Welcome

by Kev on 19 July, 2010

Scribbleit is a UK based web design and hosting company run by Kevin Partner. Scribbleit develops applications for clients and also develops its own web applications and ecommerce sites. PassYourTheory, MakingYourOwnCandles and MicrobusinessEntrepreneur are all Scribbleit developments.

FixedPriceWebsite.co.uk

Scribbleit has created a Fixed Price Website Service that will allow small business owners and others to have a fully custom designed site built by using WordPress technology and hosted on our space with built-in webmastering services for a fixed development price followed by a low cost monthly hosting and webmastering fee. We’re limiting the number of clients for this service and spaces are filling quickly so if you have a small business and want a new website (whether you have one at present or not), time’s running out!

I’ve been a Contributing Editor of PC Pro Magazine since 1996 and am also the author of How to set up an online business, a complete guide to planning, building and marketing a profitable web business idea: it even includes methods of ensuring that your idea will make money. Order it from Amazon.

Follow Kevin on Twitter at kevpartner for all the latest technology and internet marketing news, and some undisguised grumpiness.

We use BigCommerce, by far and away the best online ecommerce solution we’ve found.

Google+ – the penny drops – here’s how I use it

by Kev on 8 May, 2012

Google Plus Kevin Partner

Like many people, I gave Google+ a go when it was first released but gave up again pretty quickly. Why? Here’s a few reasons:

  • I felt I already had enough social media accounts
  • I couldn’t work out how it fitted compared to Twitter and Facebook
  • I couldn’t use it like Facebook because too few of the people I knew were on it
  • I was overwhelmed by the number of posts appearing in my “Stream” with no obvious way to filter them

Well, I’m glad to say that the penny has dropped and I now find Google+ has a unique and valuable place in my web browsing habits. The root of the problem, and the eventual solution, was the concept of “Circles“. The idea behind circles is that they enable you to group people so that when you post a status update, you can choose who gets to see them. Examples given at the beginning included “friends”, “family”, “colleagues” and so on. The problem was, as I said earlier, I knew far too few people to make this work. I also made the mistake of believing them equivalent to Facebook lists – a fundamental problem. [click to continue…]

Developing Mobile Apps with Corona

November 1, 2011
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I’ve been developing interactive programs for over 20 years (cos I’m an old sod). I started off just as a “course designer” which meant I designed, scripted and project managed the development of what would now be called elearning programmes with someone else programming them. In those days we used an arcane tool called TenCORE [...]

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Will Amazon’s Kindle Tablet light a fire under the iPad?

September 5, 2011

What a bloody stupid question but lots of people are asking it. You see, TechCrunch have published a report of a sneak preview of the upcoming, not yet formally announced Amazon Tablet. The report is very plausible and indicates that Amazon is taking a very different approach to the tablet market – some is good, some [...]

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Review: Serif MoviePlus X5 video editor

August 5, 2011

Serif is a British software company that, for the past umpteen years, has specialised in developing products aimed at the consumer and home business. Their PagePlus desktop publishing programme is used extensively at MakingYourOwnCandles for the production of leaflets and instruction booklets, having replaced Microsoft Publisher in my affections a few years back. I’d been [...]

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Chromebook and iPad – more similar than you might think

June 8, 2011
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The recent Apple developer conference was a bit of a damp squib. OSX Lion, yawn. iOS5, meh (was there a single “new” feature that hadn’t been ripped off Android or Windows Mobile?). But iCloud is different. You see, iCloud was the one announcement that could change things. And Google is also looking to stir things [...]

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How to get Ubuntu to access Network Attached Storage Devices

March 24, 2011
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I love Ubuntu but I’ve had an ongoing problem accessing my existing Buffalo NAS device. I’d been following what seemed to me to be a logical process which was to click Network, at which point I saw the device and then navigate to the folder. As is so often the case, the obvious method is [...]

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WordPress not allowing automatic upgrades/installation?

December 6, 2010
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I’m in the middle of a process of moving websites across from a dedicated server to a new Virtual Server provided by Memset. It’s been pretty simple so far with the main thorn in my side being problems with WordPress. I can get it installed easily enough but upgrades and plugin installations were failing. Occasionally [...]

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Different Page Styles for WordPress

July 19, 2010

WordPress is being used increasingly for the development of fully-fledged websites. After all, it offers a powerful combination of being (at least in theory) easy to skin whilst also providing an excellent user interface for managing the site once it’s up and running. I’ve been developing a business creating WordPress sites using the excellent Thesis [...]

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Installing Ubuntu alongside Windows, the easy way

June 4, 2010
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Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out how much of time time I could spend using Ubuntu. I am not about to abandon Windows 7 entirely as there are too many applications on that platform that I use (including Adobe’s CS5 suite) but I’d realised that I spend most of my time working in [...]

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