Truth be told, I don’t have much time for traditional paper based Christmas cards.  I appreciate the sentiment, but lets be honest with ourselves, cards are expensive, as is the postage and come the New Year all the cards go into the recycling bin at best.

As someone that offers web development services, it only seemed fitting that I send a digital e-card to my clients.  Not one of those dancing elf monstrosities, or a cobbled-together-in-5-minutes-because-we-forgot-to-get-cards-in-the-post type affair, but a bona-fide bespoke Christmas card.  Then for good measure and a warm feeling inside, a hand-picked charity donation to a cause I’ve supported for a few years – Cats Protection

Last year I got in touch with local designer Liz Elcoate from Capriccio Design who produced a great art-deco “chat noir” style design.

This year I gave Liz the brief of something 50′s inspired, Christmassey and with the obligatory cat (in case you wondered, my company is called Gattonero – Italian for “black cat”).  Here’s the finished design which I’m really pleased with:

This year’s Gattonero Christmas e-card sent out to clients:

I wish I could take credit for the design, but I opted to use someone far better skilled at the artsy stuff that myself – Liz Elcoate from Sketchy Design Capriccio Design

Instead of sending paper based greetings cards, I sent this card by email and made a donation to Cats Protection – www.cats.org.uk

I’ve long had an affection for stickers.  As a child I would rush to the local newsagent armed with my pocket money to choose whichever pack of stickers was flavour of that particular month (failing to complete the Panini 86 World Cup album was probably the reason why I care little for Football these days).   But sadly my life has been void of stickers now for many years… until last Saturday when a trip up to Leeds for the Think Visibility conference introduced me to Gadget Glamour, a company that specialises in customising (or glamorising) your gadgets (mainly Apple gadgets) with a range of stickers, skins and cases.

Due to their popularity, Apple products are where you need to be if you want the best accessories so I’m going to struggle to find anything suitable for my HTC Hero… but I have a Macbook too so bring on the stickers!

I know any slight blemish, scratch or defacement on an Apple product is enough to bring some Apple fans to tears but I’m not a fanboy and couldn’t care less.  I also like stickers, so with that in mind I’ve been scouring the Gadget Glamour website to see what takes my fancy.

So, you want to include (also include_once, require or require_once) another PHP file in one of your WordPress files?  Fine, but if your PHP file is in a different folder/directory to your WordPress installation you might run into problems.

After spending too long trawling the WordPress Codex trying to find a solution, I luckily found this post by Andy Fletcher – How to use a PHP include with WordPress

ABSPATH is your friend and the answer to your prayers.   For example, assume your PHP files are in a folder off your web root called “thefolder”, you would include them using:

<?php include(ABSPATH . '/thefolder/thefile.php'); ?>

Simple when you know how.

As a web developer I use a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS), either a bespoke solution I develop myself or more commonly an off the shelf (normally) Open Source platform.

I’ve been using the excellent CMS Made Simple for a couple of years now with great results (don’t let the “simple” in the name fool you, this is a feature-rich application) so when I was asked if I would like to review a copy of CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner’s Guide by Sofia Hauschildt I jumped at the chance.

Embarrassingly, I’ve had this copy of the book sitting by my desk for a couple of months but have been so busy with work I’ve not had the chance to flick past the first few pages.  However, now I’ve got some new CMSMS projects in the pipeline I’m looking forward to getting into the book and seeing what it can offer.

As anyone that has read a “teach yourself” software book will know, it’s hard for the authors to target the reader as everyone has different experience levels and coding for the web has many pre-requisites that can be taken for granted.  CMS Made Simple 1.6 is titled a “Beginner’s Guide”, so I’m expecting to skip at least a few pages but it will be interesting to see what new features I can learn along the way.

If you’re interested in getting a copy of this book yourself, download and read a pdf extract.  I’ll also write a review when I get the chance (hopefully in a couple of weeks).

Publisher’s notes:
CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginners Guide is a new book from Packt through which, webmasters will learn to implement their own design into CMS Made Simple to create a professional and fully functional website. They will learn how to integrate an e-commerce shop with PayPal checkout, enrich the website with features like a photo gallery as well as implement You Tube videos into templates or pages thus helping users create engaging, effective, and easy-to-use CMS websites for businesses, clubs, or organizations.

The book is out now and is available from Packt. For more information, please visit : https://www.packtpub.com/cms-made-simple-1-6-beginners-guide/book

Pretty much a year to the day when I first heard that Google’s Streetview cars had been spotted in Peterborough and the images have now gone live on Google Maps!

Have you had a look yet?  Do let me know if you find anything interesting happening in Peterborough that day – I know that may be a long shot…

It’s that time again – my mobile phone handset is due to be replaced by something sleeker, flashier and most likely touch-screenier.  It doesn’t take a genius to guess that I’ll be mentioning that phone from Apple…

The Apple phone has been on my shortlist since here and here but I opted instead to stick with Orange and go for the Nokia N95.  It wasn’t a bad decision and I even grew to rate the handset but things have moved on, Android has become much more of an established platform and I’m (once again) torn between the Apple phone and something else.

The something else in this case is likely to be the HTC Hero or maybe the Samsung Galaxy (although for me the Sense UI on the Hero is more in tune with how I want to use the phone) and apart from a few minor Pro’s that the Hero has over the Apple device (better camera and is available on my existing network) both are pretty much level in suitability.  That is apart from the applications…

Killer Apps

I’m a strong believer in killer apps selling the hardware.  In the video games industry consoles have died an early death due to a lack of titles even though they had far superior hardware to their rivals and I fear the same might happen with Android unless they seriously pull their fingers out.

Apple’s app store is great as far as I’m concerned.  For pretty much everything I want to do, there’s an app for it.  Whether it’s using online accounts software, collaborating with colleagues on project management or even looking for a new house, the Apple platform is the one developers bring their titles too first.  Which is part of the problem with Android.

Yes you can have all the bells and whistles when it comes to customising the interface but when a rival handset has a serious advantage in mobile making cloud computing extremely viable, you’ve got to be a bit special to choose anything else.

To make matters worse, I’m not even sure IF Android offers all the applications I want…

Android Market vs Apple Appstore

For some bizarre reason, Android have made it incredibly difficult for anyone without an Android handset to browse the applications.  The market homepage offers a selection of cherry picked apps which as far as I’m concerned are mostly useless and no facility to search, which I find crazy given that Google was founded on search!

Finding new applications is also a breeze with Apple, I can use the handset to search or I can sit at my desk and use the PC (or Mac) and browse the entire collection there.  In fact, I took this for granted until I tried to browse the Android Market and came up with just a few apps, questioning myself whether this was the entire Market catalogue!

So what now?

Firstly for me, Android need to invest seriously in the Market.  Pay developers of the top apps in each Apple Appstore category to create equivalents in Android.  Offer incentives for developers to consider Android in the first place.  I don’t know, anything to increase the number of quality applications available.

Then secondly Android need to overhaul their website and let people browse the store through a web browser.  I’m not sure if there’s a Suite application for the desktop, but if there is, bring Market search to that (but don’t rely on it as there are potential customers like me that don’t have the devices yet!).

Other blogs and forums I’ve read seem to pick fault with how easy it is to purchase paid apps from the Android Market.  I can’t comment on that because I’ve not got to that stage yet, but if it is an issue then that also needs to be sorted.

Apple do many things extremely well and if you’re going to emulate them, at least do it to an equal standard if not better.

I just don’t know how long I can put off becoming an iPhone customer…

Will someone please tell me that I’m missing something here.  I thought the whole point of online banking was that it could be done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week yet here is Standard Life somehow managing to apply (albeit extended) office hours to a website!

Standard Life website is closed for business

Is Standard Life’s web services team incapable of running a website through the night or do they actually employ staff to manually process page requests from the web server?

Either way it’s a poor show from a financial institution/company/thing and seems to be a common occurrence – Egg.com won’t let me print my statements out either.