Scribblings...

lighting the candles at Redhill Methodist Church by Richard...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:00:02 +0000

lighting the candles at Redhill Methodist Church by Richard Freeman on EyeEm

Rod Stewart on iTunes 12 days of Xmas on Flickr.

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:55:33 +0000

Rod Stewart on iTunes 12 days of Xmas on Flickr.

I am so street...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:59:37 +0000

Just rolling some lunch…

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Plot 15 moves to plot 7...with added deadly nightshade!

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:30:06 +0100

Oh well, we say goodbye to plot 15 and hello to plot 7. What better way to start the day than to get a lovely e-mail from my local parish council, letting me know that a plot had become free just down the road from me.
I popped down last night to take a couple of shots - this was probably getting on for 6 / 7pm ish - but can you check out the secret visitor that has snuck on, after all this was rotovated and set up in April this year?

Yep, it’s a lovely friend, Deadly Nightshade! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna Getting it out is going to be our first job this year I reckons, then on to some planting. More news soon.

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Happiness

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:50:49 +0100

is a warm, marmite crumpet to get ready for some digging …

Sent from my iPhone
——————————————
Richard Freeman
Project Manager
richard@pixeco.com
07540686985

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Photos from Richard Freeman

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:54:06 +0000

You have received new photos from Richard Freeman. — Email sent with the “Multi-Photo Email” iPhone application —

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Daughter of the Soil: Red, white and blue heritage potato harvest

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:18:41 +0000

http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com/2007/07/red-white-and-blue-heritage-potato.html Hmnnnnnnnnn, would love to give a few o these a go for 2010. Jan pot dales anyone?

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Untitled

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:27:32 +0000

via twitterrific

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So that’s a stress free kitchen floor replacement then...

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:56:26 +0000

So that’s a stress free kitchen floor replacement then …

its me, in polaroid form :-)

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:24:58 +0000

its me, in polaroid form :-)

How IBM does soap error handling

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:47:02 +0100

How IBM does soap error handling

What does your site look like in new Google Chrome then? Test it now!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:56:39 +0100

I have been on the Google Chrome trail now for a few days and my god its fast! If you haven’t got around to checking all your sites in it yet, some of the automated testing sites have been quite quick off the mark like [
Litmus ] and [ Browsershots ] but I don’t think [ Total Validator ] has caught up yet.

Anyhoo, hope your sites are well and you are enjoying the speed now anyway. It looks like Firefox 3.1 thinks its going to a bit quicker [ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/mozilla-fights-back-with-new-firefox-benchmarks/ ] but since that release is not out of the door, lets wait and see.

Anything that actually speeds up browsing has got to be a good thing I think. Whether or not Chrome is going to get market share is another matter. It was actually the Developer toolbar from [ Chris Pedrick ] that actually dragged me back to Firefox a bit earlier today. Those same plugins probably slow FF down a bit though, as most people like me probably have quite a few running.

Apart from speed, I have had very few problems with actually rending any pages **correctly**. Most things seem to have just appeared and ran quite happily, thank you very much! Its definitely becoming my browser of choice. Until next month…

transcribing video the web 2.0 way...

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:06:15 +0100

For good accessibility, usability and lovely reasons, it is always good to have a transcript done of your online video. Most of the time this means using an outside agency and sending large files around. No more. Now, there is Casting Words [ http://castingwords.com ].

I first saw it mentioned on Bruce Lawson’s blog here [ http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2008/castingwords-for-audio-transcription/ ] and it looks great. Upload your audio and they generate text for you at a very decent rate.

Judging by a few searches around, it looks like they are using Amazon for payment, looks interesting [ http://turkers.castingwords.com/tutorials/getting_started.html ] and the style seems to have been widely copied [ http://www.futuregen.sg/business-process/transcription-style-adapted-from-casting-words/ ] - now just have to find some audio to get typed up. As soon as I have, I will let you know what the quality is like.

how to host in the clouds, some amazon ec2 reading...

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:04:00 +0100

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/04/05/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2

http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/01/26/starting-amazon-ec2-with-mac-os-x/

http://code.google.com/p/scalr/

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=84

Will see if I can find some good sites hosted on EC2 and get some feedback.

test that web server till its nuts drop off hangdog...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:58:13 +0100

test that web server till its nuts drop off hangdog...

Summer holiday reading for web geeks...well, web project managers anyway

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:03:01 +0100

So, its that time of year again to head off to a beach with wifi to **go on holiday**. If Atonement doesn’t seem like your sort of thing, let me share what is on my list for this year:

The Principles Of Project Management by Meri Williams - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/project1/?SID=e6fba703ce560624ad37f333bf2ffefd
Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Web-Project-Management-Practices/dp/0321112555
Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by 37 signals - http://www.lulu.com/content/383343
Making things happen by scottberkun - http://www.scottberkun.com/making-things-happen/

Reviews back as and when I get through them.

Writing content the Google way...writing for the web 2.0

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:37:48 +0100

While browsing a few bits on Google Analytics, I came across these two:

Five Tips for Writing Effective Web Headlines

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77157&hl=en

and

Five Objectives of Website Copy

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77130&ctx=sibling

both of which have some good basic information and provide more than a few hints about how to get your copy formatted to get great Google flavour in search listings.

Free HTML e-mail templates from Campaign Monitor

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:20:00 +0100

are here :

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/

and you don’t even need to worry about testing them with Outlook 2007! For anyone new to the world of sending out HTML mails, it would be worth downloading a few of these ones and then picking them apart to see how they work. Its really the use or lack of CSS and the way of handling and styling the HTML that is key.

Oh and do make sure you have a nice plain text version too…even Mailchimp now has an automatic-text-o-tron:

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/automatic-plain-text-email-generator/

UPDATE 12:20pm

Blimey, its all go on the mail front today…here is a converter that makes all your lovely CSS inline…

http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web/

UPDATE 12:36pm

and I should probably mention the email newsletter archive as well:

http://www.newsletterarchive.org/

which is a great online store of past newsletters, to give you inspiration and ideas for your own work.

UPDATE 16:08

Pleaaaaaase, just stop it with the e-mail stuff, really…here’s how to e-mail the future:

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630542

Anyone for a CSS hover map - with added accessibility?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:59:58 +0100

Hmn….this could be a tough one. Lets see what the interwebs drag up. How about:

Right, lets make us some demos…back soon.

Here we go again with CSS Flash image replacement...or do we?

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:09:07 +0100

Most people have probably heard of SiFR, Shaun Inman’s lovely technique of embedding Flash in a site to replace the fonts. But now we have Facelift or FLIR stepping up to the table.

Facelift Image Replacement | About FLIR Image Replacement

Apart from the techy side (whether its better than any other technique which needs a bit more testing yet I think…), its a good example of how to make a up a product site.

Despite the fact that its free at the moment, its obviously been put together by somebody that know what a customer (paying or non-paying) would like, and a web customer at that.

So, we have a nice examples page which is interactive and shows what can be done.

An easy quick start page means coders or designers could easily get cracking.

A documentation page, which can be added to by users, is invaluable to show all the various options.

A forum allows people to post on great examples of how they have used your product, as well as request any help they may need. This could either be answered by Mawhorter or other users themselves.

Last of all, a blog allows the site owner Mawhorter to post occasional updates as to what is going on.

Total score? About 4.5 out of 5.

What’s he missing? Well, the blog does have a feed but there is no way to easily subscribe to its updates other than follow the RSS and there is no e-mail newsletter. The RSS is only actually in the blog when it could be easily put in the header of every page, then more and more people could subscribe to it.