by Kevin Partner on 19th July, 2010
Scribbleit is a UK based web design and hosting company. Scribbleit develops applications for clients and also develops its own web applications and ecommerce sites. PassYourTheory, MakingYourOwnCandles and PassYourCitizenship are all Scribbleit developments.
Fixed price development
Scribbleit is currently developing a product that will allow small business owners and others to have a fully designed site built using WordPress technology and hosted on our space with built-in webmastering services for a fixed development price of £399 followed by a low cost monthly hosting fee. This product is being tested with a number of clients at present before launch. If you’d like to find out how to be part of this beta test phase email me now at kevin.partner@scribbleit.co.uk to qualify for a £100 discount on the development fee.
Founder Kevin Partner has been a Contributing Editor of PC Pro Magazine since 1996 and is 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.
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by Kevin Partner on 19th July, 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 theme from DIYThemes.com. Thesis makes it possible to have pretty much any design you like, some of which can be implemented using the WordPress dashboard. To move significantly away from the Thesis default theme, however, you need to use CSS and Thesis makes this easy by making a .custom CSS class available. What this means is that any class based on .custom will override the equivalent class in a design. In practice, this means that if I wanted to have my own <h3> styling, I would simply apply it like this within custom.css:
.custom h3 {
color:#ff000;
}
I’m sure you can immediately see the power of this: you can change the entire design this way without touching the core Thesis or WordPress CSS. Thesis also includes a wide range of addition Hooks into the WordPress framework but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
The problem is that websites (as opposed to blogs) often need very different layouts across their pages. In WordPress, when you add a Widget, it’s added for every page in the site whether you like it or not. What’s needed is extra flexibility in hiding, showing and editing all aspects of the page. Thesis does add the “no sidebar” template, but that still doesn’t give enough flexibility.
I want to talk about a little known feature that Thesis makes available for WordPress pages. You see, not only can you override css at a global level but also on each individual page. To access this, enter a new, unique, class name in the CSS field within the Page.
Once you’ve done this, you can access CSS properties using (in this case) the .resource class rather than .custom, but still within the custom.css file so it’s all in one place.
Let’s imagine, for example, that I want to hide one of the sidebars on my “Resources” page. Here’s how I’d do it:
- Load up Firefox and use the Web Developer Toolbar to find out the CSS selector used to display the sidebar
- Open up custom.css and set this CSS’s display property to “none” like this:
.resource #sidebar_1 {
display:none;
}
Whilst you can, of course, achieve the same effect by creating a new template for the page, this is a much simpler way to make changes unless you want an entirely new layout.
You can also use the multimedia box in Thesis to add any HTML you like so it’s possible to further customise the page that way. There is a point, however, where all this customisation would be better done with an entirely new template. Once you start feeling as though you’re bodging it- that’s when to start from scratch. If all you want to do is hide or show sidebars or make other unique changes to the design of one page, give this technique a try, it’s a whole lot quicker!
by Kevin Partner on 4th June, 2010
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 a browser these days.
Here’s the best way to do it:
- Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/windows-installer and click Start download. This will download the Wubi installer for Windows.
- If you’re using a 64 bit processor (you almost certainly are) then Wubi will, unfortunately, install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu which the makers of Ubuntu themselves say is not for “daily use”. The problem is that drivers (relatively scare on Linux in the first place) and programs often only exist in the 32 bit version. This happened to me and I was forced to reinstall. To force it to use the 32 bit version, simply download the 32-bit iso image from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download into the same folder as Wubi.
- Run Wubi. You may well get a message about being unable to find drives. This is likely to be because you’ve got a built in media card reader. Simply click Continue time and time again until it goes away and all will be well.
- Reboot. You should see a text menu with your current Windows installation as the default and the new Ubuntu installation. Select Ubuntu and follow the steps through to complete the installation.
You’ll find most of the commonly used applications have already been installed (including OpenOffice) but to add more software go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Centre and do a search. You can find the Flash player and Filezilla there, for example. Google Chrome can be installed from within Firefox. Tweetdeck is slightly more involved but full information can be found by searching their user forum (hint: do not click the Install Now button as it doesn’t work).
by Kevin Partner on 15th April, 2010
I’ve spent a couple of hours this afternoon solving an irritation. I like to keep an eye on how many Twitter followers I have, not as an obsession of course but just out of interest. Doing so involves going to my Twitter page: www.twitter.com/kevpartner or clicking on my profile in Tweetdeck (having found a recent tweet). What I want is a way to see the number all the time, preferably updating every few minutes.
So I created a simple Windows Sidebar gadget that interacts with the Twitter API using jQuery to retrieve this bit of data (it could retrieve anything, of course) every five minutes and display it in the sidebar.
I’m just going to show you the crucial bit. You’ll need to create a blank Sidebar Gadget using Microsoft’s instructions and make it look however you want. The code would work in exactly the same way if inserted in a web page if you’d prefer.
This bit goes in the <head> section. It assumes you have jQuery in a subfolder called js.
<script src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
getfollowers();
function getfollowers(){
requestURL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/kevpartner.json?callback=?";
$.getJSON(requestURL, callback);
}
function callback(data)
{
var now = new Date();
var theminutes=now.getMinutes();
if(theminutes<10)
{
theminutes="0"+theminutes;
}
var thehours=now.getHours();
var thetime=thehours+":"+theminutes;
$('#time').text("at "+thetime);
$('#gadgetContent').text(data.followers_count+" followers");
setTimeout(getfollowers, 300000);
}
});
</script>
</head>
There are two main functions. getfollowers() calls the Twitter API and asks it to return (in this case) my user data. It uses the getJSON method to do that and, once it gets a response, it calls the second function callback
callback calculates the current time (so I can see when it last updated) and also pulls out the followers_counts JSON element. These bits of information are then inserted in the appropriate span object using standard jQuery notation. The setTimeout function repeats the process every five minutes.
And this is the bit in the body:
<body>
<g:background id="imgBackground">
<span id="gadgetContent"></span>
<span id="time"></span>
</g:background>
</body>
This is very rough and ready with no visual styling at all. But it does the job and does it nicely! I might polish it up into a proper widget which will allow users to insert their own user name. If I do decide to do that, I’ll publish it. Follow me on Twitter to find out when this happens!
by Kevin Partner on 31st March, 2010
So, you’re a freelance designer, developer, copywriter or journalist. This excellent blog post covers how WordPress can be used by you in your business.
by Kevin Partner on 30th March, 2010
One of the main aims of a blog or landing page is to build a mailing list. With a list full of people eager to hear what you have to say, it becomes possible to sell targeted goods and services alongside advice, news, reviews etc. When I find a blog I’m interested in, what I usually want is to receive blog posts by email rather than having to remember to visit the site regularly. For example, Seth Godin and Perry Marshall offer this sort of service: in Seth’s case his system sends an email containing the blog post each time he adds a new one whereas Perry’s are more traditional Autoresponder fare and tend to point you back to one of his pages for further information. You can also see this in action at MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk [click to continue…]
by Kevin Partner on 22nd February, 2010
Thesis is, in my view, the best WordPress theme for commercial sites but there can be a couple of niggles when it comes to installing it on a shared hosting platform such as, in my case, a Heart Internet Reseller account.
Thesis includes the facility to include a post image: this is an image that appears near the post title and which is then used as a thumbnail – obviously exactly how these appear is configurable within the Thesis options panel.
Installing for the first time on a shared space went fine until it came to specifying the Post Images which simply didn’t appear. After a good deal of digging around on the Thesis forum at DIY Themes and some experimentation, here’s the process I went through to fix the problems:
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by Kevin Partner on 28th January, 2010
Let’s just begin by saying that I have purchased Apple products in the past. I’ve owned an iMac, an eMac, several iPod Nanos, a MacBook and an iPod Classic. To me, they are the masters of hardware design and some of their software is also excellent (the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Keynote being two outstanding examples for me – on the other hand Quicktime and iTunes are amongst my least favourite pieces of software, right up there with Adobe Reader). My loathing of iTunes and my discovery of how liberating it is to have a plain, vanilla MP3 player, buy MP3s from Amazon and simply drag and drop them across has led to my abandonment of the iPod series, for now at least.
As a geek but not an early adopter, it’s people like me that Apple needs to impress if it’s to increase its market share. Apple evangelists will buy the iPad, even if they don’t really know why and I don’t doubt they’ll find uses for it (even if it’s annoying other commuters by watching “Love Actually” on their lovely big screen) but people like me need a justifiable reason for laying out the money.
So, if money were no object, what would I buy in the following categories? [click to continue…]
by Kevin Partner on 7th January, 2010
About Me
I’m not a self-development guru but I am interested in the area and have studied many of the best practitioners. This series of blog entries summarises the main themes I’ve seen reoccurring time and time again: a series of universally accepted principles that really should be taught to our children at school.
I don’t pretend to be great at all of these – far from it. However, I know from experience that when I work on each of them, my life becomes more productive, richer and happier.
Just to reiterate, I am not preaching or evangelising these principles. I’m simply summarising what I see as the most important of them so that you can think about incorporating them into your day. If they make sense to you, I suggest applying them one at a time until each becomes a habit and part of your natural outlook on life.
Step1 : Taking Responsibility
You’re probably familiar with the concept of “stimulus-response” as in the famous experiment by Pavlov in which he trained dogs to salivate when they hear a bell which had previously been rung whenever there was a sausage in the vicinity.
The stimulus (the bell) lead directly to the response (dribbling). In a similar way, the stimulus of being cut up on the motorway might lead to the response of sticking two fingers up, honking your horn and chasing the offender. Or you might feel miserable because the weather’s wet or because you’ve just heard a sad story on the news.
However, there is an essential difference between animals and humans. Animals have no choice about responding to a stimulus, humans do. If you feel miserable on a cloudy day, you’re giving control over your mood to an outside force (the weather) about which you can do nothing. If you get stressed when someone overtakes you on the motorway and then cuts in, you’re allowing that person’s behaviour to stress you. Note the verbs: “giving” and “allowing”. You see, it’s your choice how you react to any stimulus: you choose whether to react with anger, sadness, calmness or even not to react at all.
It might feel as though you are taking control by reacting but, in fact, you are giving up control to the stimulus just as surely as if you were a dog salivating over a sausage. The truly strong, empowering thing to do is to stop, think and then respond in accordance with your values.
One of the best ways to make yourself more effective is to work on those things you can influence and ignore those things you can’t. The weather doesn’t make you miserable, it’s your reaction to it that does so: this is why one person’s gorgeous sunny day is another’s wasp-infested slice of hell.
By only trying to exercise control over things you can control (and this rarely includes other people), you focus your energies in productive areas and greatly reduce your stress. If the weather’s crap (the UK is locked in a new Ice Age as I write this) then don’t let it get you down: work out how you’re going to control those things you can. If you’re unable to drive anywhere (as we are at present) then work on managing with what you have at home. Think about helping your vulnerable neighbours out. Clear the snow from in front of your house and car. Enjoy it!
Don’t underestimate the power of this. By taking responsibility for how you react, you stop blaming the world for your misfortunes and this is empowering (after all if you stop believing that the weather can make you miserable, you’ve just given yourself the power to be happy). It also makes you more forgiving of others and much less affected by their weaknesses.
Do what you can about what you can influence: and remember that your reactions to everything that happens are entirely in your control. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp victim and psychiatrist reasoned that he has complete control over his thoughts and reactions and, in that understanding, more freedom than his prison camp guards. His is a humbling story and well worth reading.
Further Reading: I came across this principle first in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
by Stephen Covey. This was an enormously influential experience (I listened to the audio of a seminar) and very much affected my way of looking at life and my performance.
by Kevin Partner on 6th January, 2010
I’m all for Buyer Protection (after all, I’m a buyer more often than a seller) but Paypal’s Dispute Resolution system needs sorting out.
One of my companies offers an online subscription service. On Christmas Eve, a customer emailed us to say they couldn’t access the service having paid for it. On Boxing Day having waited a whole 48 hours over Xmas and not received a response, they put a claim in. What did they claim? That the product had not been received.
I then got notification of this, logged into Paypal (having emailed the customer and asked why they’d escalated it without giving us reasonable time to respond) only to find that the three options open to me when it comes to responding are:
- I have posted the item, here is the tracking number
- I did not post the item, I will refund
- I have already refunded.
THERE IS NO ITEM TO POST! This is an entirely online product. The customer has (either wilfully or through ignorance) filed an incorrect complaint. Unfortunately, Paypal don’t bother to investigate the type of product and take the customer’s word for it. There is no way I can find to add a “note” to the dispute and surely the simplest solution would be:
4. This is not a physical product
…or something similar.
Paypal have now found in favour of the customer and refunded them. This leaves businesses like mine open to ignorant or malicious claim-backs without any recourse to defend ourselves. It really is time Paypal got their finger out and at least gave merchants such as us (with a long and blemish-free history) the opportunity to respond properly to inappropriate claims.
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