As many of you may see i like to write about music on this website, without music the world would be pretty boring and i love to share my musical taste with random members of the public, kind of like how i stand on street corners shouting band names and songs at passing cars.

In this post i'm going to review a website which is quite new to me called TunesPro, it's like iTunes but much cheaper, in fact much much cheaper, like more than 50% cheaper than iTunes, it may as well be free it's just that cheap.

So TunesPro sell music through their website, the music you download is 100% DRM free which means you can put it on your iPod, Zune (Pfft) or other MP3 player and it will work a treat. The site has over 5.5 million tracks to download from all of your favourite artists from past and present.

I wouldn't say i was the only person on the internet who has a problem and tweets about it in the hope that venting the anger will speed up the resolution, it never does. This type of action is something i find interesting because lately tweeting about your problems can help resolve them quickly.

This article is about how Twitter can be the tool that saves your brand as a company, it is also an article about how Twitter can help you solve problems faster, and lastly it's a post about the damage Twitter can have on your brand.

The inspiration for this article comes from my experience with companies on Twitter and personally the majority of companies i have had contact with have been very helpful and their help has restored hope in their brand, for others it has not been quite a picnic.

It's October and it's time for another edition of "Best Of: YouTube" again, so get ready for some laughter, some inspiration and just plain awesomeness.

I have collected my favourite videos from YouTube from the last month and put them together in one big'ol blog post to share with the world.

I was introduced to we7 earlier this year and has since become one of my frequently visited websites because it offers free streaming music from its website with no need for additional software.

Since using we7 I have seen little change in the way of features and some of the features we7 doesn't have annoys me a little, however it is a great service so who could stay mad for long.

we7 is very similar to Spotify in that it offers free streaming music supported by advertisements, the difference is that we7 works through your browser and Spotify requires a download in order to work, this is why we7 is better because you can be anywhere and listen to your music, including work or college.

With over 1 million tracks to stream for free including some unreleased albums we7 is massive and just last week we7 was the most visited music website on the internet according to official statistics of internet usage, a rather big milestone for legal free streaming websites.

I thought it would be a great idea to post some of my ideas for improving we7 in the hope that someone over at we7 would see the post and hopefully work on some of the features, features that i think would really improve the service for everyone.

Just a quicky-update with a video of the new DVD from The Killers titled Live From The Royal Albert Hall. The trailer has now officially been released and it can be viewed below. Enjoy.

A new application has been brought to my attention for the iPhone and i think it is quite brilliant, not because of its many features, but because its sole feature and sole purpose of free iPhone to iPhone communication.

The application is called "Ping" and it allows free "text messaging" between iPhones using the push notification feature in iPhone 3.0, so if you sent massive amounts of text messages and want to save some of your allowance for non-iPhone users then this application is perfect.

Recently i made a post about the features that Apple could implement into the next iTunes to make listening and purchasing music a more social experience. I talked about social networking features and public features that would allow your music tastes to be shared with the world or just your friends, i did not however talk about iTunes features that would affect you in the physical world.

In this article i will discuss some features that i believe would make iTunes a more enjoyable feature in a real world social environment. Once again this are only a suggestion and ideas and are not features that have in anyway been rumoured or created already.

iTunes is a massive product and has millions of users and the iTunes experience is quite enjoyable for home users, but once you leave the home you leave behind your library and your taste in music. So if you go out to a bar, club, party or restaurant you listen to what the DJ wants to play, which is not always what you enjoy.

In this post i discuss the new Google product Wave and share some ideas for how i think Google Wave will change the internet as we know it.

Google is clearly the king of the internet and i think it is safe to say that no matter where you go online you cannot hide from the empire of Google. They have their fingers so many pies like statistics, blogs, advertising, publishing and then they have a full hand in the search pie.

As Google have grown by sticking their fingers in more and more pies they are trying new things and most notably lately is their move into the conversation tool, called Google Wave.

I have been considering a review of my current hosting package for quite some time because i find that their service is often highly reliable but with some problems i have been having lately i didn't want my opinion to be skewed.

It has been a few month since then and i have decided that it is probably better for me to review them so that the same people don't get stung by the same problems that i did, time and time again.

When iTunes 8.0 was released last year (September 2008) i wrote a blog post about the future of iTunes and how iTunes would incorporate social networking features into its software to help people discover new music which would inevitably increase iTunes sales.

Since then iTunes 9.0 has been released and it didn't really implement anything new into the software, the software is still the same old iTunes with a nicer interface and couple of new features and i honestly don't believe these small changes deserve a full new version release, instead it should have been called iTunes 8.5 at the most.

Web Designers of world i have decided to make a post about great Firefox tools to help speed up your work flow. These are add-ons and plugins that typically help me with designing and coding so i thought i would share them with the world.

The tools i have suggested are tools to speed up debugging, general designing and then uploading.

Recently Lily Allen made a splash in the online media when she started a blog where she posted a letter regarding music piracy and how it affected smaller artists, she then went on to post replies she got from other artists.

The letter raised some interesting points from the perspective of the artists which is a new perspective because normally you only hear from the ISPs and record labels. The main point the letter makes is that piracy is not alright (probably why the blog got its name) and it only damages the music industry making it hard for smaller artists to make it big.

Earlier this month i made a new blog post about my V Festival videos on YouTube and promised i would post the rest as and when i got round to editing them and uploading them.

I never did get the time to edit the videos so i decided to simply stick a label on the front and upload to YouTube. These videos are of Razorlight, The Wombats and some random trip i went on while recording, the videos are also a little incomplete because i think i MAY have started recording half way through the song.

In June i did a post like this where i find my favourite YouTube videos and share them with my beautiful readers. Well it has been a few months since i did that one and i thought i would share some more videos with you because i'm a really nice guy.

This selection of videos is slightly bigger than the last lot of videos simply because i have been on YouTube a lot more and also decided to include some of my very own videos. Hopefully i can watch enough YouTube to make one of these posts every month, but i wouldn't hold you breath because everyone knows you cannot hold your breathe for a full month, retard.

I'm sure many people already know that i'm a massive fan of The Killers and if you don't then you better know, and know fast. You may also know that V Festival 2009 was the best weekend of my life, mainly thanks to The Killers, once again if you don't know, know fast.

Well my calendar has been pretty bare until 2010 when The Killers are expected to release their next studio album of covers. Well that all changed today when The Killers announced to fans that their Live DVD from the Royal Albert Hall will go on sale November 9th 2009 with an appropriately name "The Killers - Live From The Royal Albert Hall"

UPDATE: Added pre-order links and DVD cover after break (click read more)

With any blog successful blog it is all about finding your audience and keeping them on board, however one problem a lot of blogs have is that the audience simply doesn't find them.

This is a problem i have had previously with this blog and it is what forced me into taking serious action to increase the readability of my posts, the feedback and lastly increase traffic to the blog.

So i came across this film a few months ago on the Apple website simply because i saw Megan Fox's face and had to press play and it turns out to be the same film that the shots of Megan Fox half naked swimming in a lake came from, so obviously i'm going to pay money to see this film.

The UK release date of Jennifer's Body is November 6th so i know it's a little soon to be talking about but all those lovely American folk can see it now, which obviously means it's going to be on The Pirate Bay before UK release.

Let's face it, Twitter is full of geeks and has been for some time, only recently has it gone really mainstream in the UK. So it was no wonder that the day of my return to Twitter i got dragged into a new topic/trend called #nerdpickuplines which basically consists of people posting outrageously nerdy one-liners that other geeks can use to try and bed a lady. Luckily it wasn't taken to seriously which is why i joined in, i love a chance to post comical and borderline offensive comments and if i could poke fun at Nerds (who give Geeks a bad name) it would only sweeten the deal.

I decided i would post a chill-ass blog post with some of my favourites, the list is in no order, i was simply going through to find some of the ones that made me chuckle.

Just thought i would post a quick update to let everyone know where the website stands at the minute because it has undergone some changes again over the last 48 hours.

The Design

Last week i launched the new website and new design along side that, i thought the design would stay like that for a while because i quite liked it. I then decided on Friday that i didn't like the design anymore and thought i would add some pattern to the background, i have done this now with a wood effect. I then decided that i didn't really like the logo anymore, despite it being my logo since 2007 when the website launched, so this has now been revamped with a nice new font and slogan.

I was never a massive music fan and very rarely listened to music outside of my comfort zone purely out of fear of being beat up by the local children. Obviously this was obscene because how would they get inside my house when i'm listening to the music, it's not theoretically possible. Over the last couple of years i have slowly expanded my music collection and included some new artists that i hadn't heard about and would normally never have given a chance.

The problem is some of these artists are very good and not enough people know about them or the artists is too well known and considered to be popular music and you indie folk simply wont give them a chance, so hopefully this article will open your eyes a little and get you listening to some new music.

Incase you didn't know already i'm a web designer (and developer) and something all web designers come across at least once during the design of a website is cross-browser compatibility and i'm sure you can ask any website designer what they think of IE6 (Internet Explorer 6 - keep up with the acronyms) and they would throw so many obscenities at you that you would most likely cry.

It's no lie that web designers hates Internet Explorer especially Internet Explorer 6, simply because it has trouble rendering the simplest of things and when it does it normally renders them incorrectly. Below is my breakdown of common problems i face with the 3 versions of IE.

In the last couple of months Microsoft launched a new campaign to try and tempt Internet Explorer users to upgrade to the latest version of the browser, when you did Microsoft would give 8 meals to hungry americans and if you upgraded from Internet Explorer 6 they would double that to 16 meals.

This obviously is a good cause because I certainly don't want any fat american to have their body start consuming the large amounts of food stores around the body, so I immediately i jumped onto the cause and used it as a good way to get people to upgrade from the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 browser, a web designers worse nightmare.

Over the last few months i've been in the Will Ferrell kind of mood and been watching a lot of his awesome films. So i decided to would post about my favourite Will Ferrell films and why because, lets face it, he is a very funny man.

His career seemed to start out as quite a quiet one but since Anchorman he has blown up and at one stage he went through a stage of releasing several films a year, most of which went unnoticed until their DVD release. So without standing on roof tops crying out a long list of his releases and forcing people to go and watch them i decided i would blog about it.

Over the last 2 weeks i made some changes to the blog's Content Management System, and by changes i mean i started again, so as a result the database was reconstructed and all the data from the old one was wiped. I decided to do this because a lot of the old stuff was…. well..… old and is kind of unrelated now.

I did however keep some of the old content simply because it was a traffic driver and clearly someone somewhere found it remotely interesting. Everything else is gone.

Over the last few weeks i have been posting my review of V Festival 2009, which just happened to be the best weekend of my life. I have also posted reams of pictures onto Facebook and some of the pictures on the site but i have yet to even discuss the video footage i captured while at the event.

While at the event i captured some video from only a selection of bands i saw because i was saving the memory for The Killers, which also happened to be the band i got the least footage of (i was drunk and too busy screaming and dancing).

Well over the last few weeks i have been working on a brand new Content Management System for slater.john and today i'm happy to launch it, along with a brand new design.

The reason behind the change is simply to make it easier for me to post, it was also a chance for me to refresh my PHP knowledge and implement new techniques that have been learnt over the last 2 years. The first noticeable thing is the lack of content, i decided that the majority of the content on the old website was sat their for no reason and it really did nothing, so i removed it. As a result i have a brand new website with a nice clean look, minimal content and more of a blog.

Well day one was a very good start to V Festival with Keane playing us out with a selection of their amazing songs and epic dance moves that consisted mainly of marching on the spot, running up and down the stage and standing on the speakers, nevertheless it was a brilliant day.

On Sunday we were faced with a brilliant lineup made up of some of the bigger names in the festival such as The Script, Lily Allen, Dizzee Rascal, The Ting Tings, Razorlight, Calvin Harris and obviously The Killers headlining. So it was a difficult choice choosing which bands we went to see on the day, choices which seemed hard during the planning stage but on the day not so much.

Well it's been a week since V Festival 2009 kicked off so i thought i would post a list of the bands i ended up seeing and what i though of them.

Friday

Well the only thing that happened on Friday was were constructed a tent and carried too much food and beer across a field for about 1 mile. After that we started drinking (11am) and went into the arena for some looking around.

In here we met a new friend (pictured above) who told us all about his wacky job securing V Festival and how his job consists of a 20 hour shift stood in the same place making sure people don't get over a 20ft fence and run towards an empty stage. Which also had security. Odd. The guy was awesome though and despite his gangster watch he looks rather sophisticated.

As some of you may remember back in October of 2008 my beloved iPhone went into be fixed, this was done by Carphone Warehouse under the 12 month warranty because the screen went all weird and the accelerometer went all funny. Some of you may also remember i wrote several posts about how Carphone Warehouse sucked balls, today i follow that post with more Carphone warehouse failings.

So apparently something quite common with White iPhone 3Gs is cracking, these are small little hairline cracks in the areas where plastic is thin, typically around the speakers or headphone jack. My iPhone began to develop them around 4 months ago and it wasn't really a massive problem for me, however on Friday one of the cracks go worse, up to the point where the iPhone was almost in half.

Just a quick blog post before i go, i have created a V Festival 2009 clashfinder, it is basically a timetable that allows you to see when bands are on (estimated times) and see whether or not there is a clash between the bands you want to see.

I used this clashfinder from eFestivals Forum for the times and sexed it up a little with my l33t photoshoping skills.

I left out the B Live tent and Strongbow tent because, well, frankly i have heard of none of the bands and didn't want to spend too much time replicating something someone else made.

I thought i would take this time to update and let all (one) of you know that in less than 30 days V festival 2009 will commence with such legends as The Killers, Oasis, Snow Patrol and Keane - what's better is that I will be one of the thousands of people attending. It will be epic!

I have already started planning who shall have the pleasure of looking down on me as a observe the smash-tastic music and with new bands being announced over the next few weeks approaching V Festival it just makes my life harder in the choosing of who i go to see.

However with that said my focus will be on The Killers who are headlining Weston Park on Sunday, and furthermore the legends of British music Oasis who will be headlining my first day at Weston Park (Saturday). So despite a large portion of my day being me getting extremely drunk wandering for hours listening to random bands along my way, i certainly hope that my day/night ends with me listening to The Killers or Oasis.

Well its that time of year again where i post an update, i know its been a while but i have been away living life, not doing anything, but i have been alive, during my life, so therefore i've been living my life. god why do you question everything i do.

So updates are hard, even more so when your opinions are far to racists or sexist for a blog and its hard to pad out "Irish Women Cannot Dance but They Sound Hot" into more words, basic the title basically says it all. So instead of the last hour i went on YouTube and just ripped other peoples content and posted below. And you know what, it was freakin' easy compared to writting reviews about stuff or just generally talking to myself in a textual manner. Yeah. You know what i mean cracker.

So i will start off this new update with some of my favourite videos at the moment, you're gonna jizz in your pants at some of these you bloody bastard.

I recently wrote a forum post on the ekmCommunity forum, a forum for ekmPowershop customers, about the positives of Twitter in the e-commerce sector, a post which was inspired by a blog post i drafted about 4 months ago. The post is on a private forum which means it benefits no one other than the people inside that group, so i have decided to rewrite the blog post and adapt it to my new Twitter findings here.

This post is about how you can utilise a fast growing community of internet users to hopefully increase your businesses profit. This is based around my research and knowledge of Twitter and obviously ecommerce and will hopefully provide information to help ecommerce website owners drive traffic to their site and increase sales.

I love iTunes because it's easily the best media player on the Mac when combined with QuickTime and iTunes is always running on my iMac because it is simple, has create playlist abilities and is super smooth. I'm also a massive fan of how music players incorporate social features, these music players are not mainstream enough like iTunes is and iTunes has the infrastructure for these features to easily be incorporated.

In this blog post I talk about what iTunes is missing in terms of social features, these are only ideas and one can only hope that these features would be implemented in the near future, it would clearly make sense for these features to be incorporated because they would boost revenue via the iTunes store and boost iTunes' user-base massively.

Well it's been almost 1 week since i posted my disgust at The Carphone Warehouse for their poor customer service and repair package. Since then i have learnt new facts which only add to my annoyance.

First let me start by saying I have my iPhone back and it works like a treat but apart from that i'm disappointed at The Carphone Warehouse for their piss-poor customer service.

Sunday 2nd November 2008 - I gave them a call asking where my iPhone was and when i would have it back and they told me Wednesday which was 3 days overdue from the 14 days they promised me. Wednesday came along and i had heard nothing, but i waited for the length of the day to see if i got a text or phone as promised by the sales rep i called. No call ever came.

Let me set the scene. Sunday 19th October 2008, i spent the prior Friday in Burnley on one of my regular night outs taking various pictures with the piss-poor 2Mpixel camera on the iPhone 3G. Saturday i awake with a somewhat bad hangover (not the worst hangover), i come to marvel at the pictures i took the night before. I find myself looking shocked as my iPhone flips the photos around in any direction. The cause. A broken accelerometer inside the iPhone meaning that it didn't know what direction it was facing.

I have been waiting far to long for white iPhones to come in stock in the UK and finally i get word from Carphone Warehouse that they are indeed expecting a "large" shipment on Monday ready for selling on Tuesday. I asked the sales guy whether they would get them in store by that time and he was unable to comment but simply said "not likely" but i'm assuming this is because of the bank holiday. The guy (who was very helpful) agreed to give me a call on Monday or Tuesday (whenever they are ready for selling) so i could buy one.

Well this week has been the second most expensive week of the last year (the first expensive was the £1,200 i spent on the iMAC). Yesterday i got the impulse to buy a new mobile phone, this time none other than the magical iPhone, maybe i'm dumb, maybe i have more money than sense, others may say im a fan boy, to these people i say f**k you, f**k you and your fat f**king fingers. Still got a few stupid problems like not being able to receive voicemail and also my case is messing around with the touch screen, all will be fixed soon. Anyway that's my update, i bet you're glad you subscribed to the RSS feed now huh.