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?

I recently purchased a Samsung NC10 netbook. I chose the Samsung because my main computer is a Macbook Pro and of the handful of netbooks out there this seemed a good candidate for turning into a hackintosh (running OSX on it).

I decided that ideally I would keep the XP functionality just in case, so I am currently dual-booting it with XP/OSX. It took a little messing with to get OSX working fully, but it now works nicely. It is possible to get the in-built wireless card working, but it is a very messy process and the general consensus is just to swap it out with a cheap airport-compatible card, which I did.

The machine itself is really nice. It is a little heavier than some, but that is mainly due to the 6-cell battery it has, over the 3-cell batteries most of its competitors have. This gives the machine around 5-6 hours battery life in XP and 4-5 hours in OSX (the power management in XP is slightly better).

The keyboard is a major selling-point. It is very big in terms of netbook keyboards, over 90% of a full-size keyboard. This means that while it is not easy to touch-type, you can at least type reasonably fast and are less susceptible to mis-keying.

Speed-wise this little machine is pretty good. Boot times are very quick indeed and navigating either operating system seems pretty slick. Obviously this is no gaming platform, and you would not want to render a video on it (the Intel Atom processor is designed for battery life, not performance) but for what it is intended for it is a great little machine.

The OSX functionality is not perfect. I used the instructions from Mysticus C to get it working. It is fairly straight forward actually, once you understand how it works.

Aside from needing to swap out the wireless card the sound drivers are not perfect. There are some hacked ones out there that enable sound, but the in-built microphone is still not fully supported. Hopefully in coming weeks there will be a driver available to support this. The webcam is already supported, so once the mic is working this will be a great little video conf machine. Bluetooth works well, as does the trackpad (complete with multi-touch!).

I intend to end up with a triple-boot system by putting Windows 7 on there too, but the bootloader is slightly different so I need to work out if it will be straight forward or not. My main partition is FAT32, so all the operating systems can access it. I may at some point replace this with NTFS (there is an OSX driver to support it) but I am not sure that will be necessary.

I have only been using the NC10 for a short while, so I will post again once I have got used to it. For now I am very happy with it!

Ok, not quite, but in the world of the interweb it seems I have set up shop as one of the largest supermarkets in the UK.

Last week I noticed a spike in traffic to one of my sites. When I checked the stats I could see the traffic was coming from people searching for a particular domain name in Google. People often seem to type web URL’s into the Google search field, so it is worth making sure you rank high for your domain name too!

For some reason when people entered the URL of this supermarket into Google my site ranked number 1. I found this to be quite amusing.

What I found even funnier is once they clicked my link people seemed to think I WAS the supermarket. It turns out the supermarket had a prize draw and to enter you had to fill out a survey. People were registering on my site and emailing me their opinions thinking they were in the running for a prize.

This is most amusing, as my site looks nothing like the supermarkets branding, it isn’t even close.

I do find it odd that the proper site didn’t even rank in the top 10 on Google though. They must really be in the Google bad-books!

I pointed these people in the right direction, it seemed the right thing to do, but whoever the supermarket employ for their SEO probably needs a lesson in Googlisation!

Please bear with me on this one, I know they are very different beasts but I have been experimenting with a new concept (to me) over the weekend and would like to invite comments.

I have a site I have been running for a while which I would like to turn from a blog where comments are invited to a community. As much as I like forums in certain circumstances they can be a little bland when compared to a blog. This made me wonder what the potential is to combine the two.

A site I use on a daily basis is hotukdeals.com. This site uses a highly customised vBulletin installation to present the information in a blog-esque format. It works well, people can vote items hot and cold, but they have to register to comment.

Looking into it in a bit more detail it seems there are positives and negatives to using a forum vs using WordPress.

As much as people love WordPress (I do!), it seems to me to be a platform designed to publish information and then get comments on it. If you want a community then everyone needs the ability to publish. This is possible with WordPress but it’s a bit messy and still involved the back end. With a forum people can hit new post and post within the site itself.

The disadvantage of the forum is users generally have to register in order to comment. You can turn this off but forums don’t cope with this quite as well as WordPress does. This may deter the passing comment and rely on people buying in to the site.

My theory is to run a forum on the site but use the RSS feed to link the information to the front page, run by WordPress, replacing the usual blog posts. This way I have WordPress running the page areas of the site but the front page content is dragged in via an RSS widget. I don’t yet know how well this will work or whether a forum portal would be a better solution, but I guess I will find out once I have it up and running.

So…

Am I being crazy?

Are there benefits I am missing to using one over the other?

Does using both make sense?

This all came to me on a whim, so I apologise for the lack of in-depth research, I just thought at this point it may be a good idea to poll the readership.

I have always been a bit supporter of free, open source products. There is something about working with a community based product that gives you that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

One of my favourite free products is the phpBB forum software. It is in direct competition with the likes of vBulletin and Invisionboard and I must say it stands up strong.

The problem comes when you run into issues. Something stops working and you need to get it resolved. The paid for products have a support system in place where you can log a call and one of their staff will look at it for you. This is not the case with free software, and nor would you expect it to be.

Free offerings tend to have their support structure provided via the community forum. People help each other out and the developers often participate to resolve issues. It is a little bit random and sometimes there seems to be a shouting match going on. This is fine if your forum is a hobby, but if it is a business and the problem is serious, you really need to get it resolved pretty damn quick.

I am loathed to pay out for software that does pretty much what the free version does, but I am starting to see the value in the added support you get when parting with your hard earned cash. I have a query on the phpBB site at the moment and it has slowly slipped down the list, as others post new questions. Will it get seen? Will it get resolved? Who knows. All I do know is there is no guarantee it will, and there is nobody to complain to for a refund (refund what, it’s free?!)

It’s sod’s law (and some say I *AM* sod) that if you fork out for the paid version based on the support, you will likely not need it, but if your client comes to you saying the forum is not behaving, you will likely be glad you have the official support channels to fall back on.

Ever since the days of Macromedia I have always used Fireworks for my web design and Photoshop for photo manipulation. Lots of people swear by Photoshop for web design too, yet every time I have tried it I have ended up swearing AT Photoshop instead.

I have compiled some thoughts on both these products, good and bad. These are just my views and experiences but I would like to get your thoughts on it too, as I feel that considering the amount of people using Photoshop for the layout and design of websites I must be missing something somewhere.

Photoshop

As a photo manipulation package you cannot beat Photoshop. I love it, I love working with it, and I actually like the fact that it hasn’t drastically changed version to version. It feels comfortable.

When I turn to web design though, the story changes. I am so used to grabbing hold of my objects on the canvas and dragging them into place, like I was playing with objects on a desk. With Photoshop this task seems to be a bit more complicated. I have to look for my object on the layers toolbar, click on it, then I can drag it. If I want to drag another object out of the way I need to locate that too? There may be a shortcut to this, but I don’t know it.

If you are an organised designer you will name your layers as you go along. This makes Photoshop a LOT more manageable and saved scrolling through pages and pages of the layers lists all called layer1, layer2, layer3 etc.

Photoshop does win in certain web design areas though, such as text. Things like bullet lists can be mocked up quickly and easily. This is not possible in Fireworks without an awful lot of messing.

Fireworks

I feel like I am a little biased in that I have been working with Fireworks ever since it was released, and I know it upside down and back to front. I live the way I can drag things around, work with objects as vector entities and knock together a site in half an hour. I don’t use it for generating code, I do that by hand, but as a web graphics tool I love it.

I love the slice tool in Fireworks. It is so easy to use and you have total control over the individual slice. This is not a deal breaker for me, but it works well.

Fireworks has some really useful vector tools. It also has a symbols panel. This is great if you use objects over and over again. Simply convert it into a symbol and add it to the panel. For UI design this is a real time saver and a definite advantage over Photoshop.

Fireworks is not without it’s faults though. On the Mac it seems to decide with the roll of a dice which fonts it is going to use. With Photoshop I activate and deactivate fonts and Photoshop picks that up (upon reload), but in Fireworks it seems to misplace certain fonts and I don’t know why.

Verdict?

After comparing the two I am left with the same view that I had at the beginning. Photoshop seems better for photo manipulation and Fireworks seems better for web design. Why then do so many people swear by Photoshop for web projects? I guess the answer lies in the fact that there are a lot of web designers who have come from a general design background and grown up with Photoshop. If you have taken years to master a tool, why bother to learn another?

I really would like to use Photoshop for web design projects but at the moment I feel it slows me down too much. That may be partly due to the product, but mainly because I am a lot more familiar with Fireworks. The purpose of this post was not to choose one over the other, but just to see why people use what they use and what strengths and weaknesses each product has.

I have only touched the surface with this post. There are a pleathora of options out there, Photoshop, Fireworks, GIMP, Coreldraw, Painshop Pro. Each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses.

What do you use for your web designs, and why?