I’ve also thought long and hard about what I am going to use this web-space for.  I don’t do that much reading into tech any more, though it is picking up again, and I am no longer part of the cannonball read, but I am still reading.  As such, this space will be used to post about anything.  My opinions on different things, my views on life, and general other crap I can come up with.

Be warned, it’s not all going to be nice reading!

Right, now you have been warned (see above) if you choose to carry on reading, don’t complain when you discover that there is nothing much of interest here, other than me giving LG a publicity bashing.  Any publicity is good publicity, right?  Not when it’s a tech guy berating you for being useless!

I’ve previously posted about Apple doing well on the back of a slow moving Android, and given my reasons why, despite the slow progress of handset manufacturers to adopt newer versions of the Android Operating System, I continue to use Android handsets.  I’m currently (read “still”) stuck with Gingerbread on my handset, despite that being added to the phone some 14 months ago, and with the 1st birthday of “Ice Cream Sandwich” just around the corner, there’s no real sign of me getting a legitimate update any time soon.  There is speculation that the update will be out in Q3 this year, but that could be any time from now until the end of September; and that’s assuming they aren’t on about financial year, which would give them to the end of the year.  This gives the possibility that there will have been a full version out for a year or more before being released to customers.  A newer version which, if typical software development cycles are anything to go by, will include some security updates.  I’m essentially having to run a phone with out of date security all because the handset manufacturer is being unreasonably tardy in coming forward with an update.

For those who don’t follows Android development, I feel that this is made even worse considering that the newest version of the Android operating system has been release, codename Jelly Bean.  It was released at the end of June, so I can expect to have to wait until this time next year to get that version for my phone.  Well, that’s not strictly true, I’ll certainly not be using my Optimus 2x for much longer, and I won’t be replacing it with a newer LG phone either!

All of this almost makes me start considering getting an iPhone.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been re-employed by the company I left in February, and am going to be working from home as a satellite office to their head office.  This presents me with a real opportunity to show just how motivated and disciplined I can be, and also lets me work on a product I am completely passionate about.  Also, not having to commute for two hours a day helped sway the change back a lot.  Why would I spend 10 hours of my life a week commuting when I can spend it resting, researching, playing games, blogging or otherwise having fun?

I’m now into my third week back and I’ve done just about everything my job requires of me so far, including setting up my own machine with the software I needed, working on support to help out with the tickets on there and doing project work for customers.  Some of it is live, other parts are in testing.

The trouble with working for different companies is you start to get a feel for certain software, and then have to make the transition back.  In this case, the main challenge for me was getting used to Microsoft Windows again after spending 4 months using Ubuntu.  I’m still trying to not use Gnome 3 behaviour, such as going to the top-right corner of the screen to show all open applications, but mostly I have re-adjusted for work.  You also forget some of the things which are needed for doing certain things as part of your duties, and only come to realise that you haven’t installed something when you come to need it.  In my case it was the assistant for the phone, and Teamviewer.

Now I have everything up and running again, things are running well for me.  I have a dedicated machine for work, with a second screen to make me as productive as possible, and can get research, examples and other material I need up on my personal PC, as well as run my own music through it.

I have been up to visit the head office, and will be doing that every few weeks or so, which I think is good to help build a fully working distributed team.  If everyone gets a chance to meet each other every once in a while, then I think they will naturally be able to work together remotely a lot easier than one or more people just being faceless “drones”, for want of a better word, somewhere in the world.

I’m lucky to have been given this chance, and I intend to make the most of it!

Check back soon for further updates and comments on what working remote is like, and some important things needed to be successful at it.

That might sound totally crazy to some, but let me explain quite simply why.  No more commuting.

It’s just about that easy.  I’m going to be working from home and “telecommuting” to their head office about 300 miles away.  Doing this is going to save me about 2 hours a day in travelling time, time I can spend doing other things.  It doesn’t matter if I want to learn something new, update this blog, do some exercise, or even if I want to do nothing and chill.  It doesn’t matter because I can!  I’ll have about 10 hours a week spare to do as I wish.

I do feel bad for leaving so soon, but at the end of the day, I think this is the best course of action for me, both personally and professionally.

I am aware that there will be some difficulties to overcome with working from home, but I plan to spend time blogging about those here, and let the wider world know how to deal with these things.  I’ll be setting up a section of my blog, “The Lone Developer”, to track my trials and errors.

This is going to be an interesting chapter of my life!

Whilst I’ve been looking around at the different options on offer, I’ve noticed that some of the sites take absolutely ages to load.

Think about that a moment, a web host whose website takes so long to load you get bored before it fully opens.  Would you host your website with them?  I wouldn’t!

If they can’t get the infrastructure in place to serve up their own website at a reasonable speed, why should I assume it would be any different to my own site?  Okay, this site isn’t the fastest out there to load, but it is generally reliable and the issues themselves are mainly down to the CMS and the plug-ins on it.  I have a different site hosted with the same company as this with a different system and it loads fine every time.

If you are a web host, and your website doesn’t load fast, you have issues.  It’s bad enough visiting a regular website and having that load slowly, but when it is someone wanting to host a website with those issues they might as well hang out a banner which says “come with us for poor performance”.

If you are one of those hosts, you need to either change your website structure or re-think your server and data centre infrastructure!

If you are a customer with a poor host, both in terms of performance an service, then move.  Find a better host.  There are, after all, a lot to choose from!

He gets dragged further in, being left very little choice once George lets Carrie know that Nick has been working for him.  This time Nick is off to the South of France to capture some money launderers and pass them over for interrogation.  Not everything is plain sailing when Nick sees that the source of all the information they are getting is the same informant who gave them the tip-off for the previous job, and someone which Nick and his two team mates, Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi, really want to kill.

They carry out the collection of the first of the money launderers, and are about to go for the second when they are spotted and everything goes wrong.  One of them is captured by the terrorist funders, and driven away to a building site.  Nick and his remaining team member need to work to save him what would certainly be a very unpleasant death.

Nick always finds himself in these bad situations, and knows he will keep getting into them until they either find someone better, or he is killed.  He’s been told as much.  A solid sign that there is more to come from him.

I liked this story, it was filled with action and also tested people’s moral boundaries and gave such vivid descriptions of some horrific scenes; but that is part of the appeal of these books, they tell the stories in a manner which may well play out in real life, and doesn’t always have a happy ending.  This isn’t Hollywood, it’s a world inhabited with violence, and a one where the good guys will get hurt, and the bad guys can come out on top.  That is, after all, why Nick Stone has these adventures….to stop them!

Harry Potter was born to magical parents during a time when great evil was around in the magical world.  The evil wizard, Lord Voldermort, was so evil that even a decade after his downfall, people still dare not speak his name.  He had heard of a prophecy in which a boy who is born in July will bring an end to his rule (this is mentioned in a later book).  He decided to rid the magical world of all boys born in July in a manner which is biblical in nature, and resembles the work which King Herod did in the bible.  When he got to the house of the Potters to rid the world of baby Harry, something strange happened.  Sure enough he killed Harry’s parents, but in the process of trying to kill Harry something went wrong.  Harry Potter became the boy who lived, and he-who-must-not-be-named vanished.

Harry was taken by some of the Hogwarts’ staff to live with his Aunt and Uncle, where he was forced to live in a cupboard under the stairs, until one day he got a letter – thousands of them eventually – accepting him to study at Hogwarts where he could learn magic.

The story centres around his first year at Hogwats, meeting new friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, as well as making enemies, Draco Malfoy, and the learning curve of being able to harness and use magic.  He gets into some mischief as all young boys do, and builds into a more normal life than he ever had living in the muggle world.  Well, as normal as flying on broomsticks, fighting mountain trolls and escaping from Fluffy, a three-headed dog, can get.

Unbeknown to Harry and the other students, Hogwarts is guarding the Philosopher’s stone, a rare magical stone with very magical powers, including turning any metal into gold and being able to produce the elixir of life.  Some of the dark forces know it is there and try to steal it for their own purposes, and it is left to Harry and his friends to stop them, resulting in a one-on-one confrontation with Harry and the one trying to steal the stone at the end.

I’ve always enjoyed the films, but I generally do, so when I first read the books I did it as a comparison.  It is a difficult task to do.  The books are so much better, and give a much better portrayal of the whole world than can be put into a film easily, and the books contain some important snippets into why things are the way they are, and why people turned out the way they did which the films simply cannot match.  The books for me are the truest way of enjoying the world of Harry Potter, and I would recommend any of them to anyone, but if you’ve never read them, you need to start at the beginning to see how Harry builds his friendships which carry him through his young life.

Even if this isn’t your usual type of story, it’s one which should be read!

I read an article in Inc. magazine which showed that business blogging is on the decline, and it was brought back to the front of my mind when I looked at the analytics for my website.  Sure, I don’t get a lot of visitors, but I’ve been somewhat lax lately at adding posts to the blog, and I am behind with the book reviews I post for the cannonball read, so I have seen a decline in site traffic because of this; and there isn’t really a good reason for it.

Sure, I’ve had a busy weekend.  Before the weekend I was doing some reading on fluid website design (I’ll post another time on that) but I’ve still found time to do other things which are, by comparison, less important.

All of this made me wonder why companies place less emphasis on blogging than they do other social media?

Posting on Twitter means you can easily get traffic by posting about something which is trending and be relevant to current events, but that’s not always what your business is about – unless you are a news business.  Facebook will only give you good coverage if you are popular and the people who like you comment or like what you are saying so their friends can see, so why are these more important?

The truth is, I think, that the likes of Facebook and Twitter are not all that important for small businesses, unless they have a blog to link back to frequently.  It’s all well and good tweeting your congratulations to whoever has done well at a recent sporting event or similar, but what does that have to do with your business – unless you sponsor them?

Relevance is key!

If you have a new product coming out?  Talk about it on the blog.  Have a lot of existing products?  Work through the list of products and re-introduce the older ones.  You never know, it might just spark off a sales rush and let you clear out some old stock.

I think the problem is, people are afraid of blogging.  Afraid for one reasons – the amount of words it takes.  Throughout school you try to avoid essays and writing anything with a lengthy number of words, so having to put together a significant chunk of text can be quite a task, but here’s the thing – a blog post doesn’t need to be huge.  A couple hundred words is all it needs to be.  Sometimes there will be more, other times less.  It doesn’t really matter.

The whole point behind it will be that customers and potential customers can see that you are still out there in the market place, still going and still relevant.  It shows Google that your site is still active and may help to improve the ranking of the site, which in turn can drive traffic to the site and possibly generate sales from there.

Once you have the blog post in place, this is the time to post on other social media sites and add a link to the post.  This will help to drive traffic to the site, show that you are still relevant and maybe increase your sales.  All of this for writing a few words.  But then who should write them?

If you don’t have someone, or a team, working specifically on social media (not always an option in small businesses) then the marketing and/or sales would be a great place to start.  They know the products/services and can post about those with some clever sales spin which they use when pitching to clients.  All it takes is about an hour a week and the rewards can be huge.

There is no reason to be afraid of blogging, it is a tool to be embraced to get more information out and about.  Information which is held in the heads of people, on old marketing papers/leaflets or even positive feedback which has been sent direct.  Pull all this together and there’s a blog post in the making.  Easy.

The story revolves around a visitor to Ankh-Morpork with riches beyond the dreams of the residents there.  As the visitor speaks a language only Rincewind, a wizard, is familiar with, he unwittingly ends up as a tour guide for for the visitor, Twoflower, when a fire breaks out in the city and they are forced to escape.  Their whole journey, and the events which occur, are all down to a board game played by some of the gods of the world, including Fate and Luck.

On their travels they visit an upside down mountain, the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth, and even the edge of the Discworld where they can see the Great A’Tuin – the giant turtle, on the back of which the disc exists – and the four elephants which hold up the disc.

This is a clear fantasy book, and a one in which doesn’t resemble the regular world.  The book is a great escape for those wishing to indulge in a visit to a strange new world where nothing is quite what it seems.  There are laughs aplenty, and confusion too, but in a world where the spectrum is made up of eight colours, and is set on a disc resting on the back of four elephants which, in turn, are riding on a turtle through space; how could there not be?

It wasn’t as good as I was expecting it to be, but I’m going to have a read of The Light Fantastic (Discworld #2) in the hope that I can get fully into the magical world on the back of the giant turtle.

I worked yesterday afternoon with my web hosts to get the problem resolved, and am pleased to say that I am now up and running again.  Now for the credit where it is due…

I host my websites (this one and another I am working on in the background) with Unlimited Web Hosting.  As their name suggests, their hosting is unlimited.  Unlimited data allowance, unlimited traffic bandwidth, unlimited domain names and unlimited MySQL databases.  Don’t believe me, check out their page on their hosting, that’s where I got the information from.  They do all of this for only £2.75 a month (ex.VAT) and still throw in 24/7 phone and e-mail support.

24/7 support for the amount they bill each month seemed a little far fetched so I wasn’t too sure how much of a response I would get on a Sunday afternoon on a Bank holiday weekend, but my site wasn’t working and I needed help.  I sent them an e-mail and within 10 minutes I had a response and the help started.  They looked in to things their side and I helped them by trying things my side.  They knew straight away that the problem was the site timing out, and therefore not returning any HTTP response, so tracking down what it was from that point was just a matter of time.

The support team at Unlimited Web Hosting were really friendly, helpful and knowledgeable, and I am really glad I chose them as my hosting company.

If you want my advice, and even if you don’t, choose these as your hosting company.  The bills will be lower (probably), the resource you’re allowed to use will be higher and the support, if you ever need it, is top drawer.