Shrink-Wrapped thoughts

And all free today...

2008-02-28T16:20:00.003Z

...said the kiddy catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

But not all free stuff has a nasty catch. How about these, which I find myself recommending again and again.

OpenOffice.org - includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, and database. If you have used Microsoft Office, you will feel at home, and if you haven't, you never need to!

ippimail.com - yes, another web based email account, but this one raises money for a charity of your choice. This HAS to be better than Hotmail & Googlemail.

Firefox - some people still think you have to use Internet Explorer - wrong!

If only certain retailers gave you these as standard...

Keeping it Simple II

2008-02-26T16:22:00.004Z

Time for a few more shameless plugs for websites I have worked on recently.

Firths Solid Surfaces - Corian surfaces for kitchens and anywhere else.

Apartments in La Tercia, Spain - for people looking for a Spanish golf holiday

Physis - Social & Market Research, and Consulting.

Once again, simple designs, quick to load, does the job.

Sir Henry rediscovered

2008-01-07T09:42:00.000Z

From the mid-70s to mid-80s, many hours were spent listening to Vivian Stanshall's sessions on the John Peel show, telling the tales of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. Several phrases from there have stayed with me ever since ("If I had all the money I've spent on drink...I'd spend it on drink!")

Some parts of the saga were re-worked for a CD, but I assumed that the remainder were gathering dust in a BBC archive, never to be heard again. So thank goodness for home taping.

The Perfumed Garden has three pages devoted to the Stanshall sessions, with .zip files of the recordings.

Now I can die happy.

Shopping for beginners

2007-11-23T13:40:00.000Z

I have been asked to work on improving an existing web shop, which was set up using Actinic Express. This is one I had not come across before, but it seems to give you an online shop pretty quickly and easily. The problem is, the options for changing the look are pretty limited - a handful of templates and a fairly confusing panel where you can change some colours.

Previously I had used Zen Cart, many more options, and as a result, much more complicated to set up.

The owners of the shop gave me a simple question - should they stick with Actinic Express (£20 a month, plus a bit of my time to tidy it up), or get me to re-build the shop in ZenCart (free, but a lot more of my time). After seeing how far they had got with Actinic, with no help from outsiders, I advised them to stick with it. It may not be the most elegant of packages, but it does the job. 4bumpsandbabies.co.uk is still work in progress, but is looking better already.

You too, part III

2007-11-15T08:49:00.000Z

Another gem has turned up on Sellaband - Luckyhorse. A duo who sound uncannily like early David Bowie, and some wonderful songs. Well worth a listen.

I should also mention Bim, the sort of floaty vocals & electronica act which I would normally ignore, but they just leapt out at me.

Menawhile over on SliceThePie, things still seem surrounded by mystery. Scouting continues (and continues to pay for my investments in Sellaband), but the showcase voting and finance raising part of the exercise is just not transparent enough.

Keeping it simple

2007-11-14T13:24:00.000Z

Some of my earlier posts on web design hinted at my Keep It Simple way of working, but here are a few examples of sites I have worked on recently -

Northstar Services - cleaners, just wanted soemthing simple to publicise their cleaning services.

Tek2 Fly fishing wanted a site which was 90% static, with an events page which they could edit.

Northern Scientific sell and service vacuum pumps.

Mark Azopardi wanted a simple, clean site to show his artwork.

Nothing flashy. Nothing expensive. Just happy customers.

Picture This

2007-10-22T16:08:00.000+01:00

Another useful weapon has been added to my website armoury - Gallery2.

I was asked by a photographer if I could set up a site for him, which he could update, as easily as possible. I had already stumbled upon Gallery2, and decided to give it a go.

The webhost I use included it as an option, part of the Fantastico Deluxe package, which got around all the usual problems of how/where to install 3rd party add-ons. To cut a long story short, it was a doddle to use, and the working website was live within 24 hours.

Definitely recommended.

Too long, continued...

2007-09-28T09:51:00.000+01:00

As I was saying, leave them wanting more. This week I have found one of the best debut albums I have heard for, ooh, quite a while.

Vandaveer is an acoustic project by Mark Heidinger, previously heard in The Apparitions, a power pop band from Kentucky. The album, Grace & Speed, is a collection of ten songs, mostly one voice, one guitar, and each one close to perfect to these ears.

Total album length? About 33 minutes. Can't wait for the next half hour to be released.

Hark! The sound of Ramones spinning...

2007-09-14T13:16:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday I saw one of the strangest Sunday paper CD giveaways yet.

A while back the Mail gave away Tubular Bells, much to Mike Oldfield's dismay (although apparently it gave a nice boost to sales of his other masterpieces).

This time, it was the Star, a paper which I normally avoid. In fact I normally avoid Sunday papers altogether - either total garbage or too much to read in a day. Anyway, those nice people at the Star were giving away a Ramones CD, "featuring all of their greatest hits". And yes, I fell for it.

What you actually got was seven tracks taken from "We're Outta Here", a recording of the very last Ramones gig (Aug 6th 1996, The Palace, Hollywood). Not their finest hour. Sheena Is a Punk Rocker is half sung half mumbled, or maybe half forgotten. And on Rock N Roll High School, the "rock rock rock rock" line sounds like a duck in distress. You also got a fine spelling mistake - the first track is apparently "Blitzkrieg Pop". And there's "Teenage Labotomy" too.

But the fun starts when the seventh track is over. Ten seconds of silence and then what can only be described as background music for a corporate safety video. According to the sleeve, these "bonus tracks", eight of them, are performed by Stewart Dugdale, and have absolutely nothing to do with the Ramones. A quick Google of Mr Dugdale show that he writes and records copyright-free music. But why do the Star pad out their CDs with it?

Answers on a postcard please. In the meantime, I will add it to the small pile of free newspaper DVDs we seem to have acquired (thanks kids), and go back to listening to "It's Alive", which possibly was their finest hour

In case you have just switched on

2007-09-13T11:32:00.000+01:00

A new feature seems to have crept into virtually every documentary/reality show I watch on commercial channels. Not only do we get an ad break, but when the programme returns, we get a summary of everything that happened in the previous section, as if we have either had a sudden attack of amnesia, or just switched on.

Also, just before the ad break, we usually get a preview of what's coming up after the break.

So all in all, there isn't actually a great deal of content, but the best bits get seen two or three times.

Very guilty of this was "Dumped", the otherwise OK saga of a group of people trying to live on a land-fill site. I taped three hour-long episodes, and managed to watch all three in well under two hours, by missing out the adverts and the bits which assumed my brain had gone out with my own rubbish.

Too long!

2007-08-29T11:43:00.000+01:00

I recently bought the debut CD by a new act - saw him live, heard some tracks on the radio, liked it all. In went the CD, and all was well....until 60 minutes later it was still going....and after 70 minutes there was still more.

At the end of it, the urge to play it all again was just not there. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but back in the days of vinyl LPs, when the maximum time was about 45 minutes, the urge to put it straight back on was there more often.

Only rarely did acts release a double album of 80 minutes, and only then when they were well established, often as a live or big concept album. Now it seems to have become the norm to give "value for money" by packing the CD until it is bursting with tracks. And for me, it detracts from the impact. Take a 70+ minute CD, reduce it to 45-50 at the most, and leave 'em wanting more!

You too...part 2

2007-08-29T11:22:00.000+01:00

A few weeks on from the last post, and time to write a bit more about Sellaband and SliceThePie.

Sellaband has been around for a while, and seems to me the most "mature" of the two. Several artists have already raised the finance to make a CD, and a few more are getting close. There are plenty of quality acts on there, but two which have impressed me are Daniel Ward-Murphy and Kane Sole. Have a listen.

Meanwhile, SliceThePie has some catching up to do. While there is definitely some music on there worth hearing, the site as a whole just doesn't tempt you back. News updates are few and far between (I actually thought the site had rolled over and died a couple of weeks ago), and the whole process seems a bit of a mystery. Compare this with the constant running totals on Sellaband, and SliceThePie looks a bit thin on facts and figures. How well are your favourite acts doing? Who are the leaders that you might want to check out? Why the secrecy? Anyway, I have made a bit of cash doing reviews, and my vote in the first showcase went to Scars on 45. No money has been invested yet though.

You too can be in the music business...

2007-08-08T08:47:00.000+01:00

A little bit of a revolution seems to be taking place in the music industry, at least if you believe what a couple of websites are saying about themselves.

We have already had artists breaking through allegedly on the strength of their on-line fan base. Now, potentially, we have a lot more. Sellaband and SliceThePie both offer you, the punter, the chance to put your money where your ears are, and buy a share in the artist's future success.

The Sellaband model is simple - lots of artists to listen to, find one you like and for $10 you can buy one of the 5000 shares available in that artist. Buy more if you want to. When the artist has sold all 5000 shares, Sellaband take over and help the artist make an album. You get a copy of the CD, plus royalties from other sales, plus a share of advertising from the Sellaband site.

SliceThePie is even more interesting, because the casual listener can get paid for reviewing the artists. Listen to bands in the Scouting area, write a short review, score them out of 10, and you earn 10-30p, depending on how your reviewing skills match up with the general consensus. You can take your money out if you want to, or you can use it to buy "contracts" in the bands who get the highest scores. These in turn earn money depending on sales over the the next two years. Complicated, but fun.

So will it work, or will it fizzle out as bands fall out with their new owners and run off with the cash? Come back in 2009, and I'll tell you how much I made.

Choose a colour, any colour

2007-08-02T17:10:00.000+01:00

Finding the right colour scheme for a website is hard to reduce to a set of rules. It just looks good or it doesn't. Here are a few sites I have found which help with the task.

Colour Lovers - Not just for websites (so some of the schemes are definitely off limits), but browse through and you might just get some inspiration. You can share your own schemes, and tell each other how lovely their colours are. Nice.

Colour Pallette creator - a simple tool, choose a base colour, and watch it get blended in various stages with white and black, or any other colour. Good for the monochrome look.

Colours from a photo - an interesting tool. Choose a photo with the feeling you want the website to have, and hey presto, it produces a series of colours for you. Of course, you could just sample them yourself, but a second opinion is always good.

Webpage painter - choose one colour, and it generates eleven more. Then you can use them to paint a sample web page. Limited, but useful.

A few good sites, Part 1

2007-07-24T15:52:00.000+01:00

Time to pick out a few of the best web sites I have seen recently. Not the flashiest, not the cleverest, just the ones which have made me stop and think "this is a nice site". So, before I lose the piece of paper where I scribble them down -

www.innocentdrinks.co.uk - Lots to do and see, well laid out, and nicely quirky, without being confusing. Lots of space too.

www.castironchimineas.co.uk - So there I was, looking for a chimnea for the patio, and this was the one site, of the many I found, which explained everything I needed to know, and offered me a good choice, and had good prices. Once again, well laid out, full of information.

www.steorn.com - The content may be strange (a perpetual motion engine), but the colours just jumped out at me.

www.hha.org.uk - Yes, the front screen is full of little boxes, but the different colours make it easy on the eye. If the menu across the top was a drop-down, it might be even better, as the extra options which sometimes appear down the left are a little confusing. On the whole though, good looking.

Telly Trouble

2007-07-19T08:17:00.000+01:00

So the BBC are telling themselves off for fixing the results of phone-in contests. The big surprise is that anyone is surprised. Now if only they stopped all phone-in voting as well, we might return to television which is driven by quality rather than the potential to make money. Celebrity Makeover Swap on Ice - call now to tell us who YOU want to save.

Meanwhile another rumble is going on about shows being "faked" - apparently Gordon Ramsey didn't actually catch the fish he was seen bringing back from the sea. Well, surprise surprise (again). Do they really think that we really think that the cameras just happen to be rolling every time the estate agents call Phil & Kirsty to say the offer has been accepted? Or do they really sit in the cafe for hours, days even, with a bottle of champagne ready, just in case?

But thousands of BBC employees are going to go on training courses on Integrity, at a cost of quite a few millions no doubt. How about just sending out a memo - "Tell the truth or you are sacked".

You've been Googled

2007-07-12T16:21:00.001+01:00

One of the reasons I was curious to set up this once-in-a-while blog, was to see how effective it was at getting into Google. Just a few weeks down the line and Google has caught up with me - search for phrases I have used, and there I am.

So that gives me an excuse to give a plug to a site I recently worked on Abbey Furniture. The site was built elsewhere (I'll name no names), but they had left the job half finished, with no keywords, no descriptions, and some of the page links not working. Now Google is finding it, but will it find it even more if I mention it here? Only time will tell...

Live Earth refuses to die

2007-07-11T08:17:00.000+01:00

The rumbles and grumbles about the Live Earth concert continue to amuse and entertain, often more so than the concert itself.

The big theme is the hypocrisy of the artists - "how much recycling does Madonna do and how many cars does she own". Good point, but if her performing can pull in an audience of quite a few million, and if one in a thousand of those people change their light bulbs and turn down their washing machine temperature, then they will probably balance out her excesses.

The big test for the artists will be on their next tours. If Genesis go around the world by sea, performing acoustic sets from the back of a horse and cart, we'll know it has worked.

But if Al Gore suddenly pops up as a candidate for President, then we may just feel that we have been conned.

And why oh why did they cut away from Spinal Tap (built up all day as the highlight) after one and a half songs, to show what was happening in Japan??????

CD times are a changin'

2007-07-04T12:43:00.000+01:00

The news that another chain of CD shops has gone is no great surprise. Recent warnings from HMV showed that all is not well on the high street, and one of my favourite independent shops, Track Records of York, have also announced that they are calling it a day.

The finger of blame is pointed at downloads, rapidly becoming the preferred method of consuming music for many. The other culprits are said to be supermarkets, and on-line shops.

Personally, I have never bought a download - I just can't accept that "owning" a track in mp3 file format is what music buying is all about. But then again, I grew up in the days of vinyl - you could even smell the product.

As somebody who rarely buys a current chart CD, the lure of supermarket music departments has never been that great.

It is the online sellers who have taken me away from the high street. Their prices are low, postage is often free, and I don't have to queue. They also killed the hobby of searching racks for the hard-to-find back catalogue stuff - everything is there, just type its name in.

The only recent occasion when I truly enjoyed time in a CD shop was in a Virgin megastore, where a scanner attached to the headphone booth allowed you to listen to (almost) any CD in the shop, and not just the 30 second clips you get online. Then I went home and ordered them online...

Cutting through the layout confusion

2007-06-28T10:24:00.001+01:00

Anyone learning the art of CSS & web design will soon be overwhelmed with different ways of building a multi-column page, with or without header, footer, fixed or liquid. So many decisions. Then there is always the question of will it work in all browsers?

For the last few sites I have built, I have used the Layout Gala as a starting point. Pretty well every type of layout you could ask for, and all based on the same html. It took me a while to get my head around the negative margins idea, but it works. The really good news is, it seems to work across all browsers too.

The only down-side that I have found is that some of the layouts do not appear correctly in the design view of Dreamweaver - you need to do a Preview to see how it's looking. But I can live with that.

With a little extra code (and one small IE hack) you can add a gutter to the full-width layouts - explanation here

If anyone has found problems with these layouts, do tell!

At last - the paperless paper

2007-06-27T13:07:00.000+01:00

How have I missed this? The First Post looks like a good alternative to the BBC news page, which has been my default news source for years. Well written, an attractive layout, and opinions too, which the BBC aren't allowed to have too many of.

Glorious Mud

2007-06-26T16:22:00.000+01:00

Yes, Glastonbury was wet too. Very wet. But what fun.

Highlights for me on the big stages were The Killers, who proved wrong those who said they weren't big enough for a headline slot, The Who, and The Marley Brothers. Oh yes, and Seasick Steve - just a shame he was on so early.

Meanwhile on the smaller stages, Duke Special did a great 30 minute set in The Queens Head, and The Men They Couldn't Hang blew the roof off The Acoustic Stage.

As for the mud, it was everywhere. A pity the chaos at the coach station (well, a field full of coaches and no information) ruined the end of the festival for so many people.

Metcheck one, cricket nil

2007-06-17T10:40:00.001+01:00

They were right. The Metcheck forecast was spot on, and not a ball was bowled. The Market Tavern in Chester-le-Street provided alternative accomodation for most of the day.

The next test is Glastonbury. At the moment the forecast is for showers on and off all weekend, which means mud. Oh great joy. I have decided to take waterproof walking boots rather than wellies - will I regret it?

Awful weather we're having

2007-06-14T14:23:00.000+01:00

Not sure how I've missed this before, but Metcheck is a pretty fine weather forecast site. Better than the BBC 5 day forecast, where you get one symbol per day.

But are they accurate? Well, I will know tomorrow, when I will either be watching the cricket at Chester-le-Street, or, according to Metcheck, watching the umpires inspect the pitch on a big screen telly in a pub.

Web Design - first thoughts

2007-06-14T11:26:00.000+01:00

Is there such a thing as good & bad web design? There are certainly sites which are easy to look at, easy to use, and those which are not. And that's what my approach boils down to.

Pet web hate number one is a site which sits there saying "Loading...68%..." before you see anything. It is well established that most web users will only give a site a few seconds to load before they hit the Back button or head off somewhere else. So keep it quick.

Then there are the sites which are impossible to find your way around - menu systems which change place from page to page, or pages which you find once, but can't find again. So keep it consistent & logical.

Colour schemes and the mechanics of layouts and menu systems can all come later - the first job is to reduce the content down to something which people might actually stop and look at.

Steve Krug's book "Don't make me think!" is essential reading, and it will make a lasting difference to the way you look at, and build, web sites.