Jesse Garner (known as Jennifer to his friends) is setting out on the long march towards PR6 with BlogChemistry, promising the standard formula of WordPress themes and general PHP programming know-how…

He would always be welcoming of your support and am happy to offer mine to a mate… and we did let him borrow the “true sliding-doors” trick for the horizontal tabs.

I’ve looked and looked - for a perfect regex to grab a link off a page, for out-sourcers who can do Ruby, and also for a slideshow builder… There have been some that come close, but nothing perfect for the job - nowadays, in these brave new times of embedded content, I have basically given up and resorted to Flash… Continue reading »

The design portfolio is certainly visually impressive - launched client sites, (not just the usual scattering of demo sites and coming soons) - coming to you out of the West Midlands, UK, Web Sitedesign.net, offering web site design, e-commerce, web-based apps, branding, logos and crm software. Some of these sites, those in the e-commerce category in particular, are genuinely good, with effective layouts, competently built - and not too much Ajax sitting there amongst it all, my usual bete noire…

With seven years and more than 300 web projects down, it does take more than a snappy logo and a few bland and unlikely testimonials hanging there in quotes, to convince a client to buy the package nowadays - there’s competition about, not like the old days…

In terms of Sitedesign’s ecommerce solutions, they do seem to know how to chop up an osCommerce template pretty well - the one drawback with this ubiquitous software is that all the sites really do start to look the same after a while, to be able to bring some variety to this market is no bad thing at all.

So, as a UK-based development engineer, doing a lot of business with the US - it seems to have really taken off it the last 18 months or so - for UK sites looking to get out into international markets, though the dollar exchange rate is not so very wonderful at the moment, there’s skype to solve all the communication issues and as for the time difference, you really don’t notice it after a while - there’s no need for web design birmingham to involve Alabama any more…

Well, I remember when telnet was all we had - and computers were all green writing on a black background, and none of these silly images that get in the way all the time.

Pragmasys do telnet - Telnet Client - they also do SSH, because that’s how it all works - secure business applications that connect to a server, with or without encryption, allow its administration, data editing and management.
Continue reading »

There’s a new Alexa rank algorithm out - we previously knew Alexa rank to be meaningless except when it came to people like Text Link Ads using it as part of their calculation.

The main point appears to be less reliance on toolbar stats - as Alexa puts it, data is now gathered from a variety of sources, whatever they may be…
Continue reading »

So, this blog, and a couple of others, each get about 40% of their RSS subscribers using Google products - this according to Feedburner’s stats panel.

Google products meaning the snappily-named Feed Reader or iGoogle, the widgetised, personalised front page, clone of Netvibes and a few others…
Continue reading »

You’re getting an Intel chip, a disk and a motherboard - and told to get on with it.

Over the years, I have never quite understood how it is that since the average desktop is only a sum of its parts, there isn’t more of it - self-assembly, do it yourself desktops…

The site is How to Build a Computer and getting the product is simply a case of navigating the dropdowns, choose your operating system (which is XP or Vista, with Vista as the default), choose a monitor and media reader if you want. The graphics card is also optional in the package, which is nice, you’d think maybe the opportunity would have been taken to push something not completely suitable.
Continue reading »

With Technorati now engaged in a misguided scheme to remove [edited] suspend WordPress blogs below 2.3.3 or as many as they can find, and also given the large numbers of spammers who locate WordPress using an identical method - it’s definitely time to go a little more anonymous:-
Continue reading »

Some disquiet from WordPress bloggers and webmasters who don’t happen to be located in the US on the subject of companies, demanding personal information to be supplied to the US government involving US tax legislation.
Continue reading »

Keep it simple - KIS - is fairly obviously good advice for any WordPress theme builder.

Keep it universal - there are a lot of people out there, running all kinds of different system, doing different and strange things with the files, any complexity is increasing the risk of breaking the theme for them…
Continue reading »