by Kevin Partner on 9 September, 2009
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Scribbleit is a UK based developer of PHP, Flash & Flex applications and websites. Scribbleit develops applications for clients and also develops its own web applications and ecommerce sites. PassYourTheory, MakingYourOwnCandles and PassYourCitizenship are all Scribbleit developments.
Founder and CEO Kevin Partner has been developing web applications for ten years and is the chief technologist behind PassYourTheory, the uk’s leading Theory Test website and an excellent example of HTML, PHP and Flash working together to deliver a uniquely rich service.
Kevin 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 22 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 28 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 7 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 6 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.
by Kevin Partner on 11 December, 2009
I've spent some time during a busy week signing up for Google Apps Premier. Why? The main benefit to my companies is that it allows us to use corporate level email facilities without the expense or hassle of setting up and running an Exchange (or similar) server. I'm currently in the 30 day free trial and all is going well.
For around £2.50 per month per user, we now get sophisticated email which is delivered via the increasingly impressive Googlemail interface. In the background is the Postini service (acquired by Google a couple of years ago) which adds superb spam filtering and virus checking along with other facilities (including a standard footer) I have yet to explore.
We also get the rather nice Google Sites which allows us to set up an ad-hoc intranet. By editing our MX records, I'm able to access the various functions at [function].[domain name]: for example
mail.example.com or
docs.example.com and even set up a Google Sites web page at
www.example.com so that all users can log in and get to the various sections from one central page.
Google Apps includes Google Docs which, frankly, is still pretty rubbish. It will enable us to collaborate on simply formatted documents and presentations before the final version is downloaded and prettied up.
Apps includes a shared Calendar application, built in chat and even the ability to access Apps on your mobile phone (it works beautifully on my Android phone).
It took a bit of setting up, although it was easy enough and most of this was spent in Google Mail setting up filters to help me manage email coming from all my many email accounts. So far it's going exceptionally well: enabling me to keep to my "clear inbox" policy almost entirely. Because it's online, I don't have to worry about viruses and my inbox is not cluttered with Spam because it would have to get past Positini first and then Google's own spam filter. So far, not a single inappropriate message has made it into my inbox. I was able to achieve something similar using Thunderbird and Cloudmark but it took ages every morning to process the crap that came in.
So far so good: I now need to sell my co-director (and technophobe) on it. If he goes for it, then I know we're onto a winner.
Posted via email from Kevin’s posterous
by Kevin Partner on 2 December, 2009
I’m just starting to experiment with Expression Web 3 as a site editor (specifically for editing PHP, CSS and Javascript files) and the first stumbling block was how to set it up so that I can edit my remote files directly without having to create a local version. This is necessary because I don’t have PHP/MySQL and Apache installed on my Windows machine.
Despite the fact that this doesn’t appear to be mentioned in the application help, it’s actually very simple. Just go to File, Open and, in the address bar, type your FTP address. You’ll then be prompted to type in your login details and, assuming this has worked successfully, you’ll then be presented with an Explorer view of your site from which you can pick your file. Simple.
by Kevin Partner on 11 November, 2009
Our latest commercial venture www.MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk has launched in time for Christmas. This site/business was created as part of a project for PCPro (or which more in due course) and offers easy-to-use but professional quality candle making kits that anyone can use to create coloured and scented 15-hour candles.
The site was created using Wordpress and is linked to a shop created using EKMPowershop’s ecommerce structure. It’ll run until Christmas, at which point we’ll evaluate whether to run it as an ongoing business.
by Kevin Partner on 10 November, 2009
The utter stupidity of big corporations never ceases to amaze. Forced by law in the US to provide a protective cap to owners of their push-chairs, Maclaren refuse to do so in this country because our law does not force them to do so. Utterly pathetic: they could have had a marketing triumph by issuing the covers in the UK because it’s THE RIGHT THING TO DO. If it prevents one more child having their fingers chopped off in the mechanism then DO IT. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The epitome of why big corporations are SO 20th Century.
Posted via email from Kevin’s posterous
by Kevin Partner on 5 November, 2009
Somewhat off-topic, I’ll admit, but I’ve worked with Automotive clients for years helping to teach them how to sell properly so perhaps I’m well placed to help you get the right deal for you. Having just bought a used Toyota Verso, here are my practical observations:
Choose your car before you go to the dealer
Car sales executives will want to sell you the car that best suits them, whilst (more or less) meeting your requirements. This might be a car that’s been on the forecourt for a while or one that the sales executive has been incentivised to sell for whatever reason.
Use the internet and personal recommendations to select your car. Check out What Car and pay particular attention to the user reviews (whilst bearing in mind that reviewers are self-selecting: either gloriously happy or, more likely, bloody angry!). [click to continue…]
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