Posts by: Joff

Chilli, chili or chile?

I like spicy hot food.  I like it REALLY hot.  So much in fact that every year I take a trip out to one of the chilli festivals that are held across the UK and this weekend saw me do just that.

In previous years I’d taken the long journey from Cambridgeshire down to West Dean Gardens near Chichester, normally sitting in traffic for hours, so when I found there was another event being held just down the A1 in Stevenage I decided that would be where I was headed this year.

Benington was the venue, taking place in the gardens of Benington Lordship and whilst it wasn’t on the same scale as West Dean, it was enough to satisfy my hunger for the chile for a while.

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WordPress is NOT a CMS

According to a recent poll by CSS-Tricks, 40% of those in the survey said WordPress their favourite content management system.

Now I’m no expert when it comes to CMS platforms, but I’ve developed with a few, tested out a few others (before uninstalling and running away) and even use one (WordPress to be exact) for this blog, and I’m quite happy to put my neck firmly on the line and say WordPress isn’t a proper CMS by my standards.

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Linksys CIT200 displays unregistered

I like Skype.  I just want to reach up to that big cloud-like logo and give it a big hug, even if it is owned by the evil that is eBay.

I like Skype not only for the free Skype-to-Skype voice communication but also the Instant Messenger (MSN clone) and the fact that my contact list is full of my work associates and clients just makes it feel more professional than other comms software I’ve tried.

Yesterday my Skype account got an early Christmas present with the addition of a Linksys CIT200 VoIP handset.  Other handsets are available, but they all seemed to be lacking in that phone “feel”.  They looked like phones but the weight and the plastic just wasn’t quite right.

Overall I’m very impressed with the CIT200.  The wired thing I had before was awkward to use and pretty hideous, not to mention the abysmal sound quality.  Whilst the CIT200 isn’t a full-fledged WiFi phone, I think it’s a fantastic alternative if you can live with having to go via a PC.

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I want to ride my bicycle

Seeing as the weather in Peterborough is apparently so good at the moment, I felt a well deserved blast on the bike was in order to get some fresh air, have a ponder over a few thoughts in my head and get attacked by what felt like hundreds thousands of airborne insects.

I’ve been out and about on two wheels a fair bit over the past few weeks but haven’t really ventured beyond the city limits and considering I keep seeing all these cycle network posts (hinting that there is some kind of bike path mecca awaiting me if I just went a little further), I thought now was the time to investigate.

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Blogging due to peer pressure

Not me, I have no problems plucking thoughts and observations of my daily life out of my head and hammering the keys until words appear on the screen.  No, it’s my spikey-haired friend Matt (not to be confused with Mattysmash who I introduced at the start of the year) that I’ve bullied into opening a blog.

Neither of us are really sure what he’s going to be writing about as by his own admission, his life is pretty boring.  If you can be bothered, you’ll see he’s been to the cinema and has bought a woolly hat (and you thought my blog was lacking in content!).

Anyway, have a look at Mattywoo

How to get Cubecart 4 friendly URLs on a Windows server

Cubecart 4 includes the option to rewrite the standard URL structure into “search engine friendly” URLs.

This means that instead of a product in your shop having the pretty awful address of

http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=1

you can have it rewritten into something like

http://www.domain.co.uk/test-category/test-product2/prod_1.html

Much easier for humans I’m sure you’ll agree and hopefully search engines will love your keyword-packed URLs too.

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The week that was

The first week of July’s been a little hectic and has seen the launch of the new Remus UK website for performance exhausts, the purchase of a new car (dapper Focus Zetec in a grey colour – probably called Sunset Blue or something by Ford’s fartarse design department) and the discovery of a new (well new to me) Indian takeaway in Peterborough.

Oh yes, curry is that important to me I feel I need to put it in writing! The establishment in question is the Donner & Balti Express, but don’t be put off by it’s dubious name, this is in fact an award winning curry house! Chef Mohammed Abdul Hakim has been awarded Peterborough Curry Chef of the year for three years in a row.

I’ve also discovered this week that Moo have finally added business cards to their already fantastic range of moo minicards, stickers, greetings cards and postcards.  Arriving in a pretty-much-standard 84x55mm, you get to choose from a couple of paper options and can upload images and designs to make the cards stand out. What makes Moo even more appealing is that you can have a number of different designs printed in the same batch, giving you an assortment of different cards!

If you’ve had your head in the sand for the past few years then you won’t have seen Moo cards before, almost like cigarette cards of old, these are often used by aspiring designer types as a cheap by eye catching business card alternative.  But now they’re an alternative no longer.

Who knows what delights next week will bring!!

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