In other news, I have also started making an effort to spent time adding content to my website of places to go fishing. The site has been in development since around the start of the year but I just launched it online at the end of September. Currently it has around 20 venues on, so by my estimations there must be around 9,980 to go!

It seems like quite a daunting task, but the site is starting to pick up some search traffic which is a positive sign. Some people looking at the site might be a bit disappointed, there are lots of blank pages. My plan is to add places in and around Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and then branch out from there.

It’s a bit strange, I don’t understand why someone hasn’t contacted me about it. It’s a valid complaint, in the tea bags I purchased:

• Some of them were empty
• Most of them didnt have the right amount of tea in them
• Most of the bags split when I used them because they hadn’t been manufactured correctly

On their website it says “the bright refreshing blend of fine tea leaves from around the world will put a smile on your face”. I don’t really think so!

This made me laugh.. I have just sent an email to complain about the Twinings tea bags that I’ve been using for the past few weeks.

Most of them have split due to a strange bit of tea that’s trapped in the side part and a few of the tea bags have been empty or nearly empty.

For the time being I’m going to be using Yorkshire tea!

I started work on one of my websites about a year ago and then forgot about it as it got pushed down my to do list. When the cold weather kicked in a few weeks ago it reminded me about it – it also gave me a bit of extra motivation too!

The site is called The Double Glazing Fund. The idea behind it is to help me save up to either replace or repair the sash windows in my house with new double glazed ones.

To raise the money I would like to help people with a range of different things. These include web development, search engine optimisation work, website hosting and website management.

You can have a look around the site by following this link to the double glazing fund.

If you think that it’s a good idea and if you would like to keep track of how things are progressing then please check out the facebook page.

In other news.. I’m 30.

Dear Hollie, from Edward Lewis:

Funny that there is another version that uses someone with a different name too..

Dear Sophie, from Daniel Lee:

Both of them should get a blog, it would be really freaky getting years worth of emails like that from your dad.. wouldn’t it?!

The new version has added in some extra columns on the post dashboard on the right hand side. This is quite annoying as there isn’t really room for them, it means the post titles get crushed up and spread over quite a few lines – this makes the page about 5 times as long!

So.. does anyone know the best way to fix it, so that they arent shown there?!

Thanks to Matt for filming it and editing it up. Thanks to Seiji for playing at the party and for the tune that he sent over to use in the video.

Keep your ears close to the ground for details about the next one!

This is an example from the Assemble Online website

How to control the thumbnail image on Facebook Links

It’s pretty simple, you just have to pick/create a graphic and then add one line of code to your website. In the section of the code you need to insert an additional metatag which specifies the image to use. This is an example from http://areyoudisconnected.co.uk:

<link rel="image_src" href="http://areyoudisconnected.co.uk/graphics/disconnected_logo.jpg" />

When you add the code to your site you will need to amend the image name and path to where your image is located.

What other information does facebook show when you post links?

The link section also pulls in some additional information from the link you are posting. Sometimes this might be confusing as it doesn’t always match the content from the page you have looked at. This information is taken from the section of the page:

The other information is the title tag, meta description and also the url of the page.

Extra Advice

For sites which have a really large logo it is worth creating a smaller 100px wide version to make sure that it’s displayed correctly as facebook will resize the image down.

If you have posted links up in the past, facebook may have cached the thumbnail images from the previous occasion. If you add the code to your site and it doesn’t work correctly you should try uploading a different link or page. If you are posting a link to your homepage, add on the filename of the page, eg index.php, index.html or index.asp etc – whichever your site uses. From experience it seems like Facebook cache the images for around a week.

There is a lot of content ready to go into the site and there has also been a fair bit of customisation on the back end of the CMS. I really like using Silverstripe to build websites, it has been a fairly steep learning curve with some areas but not it is really starting to pay off. I’m using the latest 2.4.5 version too which came out a few days ago, which is, seemingly, exactly the same!

Anyone who wants to send in pictures to be featured on my site now have a pretty snazzy form to fill in. After its been styled should make things fairly straight forward. Most of the success of the site will rely on user generated content, so it will be important to make this process as simple as possible.

So.. I wonder what progress will have been made by next weekend!