next train and how the network as a whole is running.

I’m hoping to do this for the new year, hopefully before too many people are back at work! Keep an eye out for the updates!

Whilst I’m fully aware that almost all of the suggestions that anyone considered to be a member of the public would be ignored, it is quite illuminating that one service provider has cancelled all of their services leaving Brighton. Unfortunately I don’t believe this is the providers fault, as the route that the line going to this destination has to take is bad at the best of times, however if more maintainence were to be carried out then it wouldn’t look so bad on the service providers.

In today’s blame culture however, this does seem like a deliberate step taken by the maintenance firms in order to ensure that one providers trains do not run on time and at worst, do not run at all, which is what appears to have happened today.

I did notice however that the shoppers are out in force again in the lanes in Brighton. I live with my partner very close to the north lanes in Brighton, and I do enjoy watching everyone going about their business when I get a spare moment. It serves well to remind me that I am there to help people and their businesses.

In other news I am launching the online shop version of the eBay viability project (also known as the sussex pet store) today, so stay tuned!

Ensuring that the social media you create provides your potential customers with the impression that you want them to have is crucial when growing your business. I regularly advise people on the best ways to do this, and it can vary quite significantly depending on the products and services being sold. As lets face it, there wouldn’t be any point targeting consumers if you wanted to target small businesses now would it?

Do’s

Do encourage the visitors to your social media space to visit your website, your website is your more powerful selling tool online, and will help you close those all important sales.

Do offer rewards to loyal customers, no matter what channel they come though!

Do offer special discounts to your readers via your social media networks.

Don’ts

Don’t assume that your customers will know what your message is, because the chances are that they won’t.

Don’t think that your customers won’t respond to individual contact, which in fact is the total opposite of what would happen.

It isn’t getting any easier. Despite all of the discounts available earlier this year, as yet, I have still not been able to get hold of everything, most of the time because of a lack of resourcing from the companies in question.

I had to buy around 20 presents for people this year, and so far I have managed to get hold of all bar around 3 of them.

With Christmas becoming more commercialised, it is no wonder that this is happening more and more to people across the UK and beyond.

I’m working on two different possibilities, one is to use an online card service, and the second is to send e-cards to all of my friends and relatives.

Which one do you think is best?

So to date, 5 items have been sold from the eBay viability project. Hopefully with that in mind, a few of you will be inspired to buy some more of the stock from the eBay viability project!

Whilst each product sold is not worth much in terms of profit, it is however, worth every penny that it makes.

Hopefully you will agree with me and start to buy some of the items listed on the eBay store!

I firmly enjoy the usage of my computer, and want other people to do the same. I have firmly agreed and even given to the computer games market by the way of a few free games downloads. Unfortunately those games are no longer available, mainly because I’ve decided not to realise any code that could potentially be used to harm the market as a whole.

There are some sectors of society that firmly believe on some level at least that children should never be allowed to (at least prior to the age of around 14) be allowed to play any games online at all.

Unfortunately quite a large section of the same community are also the ones that DO allow their children to do so.

However, there are always people that have the ability to make gaming safe for all, young people that need protecting as well as normal individuals, and children all alike. These people however are reluctant to do anything about it, purely because it is not commercially viable for them to do so!

I’m hoping that this will help people to focus and continue to focus on helping the LGBT community to survive within Brighton and beyond. With the problems and controversy surrounding this years Pride event, and the already riled events around next years event, I felt it was only time to stand up (metophorically at least!) and do something about it!

With that in mind I have decided to establish a group for Brighton businesses to show their support for each other and gain some free advertising space in the process. I’m also hoping that they will want to help and establish their presence within Brighton and help expand it further.

I hope that I will be able to count the support of everyone in the community, and not just the few that want to ensure that this is a success.

I will be launching the website over the next few weeks, and with a bit of luck will have it filled with information before it goes live so that it launches as it means to go on, by helping those around it. Shortly after launch I’ll also be releasing a series of images that will be free to use for anyone within the LGBT community.

I started my day by responding to comments and updating the privacy policy for my website. I then spent a short amount of time sorting out the eBay viability project, and shortly thereafter posted my first blog post of the day.

After this, I decided to look over a customer’s website to see what could be done to improve it. After realising that I wanted more information, I wrote an email to that effect and decided to go onto some of the more mundane tasks that I’ve got to do.

All in all a rather long and boring day!

I’ve also not posted as much over the past couple of days on my website, this is not a sign of me not spending as much time on this project, but a sign of how much time I am actually spending on this. I want this to work so that everyone in the community can benefit. With help for heros getting a reasonable percentage for this, and the rest going to a fund to help SMEs across the South of England with their marketing, I see no reason not to want this to work.

I hope that this is a sign of things to come, and as such I have listed a few more products for people to buy on the eBay store. I am hoping that for every product sold I will list another 2, giving me an ever expanding product range on the store, and hopefully this will mean that more and more people are able to benefit from the overall cause here.

I will hopefully be in a position to announce the application process at the beginning of next year, with the first grants being given out in May/June 2011. I am hoping that the applicants will find the money useful. A maximum grant of £500 will be made available to a small number of the applicants. More details of this will be confirmed closer to the time.

I have managed to get the HuJay website in to the top 30 out of the over 49,000 websites tested by Nibbler so far, I’ve also managed to get this website into the top 10 of SilkTide’s Nibbler free website testing solution.

In other news, I’ve finally managed to link my xBox 360S to my PC, I had to take it off the network, but I did manage to link it together!

So all in all, it has been a rather busy but interesting day. Hopefully more of them to come in the future.

It hasn’t actually taken me that long or that much time to improve my score. I started on 8.7, and that was barely 2 weeks ago. Since then I have optimised my website, started updating this blog more regularily, and done a lot more in terms of twitter posts. However one thing that I have been caught out on, is when you post a semi-negative twitter post. This can and will have a negative effect on your Nibbler score, so I would advise keeping all of your social marketing onto a more positive front.

I have as a result been able to list a few of the dog beds, of many different variations, which should hopefully help to raise more funds for the Help for Heros.

I have listed 5 plastic beds at £8.99 each, and 2 faux suede beds at £13.50 each. Normal postage and packaging applies, but it should produce a small profit for the charity, as well as for the enterprise marketing fund.

They are available via the eBay shop setup for this project

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/sussexpetstore

The individual items are listed at

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=120659522669

and

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=120659510963

I cannot stress how important it is that this money is raised for Help for Heros and the Enterprise Marketing fund. Not only are you helping solider’s when they need the most help, but you are also helping small businesses across the south east to market their businesses.

In order to make the project more realistic, I have created the website http://www.sussexpetstore.com, which lists a wider selection of products. After speaking to SME’s across East Sussex, I have established that this is what they would start by doing, and then as their feedback profiles increased on eBay, they would list a wider selection of their stock on eBay.

So I instead spent the day dealing with Christmas presents. My Partner and I have got nearly all of the Christmas presents we need to for this Christmas, with one or two minor exceptions, and whilst we are not worrying overly as there two weeks to go, and we have only got three presents to get, my main concern however is that we do need to get one or two of them online, and with the current problems faced by Royal Mail after the recent problems with snow, should I give up now or chance it and hope that they turn up on time.

Anyway, overall it has been a quiet and fustraiting day, which I have not been able to do anything that I would have liked to do.

The systems at http://browsershots.org/ provide users with the ability to view screenshots of their choosen website as long as it publically accessible, in the screen resolution and colour defination they choose.

A full run of all of the available browsers takes around an hour to complete, and whilst you are required to go back once every 30 minutes to extend the time your request is running for, I wasn’t able to pull myself away from it for more than 5 minutes!

It’s free to use, and whilst you are required to register if you want to run more than one site a day through the system, it’s also free to register, so well worth the 2 minutes you spend filling in the most basic of information.

At the end of the process you can also download all of the screenshots so that you can go through them in more detail and so that you have a perminant record for what your website looked like in those browsers at that moment in time.

This is truely an innovative system, and something that will be very useful for website design and development firms all over the world! If you’ve got a website, why not try it out to see what your website looks like on SeaMonkey in Windows XP (Yes, that’s a real browser!)

1. Make sure your website is not made entirely of Flash based components.

Flash based components are unreadable by search engines, and in my opinion, whilst they look pretty, they do not gain any advantage when it comes to Google and the other search engines will practically ignore your website, and whilst your website may achieve basic keyword recognition from your domain name, nothing else will be picked up. If you are a business with a purely flash based website, then you are suprisingly breaking the law. Under the disability laws enforced in the UK, all public access points for your business must be disability aware and able to be read by all sectors of the community. Unfortunately visually impaired users even with the aid of screen reading software will not be able to read even the most sophisticated flash based website. Whilst I don’t normally name and shame, I had a small heated conversation with someone on Facebook about this very topic earlier.

2. Make sure your website is W3C compliant.

W3C compliant websites have the highest possible chance of being read by a majority of website browsers. Again using so called “non-standard” technologies can have a huge impact on both usability and continued readership. Again websites operated by businesses with W3C compliant websites are more likely to pass the various laws in the UK that relate to websites operated by businesses, including the disability laws.

3. Check your spelling! Twice!

Something that many people look at when browsing a website is spelling. Making sure that your website has correct spellings on any and all pages, can ensure that customers keep on coming back. Incorrect spellings can ensure that your customers don’t come back.

4. Make sure your website works on other systems/devices.

Out of all of the websites I have enounted when looking at SME websites in Brighton, I have discovered something very interesting. Almost all of the websites I encounted did not work correctly on my iPad, iPhone, or my BlackBerry, and with these three types of devices being some of the most common on the market, and over 20 million hours of Internet usage each year between them, they are a very sizable chunk of Internet usage in the UK.

5. Don’t use inline CSS

Every single website that I looked at during the SME website study used inline CSS of some description, and whilst this is unavoidable in some cases, this will actually work against you both in terms of search engine friendlyness and disability awareness. Again there could actually be technical legal issues with too much inline CSS.

6. Use ALT tags and TITLE tags on images and hyperlinks respectively.

Almost all of the websites contained at least one image without an ALT tag, and almost all of the websites didn’t make use of the TITLE tag on hyperlinks. These both help visually impaired users, as well as search engines.

7. Make sure that your links work

Whilst I only encounted this on 3 websites out of the over 30 that I looked at, it is still something that needs checking periodiocally to ensure that every link still works. A major website recently changed their file structure, and as a result a majority of their user profiles became inaccessible for over 6 hours until someone spotted it and got their technical team to resolve the issue. If this can happen to large organisation with a multi-million pound turnover company, then it can happen to any of us.

8. Optimise your images

This is something that a majority of people fall foul of. When designing a website, designers use very high quality images so that you see the best the website can possibly be. However when that same website goes into production it needs to ensure that the images are optimised for use online.

9. Update your website regularily

Updating your website regularily is something that many companies miss. You’ve got your website, excellent, but make sure that it doesn’t go stale. Making sure your website is updated on a regular basis, and if possible provide customers with an RSS feed for your potential customers to follow. It means that you can keep in touch with your potential customers, and with the advancement of RSS readers on most modern smartphones, you are right in your customers pockets all the time.

10. Make sure you have more than just a mobile telephone number on your website!

This is one of the most important points anyone can make. Having a mobile telephone number and nothing else on your website is as bad as having just an 0845 number on your website. Having just a mobile telephone number on your website will drive your customers away, and with telephone numbers available for a couple of pounds a month and getting them diverted doesn’t normally cost much more. So really there isn’t an excuse.

So there you have it. My 10 top tips for what not to do on your website. It’s an interesting topic and something that I will no doubt revisit later.

I am hoping that this is a sign of things to come, and not a prelude to the end.

Other than that it has been a quiet few days, but I am hoping that all being well, we will start to see some more activity on the store. Check out http://stores.ebay.co.uk/SussexPetStore for more details and to see what I’ve got listed up there today.

To make this commercial experiment appear a little more realistic I have launched a website under the same name, and will integrate the two so that people can link them when they are browsing. However this may take some time, and time is one thing that is in short supply at the moment.

I hope that over the past few days everyone has been in a position to be able to keep themselves warm out of the cold.

Long may it continue!

I have started a subscription up to one of the small eBay stores. Other than promoting the store through here, I haven’t promoted it at all.

In haste to make sure this works well for everyone, I have listed a few more products today. I have put the links below.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=120657412768

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=120657411808

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=120657411694

I listed my first multiple purchase product on the eBay shop. Speaking of which I am pleased to be able to post the link to the store which I have setup on eBay.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/SussexPetStore

I am hoping that this is going to turn out to be something that benefits the Help for Hero’s charity long term as well as ensuring that small businesses across the South East of England have access to crucial funding in the future. I am aiming long term to provide some form of funding possibly in the region of £500 grants to small businesses across the South East.

So far unfortunately, nothing has sold, and whilst this isn’t a good sign I still hold in good faith that this can be viable, but I am starting to have doubts. However I do keep on reminding myself that it is very early days, but considering that with every item that doesn’t sell takes away from the profit of the whole project.

I have decided that once the first 5 sales have been made, I will move the commercial viability website over to it’s own website.

At present there are a total of 7 items on sale on eBay, and I will be adding a few more today to help the count of products and hopefully to allow some sales to be made finally.

I am going to expand the product range to include more of the Christmas products, and include some for cats, as well as for other pets.

The one main problem is that using an account with 0 feedback to start with makes the whole process very difficult to the immediate sales of products.

eBay charges £0.20 to list this item, and PayPal will charge around £0.35 for the item, leaving me with £3.99 minus the final value fee that eBay will charge. Normally eBay will charge another £0.28 for this, again leaving the amount at £4.46, with the costs of the item as well as the postage at £4.31, it does leave a very small profit of £0.15. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, but as a small trial item, it doesn’t look that bad.

eBay and PayPal between them take £0.83, for an item that has a sale price of £2.79! That’s 29% of the total price! Shame on eBay & PayPal

Now all I’ve got to do is sell the item.



They are listed below:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120655550143

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120655550400

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120655552085

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120655560785

eBay charges £0.20 to list this item, and PayPal will charge around £0.35 for the item, leaving me with £3.99 minus the final value fee that eBay will charge. Normally eBay will charge another £0.28 for this, again leaving the amount at £3.71, with the costs of the item as well as the postage at £3.45, it does leave a very small profit of £0.26. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, but as a small trial item, it doesn’t look that bad.

eBay and PayPal between them take £0.83, for an item that has a sale price of £2.79! That’s 29% of the total price! Shame on eBay & PayPal

Now all I’ve got to do is sell the item.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120655522723

Commercial viability dictates that I will have to make enough profit after 6 months to be able to live. As with any business this is to be set at about £7,000.00 in a 6 month period. I have already pledged 20% of the total profit, which is potentially over £1,500 for the Help for Hero’s charity.

As with any business it will never be able to sustain someone effectively within the first 3 months, but after this time, it should be enough for someone to live on a £14,000 a year wage. Normally I would never recommend taking anything out of a new business within the first 2 years, especially considering the current economic climate.

Hopefully we will see what happens over the next few weeks and months to see if eBay is still a way to profit alone, or if it is purely only a supplementary income for an existing business. Hopefully over the next 6 months, I will prove this theory one way or the other.

So here is to wishing myself the best of luck!

So I’ve decided to take on a challenge set by one of my long term customers. Over the next 6 months I have to resell products and make an overall profit. I’ve started on this today, with something that I thought every new pet owner would love. A bed for puppies.

So if you want a new bed for your small dog or new puppy, then please head on over to eBay, and you might even be  helping me to provide a bit of insight into how profitable eBay can be for those who want to make a serious living out of it.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be hopefully listing quite a few products to see which ones sell best.

I’ll add a page onto my website so that you can see what items I’m listing and if you like what you see, you might consider buying some of it! It’ll all be being supplied from a company in Derbyshire. So far I have managed to sell one of the beds, and hopefully over the next few weeks and months, I’ll also publish details of how much profit is being made. At the end of the process I’ll donate 20% of all of the profit made to the Help for Hero’s fund.

So make sure you keep an eye out for the items on eBay as well as the items on the new page!

This is something that any small business consultant would support, but given the current economic climate, I find myself asking if it is so wise to do more than to try and conserve money and energy in an attempt to keep customers coming through the door. With the OFB saying that growth will be very slow at best, means that we will see more and more businesses using up their reserves, and unable to continue trading in the same way as they are at the moment. Whilst the LGBT community in Brighton is very resilient, making most small businesses in the Brighton area quite comfortable moving forward, it is still somewhat uncertain for most companies in Brighton.

I work with some very small businesses in and across Brighton and beyond, and I would say that 90% of them are guarding their finances, and especially their reserve “pots” with much more vigor than normal. Whilst marking and other ways of gaining new business does appear to be on the increase at the moment, don’t take this as a sign of strength in the market.

Small businesses are definitely looking around for the best deal and are happy to go further afield if it means that they are in a position to save more money, whilst most small business aren’t quite ready to go abroad just yet with most of their services they will go definitely to London, if not further north in order to gain those extra price breaks.

Whilst the rest of the country went into meltdown, the people of Brighton seemed to not be effected by the bad weather predictions at all. Over this weekend I am not aware of any rain falling, or of a single road requiring treatment with grit.

I don’t know about you, but it appears to me that the British media caused a frenzy in parts of the country where the likelihood of problems occurring where minimal to none.

In my mind, this is an advancement both in terms of technology, as well as home security. I have a lot of IT equipment in my flat, and when I go out for the day to work, or to meet a friend for lunch, I want to know that when I come back that everything will still be there, and if not, then I will be notified within a very short period of time.

In other news, I have started to work with another company over the past few days, and they have given me the option to promote them via this website. This is something that I shant be turning down, and shall be working closely with. Stay tuned for more details.

I have found that most employers are unsympethic for someone to go into employment with a disability, whilst there is a recession and I, like many others that are in a similar position, have also accepted that we will be discriminated against both in terms of pay and conditions. That is if you can get employment at all!

A word to the wise, if you are disabled, make sure you keep a log of all CV’s sent out, when they were sent out, and if a response was received. In most cases, employers will not respond, purely in my opinion, because they see someone who is potentially disabled, and decide that they do not want the hassle. Whilst it is illegal for employers to do this, it is almost impossible for potential employees to prove this is the case. I have worked on both sides of the table, and it is mostly true that employers do you want to take on anyone who may have a disability, mainly because they assume that there will be several problems associated with employing someone with a disability. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. Whilst my disability is only very slight on most days (fortunately!), on the days when it is bad, I am still not any different, of course I am limited to what I can and cannot do, but I ensure that I am only applying for jobs where I will be able t0 actually do the job, even on my worst days.

Well with all that being said, I am still job hunting, and dispite my disability, I do have a large number of skills that a large number of firms would really benefit from. This article and articles like this is just one of the many skills I possess when working within organisations. Being Brighton based, I am very close to the sea, which helps my health in a mryid of ways. As a result, I am reluctant to be away from the sea air for long periods of time.

So what do you think? Are you finding that the employers in Brighton are discriminating against people with disabilities?

Using these books I have already been able to achieve a 0.1 increase in my rating with the Nibber website, which I mentioned in one of my previous articles.

I am hoping that by the end of the month I will be in a position to provide these services to external agencies, just as I do with my consulting services at the moment.

Stay tuned for more updates on the books and how I manage to move things forward for the website!

This has meant a change in mindset for myself, but it is also something that I would look to other freelance IT consultants also to do. At the moment it is very easy to take a large job and unless it is ultimately secured, then please do consider taking on a smaller job as well. This will help you to keep some level of financial stability in the current financial climate.

Whilst I have been very lucky within the large corporations that I have been able to provide and produce services that keep customers of all sizes interested, I am also very concerned that everything I have done has been with great sacrifice on my part, and the part of others who keep my company on a regular basis. For example I have stopped attending meetings, which 3 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought about skipping.

Part of this is no doubt down the achievements I have made when working with businesses all over the country, and something that I would continue to revise in the future, however having only recently really discovered the true worth of the skills that I bring to the table. Some of these skills are transferable, and some of them, unfortunately are not. The business accumen that I bring to the table at any business discussion has without doubt saved many businesses from making very costly mistakes.

So what about you? What have done in order to help you survive during the recession? Have you got any tips and tricks that can help others in the same field? Drop me an email and let me know. I’ll pick the top 5 and publish them next week!

Nibbler rates websites based on 4 different categories. These are;

• Accessibility
• Experience
• Marketing
• Technology

At the moment my score is 9.2 out of a possible 10! When I first found the website my score was not bad at 7.6, but I decided that I should do something to resolve the issues and improve my score. Well, it turned into a competition, once I got up to 8.6, I decided that I would try to get into the top 100, now this is something that means loads of bugfixes on the website, but it has been well worth it! The testing that Nibbler does takes into account W3C standards, Social Media posts, incoming links from Google and Yahoo, as well as a host of other things.

I’m hoping that eventually I will be able to get up to 9.7, which is 0.1 higher than the current champion! – Check out the Nibbler website today (http://nibbler.silktide.com)

However whilst carrying out the monthly maintanence of my asterisk box, I discovered much to my dismay that my automatic call forwarding when people have been out of the office hasn’t been working correctly. This is somewhat annoying, especially for me. I therefore have spent a considerable amount of my time today attempting to fix this problem when I realised that I had long forgotten about the Asterisk module I had started to build in a previous life.

I dug out the old code in between reinstalling various parts of a 3 year old asterisk system, and realised that this would be perfect for something I had been working on recently. I am therefore hoping that I will be able to ge the module up and running, and post it here for everyone to make use of.

The first major problem with MVC frameworks is durability when the websites that use the framework expand to large amounts of users. At present most frameworks slow down to a virtual stop when you get to around 5,000 concurrent users.

The second major problem with most of the MVC frameworks is that when they are expanded at some point in the future it can take nearly as long for a developer who hasn’t seen that particular piece of code for a while as someone who is writing the code from scratch, in some cases, it has actually been quicker to rewrite code than to debug the existing code base, purely because it is based on an MVC framework.

These two points are some of the biggest points that based on the feedback I have received from developers and system administrators are being faced with in the current development environments.

Over the next couple of days I’m hoping to get a first draft of the MVC framework online for everyone to download and test out. This will be a a very very rough draft, but it is one that I feel will be very much commercially viable. It will be on a very restricted license, as I have not determined the final use. Anyone wanting to take a look at it will be required to sign a legally binding non-disclosure agreement.

As it turns out they are quite awsome! I’ve also managed to (and don’t tell O2 this!) link it up to my Exchange 2007 server via the Blackberry Enterprise Server Express, which means that I have the same connectivity as most corporate organisations for a fraction of the price! For those of you in the know the Blackberry software normally costs megabucks to obtain, but recently RIM seems to have taken a turn towards community mindedness and are now giving away 75 user licenses for their Blackberry Enterprise Server software for free. They’ve rebranded it as an express version, which it most definately was when it came to setup and installation. All done within 40 minutes.

The last Blackberry Enterprise Server I installed took me nearly 4 hours, and that was on a test lab network to try out some of the new features of version 5.