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Oh well, we say goodbye to plot 15 and hello to plot 7. What better way to start the day than to get a lovely e-mail from my local parish council, letting me know that a plot had become free just down the road from me.
I popped down last night to take a couple of shots - this was probably getting on for 6 / 7pm ish - but can you check out the secret visitor that has snuck on, after all this was rotovated and set up in April this year?

Yep, it's a lovely friend, Deadly Nightshade! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna Getting it out is going to be our first job this year I reckons, then on to some planting. More news soon.

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is a warm, marmite crumpet to get ready for some digging . . .

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-- Email sent with the "Multi-Photo Email" iPhone application --

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Hmnnnnnnnnn, would love to give a few o these a go for 2010. Jan pot dales anyone?

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So that’s a stress free kitchen floor replacement then …

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its me, in polaroid form :-)

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I have been on the Google Chrome trail now for a few days and my god its fast! If you haven’t got around to checking all your sites in it yet, some of the automated testing sites have been quite quick off the mark like [
Litmus ] and [ Browsershots ] but I don’t think [ Total Validator ] has caught up yet.

Anyhoo, hope your sites are well and you are enjoying the speed now anyway. It looks like Firefox 3.1 thinks its going to a bit quicker [ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/mozilla-fights-back-with-new-firefox-benchmarks/ ] but since that release is not out of the door, lets wait and see.

Anything that actually speeds up browsing has got to be a good thing I think. Whether or not Chrome is going to get market share is another matter. It was actually the Developer toolbar from [ Chris Pedrick ] that actually dragged me back to Firefox a bit earlier today. Those same plugins probably slow FF down a bit though, as most people like me probably have quite a few running.

Apart from speed, I have had very few problems with actually rending any pages **correctly**. Most things seem to have just appeared and ran quite happily, thank you very much! Its definitely becoming my browser of choice. Until next month…

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For good accessibility, usability and lovely reasons, it is always good to have a transcript done of your online video. Most of the time this means using an outside agency and sending large files around. No more. Now, there is Casting Words [ http://castingwords.com ].

I first saw it mentioned on Bruce Lawson’s blog here [ http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/castingwords-for-audio-transcription/ ] and it looks great. Upload your audio and they generate text for you at a very decent rate.

Judging by a few searches around, it looks like they are using Amazon for payment, looks interesting [ http://turkers.castingwords.com/tutorials/getting_started.html ] and the style seems to have been widely copied [ http://www.futuregen.sg/business-process/transcription-style-adapted-from-casting-words/ ] - now just have to find some audio to get typed up. As soon as I have, I will let you know what the quality is like.

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http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/04/05/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2

http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/01/26/starting-amazon-ec2-with-mac-os-x/

http://code.google.com/p/scalr/

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=84

Will see if I can find some good sites hosted on EC2 and get some feedback.

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So, its that time of year again to head off to a beach with wifi to **go on holiday**. If Atonement doesn’t seem like your sort of thing, let me share what is on my list for this year:

• The Principles Of Project Management by Meri Williams - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/project1/?SID=e6fba703ce560624ad37f333bf2ffefd
• Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Web-Project-Management-Practices/dp/0321112555
• Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by 37 signals - http://www.lulu.com/content/383343
• Making things happen by scottberkun - http://www.scottberkun.com/making-things-happen/

Reviews back as and when I get through them.

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While browsing a few bits on Google Analytics, I came across these two:

Five Tips for Writing Effective Web Headlines

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77157&hl=en

and

Five Objectives of Website Copy

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77130&ctx=sibling

both of which have some good basic information and provide more than a few hints about how to get your copy formatted to get great Google flavour in search listings.

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are here :

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/

and you don’t even need to worry about testing them with Outlook 2007! For anyone new to the world of sending out HTML mails, it would be worth downloading a few of these ones and then picking them apart to see how they work. Its really the use or lack of CSS and the way of handling and styling the HTML that is key.

Oh and do make sure you have a nice plain text version too…even Mailchimp now has an automatic-text-o-tron:

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/automatic-plain-text-email-generator/

UPDATE 12:20pm

Blimey, its all go on the mail front today…here is a converter that makes all your lovely CSS inline…

http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web/

UPDATE 12:36pm

and I should probably mention the email newsletter archive as well:

http://www.newsletterarchive.org/

which is a great online store of past newsletters, to give you inspiration and ideas for your own work.

UPDATE 16:08

Pleaaaaaase, just stop it with the e-mail stuff, really…here’s how to e-mail the future:

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630542

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Hmn….this could be a tough one. Lets see what the interwebs drag up. How about:

1. http://www.tanfa.co.uk/css/examples/europe-map.asp
2. http://www.alistapart.com/d/sprites/ala-image3.html
3. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/old_master.html

Right, lets make us some demos…back soon.

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Most people have probably heard of SiFR, Shaun Inman’s lovely technique of embedding Flash in a site to replace the fonts. But now we have Facelift or FLIR stepping up to the table.

Facelift Image Replacement | About FLIR Image Replacement

Apart from the techy side (whether its better than any other technique which needs a bit more testing yet I think…), its a good example of how to make a up a product site.

Despite the fact that its free at the moment, its obviously been put together by somebody that know what a customer (paying or non-paying) would like, and a web customer at that.

So, we have a nice examples page which is interactive and shows what can be done.

An easy quick start page means coders or designers could easily get cracking.

A documentation page, which can be added to by users, is invaluable to show all the various options.

A forum allows people to post on great examples of how they have used your product, as well as request any help they may need. This could either be answered by Mawhorter or other users themselves.

Last of all, a blog allows the site owner Mawhorter to post occasional updates as to what is going on.

Total score? About 4.5 out of 5.

What’s he missing? Well, the blog does have a feed but there is no way to easily subscribe to its updates other than follow the RSS and there is no e-mail newsletter. The RSS is only actually in the blog when it could be easily put in the header of every page, then more and more people could subscribe to it.

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Sounds too good to miss…was thinking about getting my hands on a copy of [ The Principles Of Project Managementby Meri Williams - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/project1/ - aka Geek Project Manager ] so this might be my chance!

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Howdy all…does seem like more and more sites are chucking out open betas of their homepages these days, very web 2.0.

The grand daddy I suppose was the BBC one - [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2007/12/a_lick_of_paint_for_the_bbc_ho.html  ] which most people probably saw, but recently Facebook have rolled out a new one as well as the retailer Comet.

Why have they all bothered?

Well, first of all, its much better to get real users to test sites out rather than the creators. They respond in so many unexpected ways, to things that you maybe didn’t even think were important at the time.

Secondly, if its a public beta, its a damn site cheaper to sort out that running a more formal usability test. Recruiting participants,

Thirdly, in web 2.0 land (tm), involving users in virtually everything is one of the main tenets of running and managing an online prescence. If users are publicly involved in the consultation around a new home page, they will certainly feel a greater sense of engagement with it and ownership over it.

So, to get the best out of it, here is my top ten (ahem, er, seven) for running a public beta:

1. Make sure you have enough changes to make a beta out of - nobody is going to bother to check out the new beta of your new contact us icon. Just roll that one out as usual. 
2. Make it clear how people can send comments on the beta
3. Tell people what you are going to do with your comments
4. Tell users of the alpha site that you are doing a beta
5. Check you have good stats to record how many views your beta is getting
6. Seed links to the beta through chosen forums, to try and get the word out in as many ways as possible
7. Play nice with your users now - if it all goes well for this beta, users will also get involved in future rollouts and might be interested in helping out on other things

Any examples on the interwebs currently?

Well, Comet has a new beta out:

www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/betahomePage.do?zone_id=13

and what I quite like about it is that users comments are actually public here:

www.betacomet.co.uk/

which is a rare thing. The BBC has a  new gardening site here:

www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/ 

and the comments go here:

www.bbc.co.uk/vision/genres/feedback.shtml?genre=gardening

but aren’t public, at least it tells you what is going to happen to them anyway.

If I find any more, I will post them back here.

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