Our much delayed and buggered about with release happened with no problems this morning. We can begin the wind down to Christmas now as we are definitely not going to be allowed any more releases until the new year.
Now to sit back and watch the political fall-out from the last few days games. For once we seem to be pretty much in the clear. This is when it pays to be a contractor with no vested interests to fight for.
You’ll notice that I have turned on Adsense at the top of the page again. I hope it doesn’t cause you too much offense but now that this site is hosted at home the cost of running it have increased slightly so hopefully this will offset that.
It seems to be a fairly black art getting a good return. Looking around I found a good article here though. Generally the tips seem to be common sense – increase your reader base, get better keyword hits etc. One interesting point is that the URL seems to get scanned as well so I don’t suppose my noteid structure is going to help me much, maybe I need to revisit that and change it to an article title structure.
It was the “splinter cell” Christmas party, an unofficial gathering of current and ex colleagues who like to get together once in a while. We thought we’d try something different from the usual heavy drinking followed by a curry so went to The Gaucho Grill which, I think we are all agreed, serves about the best steaks we have had in the UK. Not cheap but well worth the money.
A few people are yet to show their faces this morning and when they do I imagine they’ll complete the compliment of sore heads all round. But a good night was had.
The planned release got cancelled by our users at 5 o’clock yesterday. Cue rushing around trying to get hold of our administrators to stop them putting out the new designs. We seem to have managed that OK but now we have to try and negotiate with them when we can re-release the templates. To make things harder the end of year code freeze comes in at the end of the week so we need to try and beat that otherwise we may end up waiting until next year which would not go down well with anyone.
We have a fairly major release to perform tomorrow morning so, as ever today is a bit of a panic. Not because we’re not ready, but because our users have decided to not give us go ahead to send designs off to the administrators. We have warned them for weeks that they needed to sign off by midday today but at 14:00 they were still umming and ahhing. Finally sorted that out and then started to look at the config data that they were also late sending. A quite staggering error rate in the data of 25% has shown up so now they are having a mad panic about what to do with that.
Oh what fun releases are!
I pride myself on my cynicism but the Labour Party have some lessons for all of us: proudofbritain.org.
A new beta version of Google is the Google Suggest page which makes suggestions as you type.
Rather bizarrely this is something which of the team I am working on has been developing over the last weeks for a Domino application. We can’t even begin to compete with Google but they do offer some interesting ideas about where the time is spent doing the work.
I think it’s going to take off in a big way.
OK I think we have this fixed now (once DNS has updated itself around the world). For RSS please use:
http://www.11tmr.com/fclonline/11tmr.nsf/11tmr.rss
And then continue onto http://www.11tmr.com. See you on the other side!
So 11tmr.com is still knackered. It appears that the company I registered the domain with had one of their servers hacked and I have lost control over the domain as a result. My approach to this is to do something I have been meaning to for a long time – transfer the domain to my Dynamic DNS host and then run this site from my homer server instead.
As ever with these things it will take a few days for DNS to sort itself out so my apologies if you are having trouble.
I will also have to work out a good migration strategy for people who have bookmarked the fclonline.com URL which has been this site’s home for the last 3 years. I guess I’ll just put up a light design into this database which redirects you to the new website. The only bit I am not sure is how to transfer those of you read via RSS. Looking at the recent transition of the Lotus Weblog it appears that I’ll have to rely on you to manually remove one feed and replace it with a new one, unless anyone has any bright ideas.
Simon and I came up with what we thought was an original idea at the weekend while listening to our iPods. The problem was that his lounge has the stereo system in one corner and we wanted to know the names of some fairly obscure tracks which were playing. Enter the iPod Projector which would plug into the iPod and project onto the wall the “Now Playing” screen. I have had a surf around and can’t find anything on sale but Dan Hill has mocked up exactly what I was picturing with this picture on city of sound. Now a canny manufacturer just needs to get in there.