Web Notes

QDOS

2008-06-06T02:05:00.004+01:00

I've just come across this new beta website called QDOS which measures your internet status and helps you manage your online profile.

QDOS measures your digital footprint showing how active, popular and impactful you are online.

It only takes a few minutes to add details of your online presence, then you can get it to calculate your own personalized QDOS score.

While on the surface this website seem like a fun diversion for a few minutes or so, it does have a serious side to it, as it should provoke an raised awareness of your digital footprint, and how you should keep control of it.

I'll be keeping an eye on it over the next few month or so to see how it develops and expands.

A dream come true

2008-05-30T01:06:00.002+01:00

I'd like to tell you of a success story involving a couple of friends and clients of mine, Paul Atkinson and John Smallwood, who I've known now for about four years.

I first met them after I came back from a holiday in Thailand. During the holiday I learnt to scuba dive gaining my Open Water Diver Certification at Chumphon Cabana, a quiet and secluded resort on the west coast of the Gulf of Thailand. After which on my next visit to the area I gained my Advanced Open Water Certification just a few miles further up the coast at Ban Krut with Absolut Wreck. By then I was completely hooked so to speak, so on returning to England I went and found the nearest dive shop to see about getting some proper training to dive safely in UK waters, this is where I first met Paul and John. I was actually buddied up with John for the Night Diver Specialty Course at Stoney Cove on a cold February evening, where it was warmer when we actually got in the water. Even back then John had a passion for sharing with others the joy of diving.

Since them John has progressed rapidly gaining both experience and qualifications, and is spreading his enthusiasm and passion for diving as a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer.

So enough of the background information, and back to the purpose of this post!

18 months after deciding to start up a PADI Diving School, their dream has come true for the team at Dream Divers, after what seemed a never ending search for suitable premises, they finally found some ideal place right on their doorstep. After a couple of weeks of hard work they have got both the well stocked dive shop and the purposely designed training classrooms up and running.

I popped round the other day and was very impressed of the set up and what they have managed to achieve in such a short period of time and how competitive the equipment prices in the shop were.

So when time allows I look forward to getting wet with the Dream Team at Dream Divers, either on one of their many club trips or enjoying one of the many PADI
Specialty courses that they offer.

Sophie Mei and Britains Got Talent sends Traffic through the roof

2008-05-28T18:21:00.004+01:00

Well what can I say!

After Sophie’s appearance on the first semi final of the current series of Britain’s Got Talent, the web traffic on All 4 Dance and Drama (one of the websites I work on!) went straight through the roof.

Her excellent (some would say Jaw Dropping – Yes I mean you Simon!) performance, resulted in a massive traffic spike for two days solid, the same bandwidth in two days as the whole of last month!

So the site went form an average of 100 visitors a day to over 1,000 a day for the last two days and over 400 today so far! Which has catapulted the article about sophie's semi final appearance to the most popular article on the website with over 2700 viewers in just over 2days.

The World blogging just got a lot easier

2008-04-21T17:18:00.002+01:00

If you like me, and blogging can sometimes seam a chore as you might have wrote the blog entry in Microsoft Word as a side shoot of something else you were working on, and you needed to write the blog post down before you forgot about, so you type it in to a new document and save with every intension of going on-line later and copy and pasting it to the post form of your online blog only to forget about, until you do it again, and find the previously save potential blog post of days or even week ago!

Well for users of Word 2007 this is now a thing of the past

With the built in blog post template after an initial couple of minutes to set up the link to your blogging account, you can now write your blog posts and publish them directly to your blog without leaving word.

This blog post is an excellent example of this!

You serial bloggers out their, are also well catered for as you can set up links to multiple different blogging accounts on a range of different blogging platforms.

What happened to the last year

2008-04-21T11:04:00.003+01:00

I can't believe it over a whole year has passed since by last post on this blog!

So what have I been up to:-

Properly spending more time than I should helping my wife to run our restaurant the Orient Express in Stocksbridge (which on the northern boundary of the City of Sheffield), which has both a Chinese and Oriental buffet and a Thai restaurant.

Working on the development of the All 4 Dance and Drama Website which is rapidly turning into a massive project, together with a new project for the European Festival of Dance and Performing Arts, which we were invited to work on as a result of the work we had already done on the All 4 Dance and Drama website.

Not to mention a few other web projects and being a permanently on call unpaid dad's taxi for my two oldest daughters

On and I nearly forgot I managed to get a little bit of sleep somewhere amongst it all., a

2007-03-04T21:37:00.000Z

All 4 Dance and Drama community Profile Badge test

this is a test for the HTML code so community members can post a badge on other sites like myspace so that their friends can visit there profile on the All 4 Dance and Drama Website

All 4 Dance and Drama ~ Ian Wilson

Become part of the All 4 Dance and Drama Community

The UK Dance, Music and Drama Information and Business Resource

Visit Ian Wilson’s Profile Page

Why I've Been so quite!

2007-03-02T02:29:00.000Z

Apart from the obivious problems or computer breakdowns - time for new ones I think!

I have been busy developing a new Dance, Music and Drama Information website for the Dance, Music and Drama communities in the UK, which will cover all aspects (Child Friendly) of Dance, Music and Drama ready for its official launch at the Move IT dance show on the 16th of March.

Off Topic - but entertaining

2007-01-31T19:08:00.000Z

This post is totally off topic is totally off topic, but it is interestig to watch!
Being the size of an elephant has serval advantages:-
Highway robbery Thai style

Broadband now cheaper than dial up - official

2007-01-17T12:08:00.000Z

According to this report
MSN UK News, Latest news bulletins from Reuters, UK, World, Sport, Business and Weather

Broadband is now cheaper for the customer than dial up!

Whilst I do have the facility to sell broadband to customers, due to the way BT price its wholesale broadband, there is no way I or my reselling partner can compete with the special offers now available from the like of BT, AOL and Tiscali.

"The Importance of Good Blog Entry Titles" from The Intuitive Life Business Blog

2007-01-15T03:24:00.000Z

I've Just found this interesting and useful article on Dave Taylor's Intuitive Life Business Blog, which explains the advantages of using title tags properly within a web page.
"The Importance of Good Blog Entry Titles" from The Intuitive Life Business Blog: "The Importance of Good Blog Entry Titles"

SEO: Google update

2007-01-11T23:34:00.000Z

Google seams to be in the middle of a major update of its databases!
my advice is don't panic!!!!!!!
especially if your site has dropped in the search engine results pages, these things, happen quite frequently and generally take a week or two to settle down.

If after this period your sites haven't recovered you might need to check out the optimisation of your site, and see how it can be improved, you can carry out this process yourself or you can get someone else to do it for you! Those of you that are my web design clients, this process will be included as part of your web design package, if you opted for the full maintenance package.

Anyone who didn't or are new clients please contact me for free consultation, and quotation.

The March of Technology

2007-01-10T14:28:00.000Z

Is it worth upgrading your system or is it better to buy new!
With the imminent release of Windows Vista, the computer hardware industry marketing machine is about to click in to full steam, and the generally lowest hardware prices ever, you can get a brand new windows vista capable machine for under £400 that will be able do everything most users will ever need, when you buy the necessary software.
This actually makes it totally uneconomic, in most cases, to upgrade your current machine to successfully run Windows Vista, for the price of a new graphic card, memory chips and processor, not to mention the copy of Windows Vista you can get a brand new guaranteed system, from companies such as Dell that will run straight out of the box, which will preform better than, and be more trouble fee than any upgraded system. This doesn't even take into your account the cost of your time, trying to find new drivers for your exisiting hardware.

New Government Website regulations

2006-12-24T19:02:00.000Z

Yet another set of government / EU regulations to implement!

I will be checking over my clients websites in the near future and making the necessary changes for you.
if you notice in the meantime you notice any changes that need to be made please let me know!
thanks

Ian

These OFT E-commerce guidelines might be useful to read well!

Mail mail mirgration

2006-12-24T18:26:00.000Z

Dear All,

I have just received the following notice from my hosting provider, and it affects those of you that are using the ice warp web mail inferface, it is now being upgraded to an new interface, but unfortunately, any email or sent email stored in your the ice warp inbox won't be carried over

Please let me know if you require any help in accessing and archiving these emails on your local system before they disappear for good on or around the 20th Janaury.

We are currently troubleshooting an issue with the Merak Mailserver. We feel that this mailserver has been experiencing too many issues in a short period of time and have therefore decided to move all remaining mail accounts to one of our newer mailservers which have been running trouble free for some time now.

We will complete all mail account configuration and setup so the changeover will be completely transparent to our members. You will still be able to access your mail using your current settings. You will also still be able to access the mail on the Merak server using POP or the old webmail interface for 30 days. For this, instead of using mail.yourdomain.com as the mailserver address just use 195.242.214.131.

We wish to provide our members with the best solutions available for all our services and so it was decided to upgrade the mailserver software for the new servers. Unfortunately, this means Webmail settings will not carry over to the new system as they are different systems and also old mail cannot be copied across to the new server due to being a different format. However, to compensate for this inconvenience the newer Webmail interface is much improved and there is a big bonus - contacts, calander and tasks can now be synchronised between Outlook and Webmail.

If you have any questions about this or anything else, please feel free to ask here on our forum or on the helpdesk.

Google Website optimizer

2006-12-21T00:54:00.000Z

received my invite to beta test this service out - if it works it will be a very useful tool in optimising site content to human visitor and maximising the ROI for the websites
will keep you updated during this testing phase

Portfolio pages

2006-12-19T13:00:00.000Z

I am currently in the process of updating the sites listed in my portfolio pages section
Which means that a present the list of sites is very much reduced whilst I upload the new sites to this section.

New Websites

If you want to look at the new sites in the meantime here is a list of the URL's.

Support Forums

2006-12-15T02:55:00.000Z

I have now closed these and removed them from the server due to the large amount of time wasted in deleting unwanted post and bogus users

Even through the captua thing was turned on in the user registration section, maintaining and constantly ungrading the form is taking an ever increasing amount of time and effort so they have to go!

Finally got round to it

2006-12-15T02:13:00.000Z

Following hard on the heals of radio superstar Chris Evans and his daily Radio Two blog .

I finally found half an hour to finish off intergrating this blog into the overall design of the website.

I think that this new version of blogger is much eaiser to use than the previous one.

Client Project Areas

2006-07-31T10:26:00.000+01:00

I am still in the process of trying out several different project management systems in order to find one that works reliable and is use for my clients to use and understand.
If it is not easy to use they won't use it, to post project feedback etc...

My Support Forums

2006-07-07T05:54:00.000+01:00

I will shortly be closing the support forums - due the numerous unsolicited porn and other posts from Russia and elsewhere.
It seams that phpBB2 forum software is under constant attack from these unscrupulous individuals and know sooner as a upgrade has been released that they have found another hole.
the role the support forum played is going to be split into two:
this blog
and a project management / help-desk setup as soon as I find a solution I am fully happy with!

Publishing this blog

2006-07-07T04:09:00.000+01:00

I found the initial setting up of this blog through blogger.com very easy in the main part just working through the basic selections to set the blog up as make the first post (and even the second one - this post). I am now going to have a play with the template to see if I can get the blog to blend in with the rest of the website.

I must remember to spell check!

This blogger site works work on FireFox -even this WYSIWYG editor works - as some of the ones in other cms (Content Management Systems) type websites, the editor doesn't always work.