The other day I wrote about my plans to provide media streaming in the house. I said I had placed an order for the Xtreamer.

Well maybe I am expecting too much now that Internet companies have mostly got their arses into gear and tend to ship same day if you order early enough (except Amazon, but that’s for another rant!), but I placed my order Sunday night (8th) and it is still not here.

Of course, maybe my standards are too high but if a company is going to not post your product out immediately there should be notification, order tracking, or something. How do I know if it is due tomorrow or 3 weeks on Friday?

I emailed their contact address and was told (by automated reply) that they are posting the products out same day, and that I would not receive any more emails from them. Really? Then where is it? Is this an acceptable response?

I am starting to get a little irked, again maybe because most ebayers I deal with post out same day, as do most online retailers.  Is it too much to ask to dispatch within 48h, and if not to simply let me know?

Oh well, it will arrive when it will arrive I guess, but in the mean time I can’t help but have a deflated opinion of them as a company.

UPDATE: I just chased them up and they are out of stock til the 17th and will process the order then. I have asked for a refund and they said accounts will have to get back to me! For crying out loud I have rarely seen this level of incompetence before (or maybe I am just spoiled).

I will be looking for another alternative now, maybe a small PC to run XBMC on?

I was recently looking for a favicon of a flag to use in a project I am working on. During my search I came across favicon.cc, a cool little site that lets you design your favicon online, share your creations, and use favicons others have created.

It really is a simple tool, but a genius concept. Sometimes I am looking to incorporate a logo into a favicon, but other times I am just wanting a favicon that reflects the site, and for this purpose this is great! There is quite a growing selection of favicons on there and it will only grow over time.

I have recommended the Dynamic Drive favicon generator in the past for converting images into favicons, but for creating from scratch or picking from a library this site is great!

Ok, this is not really my usual blogging subject (and it is for UK folks only, sorry!) but I thought it was worth a mention considering I have spoken to a few people about it over the past few months and lots of people still have not heard of it.

Quidco is an online cashback site, simple as that. If you purchase things from Play.com for example, if you login to quidco first, then click their Play.com link, then purchase your item, Quidco will pay you a percentage of your sale in cash.

Sometimes you only get pennies but sometimes you can get some great deals. I have had £120 cash back off £150 worth of home and contents insurance, and $45 of my car insurance…. all for clicking a link.

The only catch is they charge £5 per year for this, but if you don’t make £5 savings then you don’t get charged, so there really is no risk at all, it comes straight out of your profit.

Check it out for yourself at www.quidco.com

With the World Cup coming up in 2010 South Africa has been getting quite a lot of press. Some people see South Africa as being behind the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure, technology, business etc. In some ways this is true, you only need to look at their roads to see there is much room for improvement. However, when it comes to business, in particular online business, my word does the rest of the world need to stand up and take note.

South Africa seems to have embraced the Internet culture and used it to great effect. You only need to follow South Africans on Twitter to see how excited people are about being a part of it all. There are constantly meet-ups (tweet-ups, as they are called) and dinner parties arranged for people who have formed a community from knowing each other online. This happens in other parts of the world too, but I am in the UK and I have not seen half as many over here.

If I look at products I use every day I find a lot are made in South Africa. I send SMS via the internet using BulkSMS… made in South Africa. My SearchStatus Firefox plugin which I have been using for years comes from Quirk eMarketing, a South African firm. There are a growing number of successful Internet sites that you may not know that come from South Africa. South Africa online presence seems to be growing faster than I can ever remember it doing so in the UK.

Almost every week people are tweeting that they are in seminars about media, marketing, the Internet in general. The shear number of these events just shown how positive they are about progress. South Africa has a TEDx function coming up. TEDx is a kind of miniature TED conference where very clever people speak about their specialised subject. These things are great and I really wish I could attend this one!

I have been following the changes online for a while now and all I can say is the enthusiasm is infectious! They have their own social network called Afrigator too. To look at it really is a polished production, but more than that if you look at 95% of all African blogs they have the Afrigator link stating “I am an African Blogger”. This is the crux of it to my mind, these people are PROUD to be a part of it all and they are excited for the future.

I can’t help feeling that certainly in the UK people feel the Internet has come as far as it can and has leveled out a bit. The excitement has died down and people have found other things to be enthusiastic about. If you can relate to that I implore you to start to follow a few South Africans on Twitter and see what they are up to. The enthusiasm displayed is something I just can’t help wanting to be involved with, and something that the UK for one could really learn from!

I have had in mind for a while now that I would like to centralise the media in the house. I would like to digitise all my DVD’s onto a huge hard drive and have them available from both the TV downstairs and the TV in the bedroom.

I have been weighing up the options over the past week or so, ahead of the 50Mb broadband being installed. I have also run CAT6 cable from the attic (where the media server will be) down to the living room.

Looking at the options it seems there are a few issues to consider:

1. The living room TV currently is CRT and doesn’t have HDMI input
2. Do I want a central media centre that outputs to two TV’s, or two media centres?
3. Do I use a PC with a media centre OS or a dedicated solution?

With these issues in mind I have decided to take the somewhat baby step of buying an xtreamer system. This little box will sit near to the bedroom TV and connect via HDMI to the TV and by ethernet cable (down through the ceiling) or by wireless to the media server.

The cost of the unit is £107 delivered so I think it is a relatively cheap way of serving media to the bedroom TV, although the interface does not look as snazzy as the XBMC or Windows 7 MC systems. When it comes to upgrading the TV downstairs I think we may go for a bit more of a “grown-up” solution.

So, hopefully it will be delivered this week and I can get it in place. I don’t have massively high hopes of an all singing all dancing solution in the xtreamer, but as far as this piece of kit goes all it needs to do is stream hi-def video smoothly and consistently and I will be happy.

It also has a cute little iPhone interface for controlling it. I may try converting it into a proper app, as at the moment it is just a web page, but it does look cool.

Well, after 2 years of being free of the rude, arrogant and generally poorly supported Virgin Media service I have signed on the dotted line for more of the same. Why? Am I mad? Perhaps, but alas if I want a reasonable speed Internet connection it seems there is no option.

When I say reasonable speed I am referring to something in the region of 8Mbps or above, I am not greedy. The problem is the distance I live from the BT exchange (damn me for choosing a house more than a mile away!) means the maximum speed I can get out of my line is 3.5Mbps. In this day and age for anything other than email and a bit of web surfing it is just not fast enough.

The installation is due on the 17th of this month… Whether the engineer will turn up on time we will see, and if he does will he have the correct kit? Maybe I am too cynical in my old age, but my experience of Virgin in the past has made me that way.

As for the package, it looks reasonable. I am replacing my existing ADSL (with O2) connection, my Sky+ box with sports package and my BT line and shipping it all to Virgin. I am saving a few pounds a month off my bill, losing sports (never really used it that much) and getting 50Mbps Internet in replacement to an ambitious 3Mbps.

I will promise to post my experience of the (hopefully improved) Virgin service once it is installed. I do hope I don’t regret it as O2 have given fantastic support since the beginning and if only ADSL wasn’t such utter crap I would dearly love to stay with O2. Alas as Virgin hold the UK cable monopoly I am forced to sell my soul for a Virgin!

Every now and again we hear that changes are afoot at Google that may influence how our sites are indexed, discovered and presented. The rumor mill is a busy place, but in actual fact it is possible to get a bit of a “heads up” on some of the changes without resorting to Chinese whispers or black magic.

Google have a sandbox environment, open for all to see on the Internet. Just point your browser to www2.sandbox.google.com and take a look at their development environment. If they change the way results are presented or how predictive searches are built then it should manifest itself on the sandbox site.

I actually came to use the sandbox site last night as for some reason my connection to Google went astray but I could access the sandbox fine.

I have found a few times that Google make changes to the iGoogle pages on their sandbox site first, so it is worth checking every now and again if you are interested in seeing what’s around the corner.

This is a subject that doesn’t often get discussed, but is an important consideration, especially for web designers who are providing (often reselling) web space for their clients.

Both managed and unmanaged hosting have good and bad points but it is important to differentiate between the two and choose the option that is right for you.

The following list is typically what you should expect from the different types of hosts. Not all hosts are alike though so please be sure to check before signing up.

Managed hosting

The good points

• You have a point of contact on the end of the phone
• If there is a problem with the server they will fix it
• They will take nightly backups
• If you accidentally overwrite your files they will restore from the backups
• If you get stuck configuring your site they will assist you
• If you need products setting up they can advise and assist

The bad points

• They are sometimes a little more expensive than unmanaged hosts
• The level of service is dependent on the particular host

Unmanaged hosting

The good points

• You usually have a control panel so you can configure your site yourself
• Sometimes cheaper than managed hosting
• Setup time is quick

The bad points

• If you need help you usually have to work it out yourself or log a support call and wait
• If things go terribly wrong the fix time can be slow
• You sometimes have to tell your client “I am waiting for them to answer my call”
• Backups are sometimes taken but access to restores is usually not available unless you have total failure

Which is the right hosting for you?

That entirely depends on the individual. If you like to get your hands dirty with configuring sites then unmanaged is the way forward. However, when things go wrong having someone managing things for you can be invaluable.

A case in point is reseller packages. In this case you have all your eggs in one basket. If something goes wrong you need to know you have the technical skill to restore backups (if you have access to them), configure email and web access and get things working again, fast! In this situation having someone at the server end working for you to restore normality can be a life saver (and a client saver!).

Generally my recommendation would be to use an unmanaged solution if it for a personal site, it is a great way to learn, but think twice about it if you are hosting a business site. The few pennies you save by not getting a managed solution could one day lose you a client.

The concept of the cloud is one that has really grown over the past couple of years. To those in the know it is possibly one of the biggest things to hit the development world since the advent of mass home-broadband connections. To others it kind of lurks in the background and is simply the trendy buzz-word of the geek community.

What is the cloud?

The easiest way to explain this is to look to our old friend, Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet”

One of the most popular and famous cloud providers is Amazon. To simplify it, they basically charge you for what you use in terms of data and in turn you get to back on to their infrastructure.

The benefits:

Their servers are super resilient
Their servers are very fast
The infrastructure is completely scalable
You never run out of space, you just pay for what you use
Bandwidth is immense, and wont be brought down by stumble/digg traffic

In real terms it means as a small development organisation (as an example) you do not need to worry about taking into account the server infrastructure behind your online application. Providing you have a business model that supports the usage of your app then you’re good to go.

What does it cost?

Cloud computing has a relatively low cost in normal use. You pay on a monthly basis for the space you use. You also pay for data transfer in and out, and for the number of requests and manipulation of the data. This all sound a bit complicated, but the figures are quite small. For example Amazon currently charge around $0.18 per Gb of data storage, and similar for transfer. When you look at the infrastructure behind it that cost is not too bad.

Who uses it?

You probably already use site that use cloud computing. If you post images on twitter you may use the twitpic image hosting service. Go to one of your images on there and view the properties of it, you will see it starts with http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/. The image is actually hosted in the cloud, on Amazon’s servers.

Lots of companies are taking on this model in order to rapidly deploy their environments. It is great for them because although their initial traffic is very low, it is completely scalable. In “the old days” you would have to invest up-front for huge servers in anticipation of the traffic you will get 18 months down the line!

The million dollar question!

One thing I have notices over recent years is lots of companies that seem to have a flawed business model. Companies such as Brightkite, an image hosting service combining traditional image hosting with geolocation services (a google map). This company does not charge for it’s services, it’s iPhone app is free. There are no adverts on the site either, so no obvious source of revenue either.

Perhaps Brightkite is looking to build a userbase and then sell out to one of the big boys, or perhaps they will introduce advertising or premium services at a later date, who knows? They are not alone in this though, lots of sites that have sprung up in recent times seem to be “free”. Although cloud computing is relatively low cost, it is not free, so one must wonder what their end-game plan is.

How are they going to turn their good idea into profit?

Part of Google’s terms and conditions is that each with with Adsense on it MUST have a privacy policy. This is all well and good, but most of them are pretty generic, and unless you are a lawyer you may want to use a standard one that is floating about on the Internet.

The problem is, Google has told us time and time again that you should do everything in your power to avoid duplicate content. We also know that if you have part of your site that must have duplicate content the easiest way to avoid it is to add a do not follow line to the robots.txt file.

This is great, and it works, but then how will Google know if you have a privacy policy or not, if you don’t allow it’s robots in there? Is there a guy employed on minimum wage to trawl through manually and make a note of it?

For now I have left it as it is, but I do wonder if Google will see it as duplicate content, along with half the Internet? Or is it clever enough to pick up on the keywords and turn a blind eye?