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July 31, 2005
Womad and Manly photos
I was meant to be at the WOMAD festival in Reading today, but my Sunday ticket failed to arrive in the post this week. By the time I called the ticket office, they were already closed for the weekend. At least I'll be going to another festival in August: Reading Festival.
I took a little time to update my photo gallery with some of the Manly Beach photos taken on my first day in Australia.
Posted by Nahoo at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2005
My server downloads
I have been on the phone to EV1 Servers this evening trying to work out why I could only connect to my server at 15 Kb/s on my 8 Mbit connection. They told me the that there was a problem somewhere in the first email, then a little later on they reported that everything was fine. I am a little worried that such a powerful server is being let down by a variable connection.
A puzzle publisher in UK is interested in some Sudoku puzzles. It looks like there will be Sudokus from supersudoku.com all over the world in no time. Lydia is just finishing the second version of the Sudoku generator program. It takes slighly longer to generate the 3×3 puzzles, but now their quality is unsurpassed. The Sudoku generator website will be able to create Sudokus that would normally be reserved for books and magazines. These Sudoku puzzles will focus on the actual difficulty of the human logic used to solve, rather than more obvious factors.
Posted by Nahoo at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
Midnight WRP launch
At midnight I launched the all new Workers Revolutionary Party website, loosely based on PHP-Nuke. The owners of the website have been studiously posting news items since May meaning that there is now a sizable archive in place.
The people who work on the News Line have been very patient in the development of this site and pleasant on all aspects of design and technical issues. Sometimes they are almost apologetic on how long it has taken for them to get adapted to the new system. It is certainly a good experience to have such nice clients; they really have been a pleasure to work with.
The PHP-Nuke used as the CMS had to be heavily edited to remove quite a few bugs in the news handling. There is a photo upload and auto-thumbnail facility (something that the Nuke community fail to offer) and a large number of simplifications to remove the nonsense "stats" from the site. Daily news is grouped together and sorted by the category ID rather than the story number.
I believe that there is a lot of potential with their new CMS website. I do not have the same views as theirs, nevertheless, please have a look for yourself.
Posted by Nahoo at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
Design Extreme redesign
I would really like to create a new site design for Design Extreme that makes a better point of selling website design services, domains and hosting. At the moment, most of the search terms used to find the website have no relation to what happens there.
I feel that most of the text content is out of date, the design is inconsistent and there are not enough graphics. My original plan was to give the site to someone else to design, but nothing ever happened. The first splash page did look very effective, but it didn't encourage people to enter the site itself.
John contacted me today about improving the visibility of the Global Crew Network website as there only a few people registering there at the moment. I suggested that the design was not aimed at potential crew and vessel owners, rather it misses the target hitting yacht buyers instead. There is a big difference between the small registration fee for a crew listing and buying an entire classic yacht.
Once a website has been found on a search engine, visitors must be encouraged by the appearance of site before them. The graphic design must reflect the text within the page; the aim of the website must be very clear.
Anyway, back to Design Extreme - its up to me to get started on this big project and get more people interested in the site content. If anyone has any comments on this, please post them here. It would be nice to hear what your views are.
Posted by Nahoo at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
Getting domains
This week I successfully grabbed the domain name dahost.com for the hosting website and server already at dahost.net. At the beginning of the month someone tried to sell me their services to get the domain name as it expired, but I managed just fine using the Snapnames service.
Earlier this week I successfully moved the website at Ooohh.com to my Xenacia server without the previous website designer being any the wiser. He was refusing to give any kind of control to the owner of the Ooohh.com, despite the fact that she had fully paid for the design and maintenance.
“We were recently asked by the owner of Ooohh.com to make available the code and the database we created for ooohh when we helped them out when they lost their previous hosting arrangement.....
Despite assurances they were not moving hosting we now find a new site, with our code and database, minus of course our "designed by information", hosted elsewhere. While we have no problem with clients moving hosts we did state that we required one months notice if they were to move, plus retention of our "designed by label". (Under the law we retain intelectual property rights on the code used). Of course none of this has been honoured!
We consider this as gross breach of our rights, and have advised them of the following:
1) To remove all photos and details of our clients
2) That we intend to pursue matters to protect our hosting and property rights.
This is not the first time, why do people need to be so underhanded, I will never understand it.”
This is all so wrong is funny. Why would anyone want to post such crap news on their own "website designer" pages? From any angle, this is grossly unprofessional - this type of (ex)client commentary should be kept to a blog (if it really must to go somewhere). I have to point out that he has made a really poor effort to pursue his legal matters - no one has received any communication from him. Its not that the site actually belongs to him anyway...
There is a very good reason why people are underhanded, they don't want to lose their own websites. Why would anyone want their business controlled by someone who can do whatever they choose and self-promote their services for their own financial gain?
The Sudoku website is doing very well, with well over 1,000 members now and almost 3,000 Sudoku puzzles generated since we launched the generators last Wednesday. The site now brings in around 40,000 hits a day. Lots of other things are taking off much more quickly than we expected. The Sudoku syndication is attracting attention from all over place. It looks like there will soon be quite a lot of printed media with our name on in the very near future.
There are still some Sudoku left at the Redroaster cafe. Around 100 of these disappear each day.
Posted by Nahoo at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2005
Big Tabasco
The day has arrived for me to open my new enlarged bottle of Tabasco! Unlike the little squirt you find in the supermarket, this one fits into your hand. This is much better it should last me a little long than the usual "one week".
Posted by Nahoo at 08:09 PM | Comments (2)
July 06, 2005
Sudoku generator is here
Several days late, the Super Sudoku generator is finally ready for public viewing. The single most annoying part of the large generator was the browser timeout caused by a lack of information sent to the browser.
Yesterday I made the breakthrough to get the generator live, I found the perfect PHP function that forces the browser to display the page when it hasn't completed loading. This meant that people would no longer wait for a painful length of time to see the next page - now it was instant.
The Super Sudoku generator takes from 10 to 25 seconds to display the puzzle, but as there is an animation and, soon to be, progress bar, the wait is now acceptable. I have noticed that some normal Sudoku generators on the web actually take longer to generate a puzzle despite having to consider 175 less cells.
The Super Sudoku generator can now remember the last grid during the session so that people will not loose their puzzles. A similar feature should be ready for the solvers by the end of the day.
Today we will work on the email functions that send HTML emails to the user's email address or to a friend. This should encourage more people to join up and prove useful for newspaper Sudokus that accept email entries.
Posted by Nahoo at 01:56 PM | Comments (1)
July 01, 2005
House Of Cyn party
Last night I was invited to join Letitcia for the launch party of an adult website in London. As Cynthia wished for some Brighton transvestites to appear (and too few were around), I was listed as the last TV of six invited.
I met Letitcia at the Selfridges Hotel located nearby. It was a very stuffy evening and the hotel room was not ventilated well and the corridor on the third floor smelt like an overflowed toilet.
On checking for my name on the list, the lady at the door complained that I really hadn't tried very hard with my appearance. I tried to convey that I really wasn't a transvestite at all, but she didn't hear me. At the time I took it to mean that I generally looked shabbily dressed for the occasion - not the best start for what I thought was a mega-posh-do.
Thanks to the lovely glass roof, nearly everyone was having a hard time keeping their cool. It felt like I was the only one perspiring, but as I looked more closely at the people around me, this wasn't the case at all.
Letitcia informed me that I was representing some Brighton magazines as their photographer. I should have started straight away, but I made a decision to leave people to their free champagne; then taking photos of a more interesting crowd.
Cynthia appeared to be a little flustered with the occasion, I think that she was pissed off with the organisers putting up such an ill-thought out event. I don't remember seeing one piece of information relating to any website or anything - it appeared that the organisers completely forgot about anything relating to a "launch" at all.
Posted by Nahoo at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)