Last year I decided to be a bit daft and dressed as a fairy. Unfortunately my inflatable boobs burst so I was a flat chested fairy. We took a stack of money though so it was all good in the end.

Strangely its only the office staff who join in, and even then not everyone. Non of the warehouse or workshop staff do. Oh well, at least we then get to go and beg money off them for the cause.

Unfortunately this year I fear that the money we raise will be down on last year. Its almost 10am and so far today we have raised just about £0 and foot traffic in the showroom is down due to the recession. Its a shame really but I'm going to start pestering people for their loose change (and loose folding money too) shortly. The tight bleeders better not say 'Oh I'm Skint' only for me to find them in the pub later.

Anyway, this year I wanted to surpass my last outfit and as I had previously bought something for a Beach Party fancy dress night at the Harley Davidson meeting I go to (St Leger Chapter Iron Horse) I decided this year is would be Hula Girl for me.

There seems to be a theme emerging here though; I'm not a cross dresser really I promise. I have already said that if we do it again next year I'm definately coming as a man.

Oh, and it's bleeding freezing too.

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Anyway, loats of stuff have happened really.

Firstly. I have had work done on a new logo. I started this because our old logo did not scale very well. It worked fine when it was large but as it got smaller the text dissapeared into the background becoming unreadable.

Other reasons for undertaking this revisions included bring the logo up to date in colour (which will fit in with another revamp of the site at a later date) and to make it match our other logo's for stairs, door frames, handles etc.

Secondly. I started walking to and from work. I went Scuba Diving again while on holiday in the Maldives. I could only manage 58 minutes dive time even using the larger 14 litre tanks. So time to get off my arse and get back into training. I didn't want to build muscle, only be able to not gasp for breath while walking to the toilet. This also has the added bonus of making sure I leave work on time. Its a 4 mile walk to work. And dependent on route, 3.25 to 4 mile journey home. I don't do it every day, about 4 times a week is all. But I also walk in the woods on a Sunday. I have been using Runkeeper for the iPhone to track my progress and improvement which is brilliant. I have already noticed a massive difference.

Thirdly. We have climbed back to Position 1 for the search term 'doors'. My god what a lot of work this took. Made some tweaks. Buffed the site. Complained to Google due to the amount of webspam showing above us on their Caffeine Sandbox. Hey Presto! Number 1. I don't know how long we will stay there but anyway whatever happens I do know that we have fantastic content and loads of info which is good for the user.

Fourthly. I am having more holidays :)

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William Shakespeare, "King Richard II", Act 2 scene 1
Greatest English dramatist & poet (1564 - 1616)

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It's not just a Sixth Sense thing any more either. I have a sickly feeling in my stomach.

Maybe I'm getting a terrible illness or maybe the world is going to end in a major disaster.

Or maybe its just residual hangover. I'm thinking probably the 2nd option.

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I saw this guy in a bright green vest top. He didn't have the greatest physique but was not a lard arse. But he walked about like he thought he was '10 men', arms splayed out and looking around as if to say 'look at me ladies'.

Why the hell don't people realise that they look like freaks instead of thinking 'Excuse me miss, tell me this. Am I cool? Or are you wrong?'

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This show used to be the premier event for building/house renovating exhibitions and it is sometheing we had always considered doing. However the cost is phenomenal so we had always shyed away. This year one of our major suppliers Jeld Wen asked us if we would cost share. This meant that they would pay for the stand (£100,000 for the week) and put up the display but we would staff it. How could we lose?

On this stand the displayed their entire range of bi-fold patio doors including the new Smoothfold which I blogged about previously. They also had the new oak Stormsure window which they are introducing in around 8 weeks.

So when we arrived on the Thursday morning we thought that the stand looked great and that we would have a really good show. But the problem was that the exhibition itself was like a wasteland. I still do not have numbers for the visitors but they were few and far between. The interest we had in the products was great and they showed genuine interest in the products. A lot better than at the NEC which, to be quite frank, has a lot of 'Type Kickers'.

So all in all it turned out to be a waste of a week. I would have been much better off staying in Sheffield working my regular job instead of being bored all day then having to get drunk every night

Oh, but there is a bonus to this visit. I got to meet Gandalf. Or if it wasn't him then its his body double.

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We have launched a couple of new products this year, one of which I have already blogged about (our Pre-Hung doors), the other which had launched the Monday before the show. We wanted to show both of these this year so opted for a new stand design.

In this picture you can see our Smoothfold folding and sliding door set which is brand new to the market. While there are many different sets of these available,  several also made by Jeld Wen, this one has a great many unique features.

Less wood, more glass. The door leaves are 44mm thick, normally they are 57mm for these types of door. Also, the stiles are reduced from the normal 120mm to something around 80mm. This gives an asthetically pleasing look as the view outside is much more visible.

Insulation. The double glazed units in the door leaf  is only 18mm thick but these are Argon filled which increases the insulation. This in turn reduces the amount of heat loss saving both energy and money.

Mass produced. Making these doors to standard sizes reduces the environmental impact as they are manufactured using LVL engineered timber components which uses almost all of the cut lumber reducing waste. This method of construction also provides much more stability than traditional 'solid component' doors which are susceptible to warping such as twisting and/or bowing.

Fully Finished. These are supplied fully factory finished with a 2% pigmented clear laquer. This gives much better protection than a site applied finish.

Great Price Point. All of the above features have a by product insomuch as they also help reduce the cost to the end user. These doors undercut everything out there on the market currently on a like for like basis. The 6ft tri-fold starts at £1839 inc VAT (price correct at time of posting)

This year the exhibition had around 40,000 visitors and we had a great deal of interest in both the Smoothfold doors and the Pre-Hung door sets, particularly the Oak Croft Elegant Entrance (shown left). For this reason we hope to expand the range to the whole of our Elegant Entrance doors within the next month.

3 days to recouperate from this show then off to the Ideal Home Show for a week exhibition there.

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While working on a complete 'How To' guide has been started its quite a large task and I wanted to look at a method to take the hard work away from the site joiner. What I decided to do was to develop a Pre-Hung Door Set for our entire external door range.

To give the best possible security I used a ERA Vectis multi point lock system which is PAS23/24 rated. I also added in a high securlty hinge set which has built in hinge bolts for security along the swinging side of the door set.

This was launched last month and the response has been amazing. I had expected maybe 1 or 2 a week of these sets to be sold given the current drop in trade but I would extimate that at least 30% of our external doors have been made into door sets so far with arounbd 50% of our enquiries being for these doors.

Given this I have drawn a leaflet  to show the different options available and I will be handing these out at both the Home Building & Renovating Show which we are exhibiting at from 19th to 22nd March 2009 and then at the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court in London where we will be displaying on the Jeld-Wen stand from the 27th March to the 1st April.

Given the interest we have had in these products and the service I have expanded it to cover our bespoke frames and Elegant Entrance door sets. I expect this will become our key product for the remainder of 2009 and into 2010

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I noticed one of his posts @nmw and thought I would check out this guys post to Matt. Often this gave provide clues as to what we ourselves should be optimising so they are worth following.

I saw the following: -

	
	
	
	
	Why does @mattcutts only PRETEND to remove spam? www.twitter.com/nmw/status/... Could Google be earning $$$ from the organic results? 7:27 AM Jan 29th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts FYI: A Google SERP lists www.DSL.COM but when I click on Google's link I see www.wdns.info/goog/freedsl.jpg page uses G Analytics 7:21 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts To be clear: It seems like you are manipulating Google results by hand NOW http://www.sn.im/google-man... Why do you do this? 6:50 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts I'm asking NOW. The problem exists NOW. You are using ridiculous labels to justify nonsense NOW. Please start listening NOW 6:47 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	Why didn't hitler just remove Jesse Owens from competing in the Olympics? http://vu.adlinks.info/aywv Use bogus labels to justify nonsense? 6:38 AM Jan 29th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts 1. it's NOT a parked site 2. if you have a problem with default pages, then remove them 3. www.sn.im/google-manipulate 6:35 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	LOL -- who did this: www.vu.adlinks.info/ayvy ? Video gamers are sick -- applications made for the movies -- media mashups are a riot! ROFL! 6:24 AM Jan 29th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts there is NOTHING wrong with the site. If you manipulate Google's index to remove the site, that make YOU ridiculous, not the site 5:58 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts Google did not succeed by making value judgements. In fact (in case u didn't know) that's what sunk Yahoo. U should avoid tricks. 5:56 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts regardless of the similarities, Google is not finding the actually sought-after site. Where is Google's content? Is Google spam? 5:53 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts I suggest you look more closely (they may be similar, but they are not identical) s-g is not yet finished, goes to a default page 5:50 AM Jan 29th from web in reply to mattcutts
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	Why does it seem like some people prefer exclusive offers to inclusive offers? What motivates people 2 want 2 have a deal that others can't? 11:33 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	Live music is better, bumper stickers should be issued www.vu.adlinks.info/w7y5 all in favor of what Neil said, signify by sayin' YEA!  11:11 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	www.twitter.com/nmw/status/... ... sociolect (Basil Bernstein): brands are "restricted" languages PLAIN ENGLISH (or other pop) better 11:02 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@shirleybrady LOL - too true! re PPT: not a fan of King Crimson? ( www.vu.adlinks.info/w7uz  My POV/Progress:Monolog>Dialog>Polylog  10:34 PM Jan 28th from web in reply to shirleybrady
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	OMG -- what a KLUTZ! I was stuck on page 2! :O (*blush*)  9:57 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	My tweets aren't showing up in my timeline. :S 9:56 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	That's STRANGE: 1 of my tweets isn't showing up in my timeline - do any of my followers see www.twitter.com/nmw/status/... in theirs? 9:55 PM Jan 28th from web
	
	
	    
	
	
	
	
	@mattcutts What is the status update on the Google Glitch? Reminder: http://www.vu.adlinks.info/... leads to EPIC FAIL: homepage not found! 9:15 PM Jan 28th from w
	
	
	
	
	

This was from the landing page - I have not editited at all, not even to remove the non-related posts.

My point here is, if you have such a problem with how Google is working surely the way to go about remeding the situation does not involve trying to force an argument with one of the hear honchos.

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What I like about this is the fact that he (and Google) have asked the user what they consider webspam. In other words they want to know what their (Google's) customers want to find. And more importantly, what they do NOT want to find.

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I don't know if any of you have heard of this site but I would certainly steer clear. The reason I say this is because it caused me more grief over the last 5 days than all of the other tasks I had on all put together.

This website is a SEO related keyword tool. But the difference is that it tries to also give you an approximate spend for your competitors based on the knowledge it has built after scraping the internet.

I have found its results to be totally unreliable.

We spend a certain (not inconsiderable) ammount advertisint on Google. Nowadays we do this through an agency and not directly for ease of management.

While this means that we do not get the full spend on our Adwords campaign it should mean that it is well managed.

Running our site through the SpyFu system I got the result that we spend about £10 per day on our CPC campaign. This is waaaaay off. I wish we did spend £10 per day.

But this got my cogs turning. Are we really spending that much and are the agency taking the rest?

I have spend most of the last 5 working days getting to the bottom of it and the conclusion is that SpyFu's data is unreliable.

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Over the years we have been the unfortunate subjects of some pretty decent Card Fraud Attempts. At the beginning of the the year we were stung for two quite large amount, around the £5000 mark both times. Both of these incidents were either deliveries to a different address or for collection.

We do quite a large amount of trade in situations like this so we were reluctant to loose these orders (of which the vast majority are legitimate) but as we work on very low mark-ups we would need to trade around £50,000 to recover these losses. So we needed to come up with a solution.

These days mail order/internet transactions paid on card are so well protected that in real terms we have no guarantee whatsoever of getting the money. This helped us in making a 'plan of action' to counter these frauds.

In the past we have had incidents where we have delivered to the card holders address, our vehicle tracking system proves the vehicle parked outside the property, we received a signature from the card holder, we entered the property and identified other items inside the property, we returned and have photographic proof of our goods being installed to the property, yet the customer has said 'No I never received the items' and the card issuer had reclaimed the payment. 'Not enough proof' is the card issuers stance. If anyone is interested in this I will post the whole story at a later date if enough people ask.

So the reason this lack of payment security helped us reach a plan was because we though 'if we are not guaranteed our payment even when we have followed the guidelines rigorously there is no point following them at all.'

In order to prevent card fraud the guidelines given by the card issuer to us as a mail order supplier is to 'always deliver to the card holders address and always ensure that a signature is obtained'. As I have detailed above this does not actually guarantee your money anyway. So ignoring these guidelines was our first decision.

So we needed a method of ensuring that the customer was the card holder and that they wanted the items. And we needed proof that they had ordered them.

We devised a method of checking the customers details using what we call a security letter. I will detail below a real life example of  how this works and how it has just (today) helped prevent a £7,000 loss.

Mr. Atkins (name changed) places an order online for, amongst other things, some Walnut Interior Doors. In his email he mentioned that he lives in Wales but he needs delivery to a London address. He added 'I can provide identification if required'.

We quote Mr Atkins and enter his order up onto our system and booked a delivery date for approx. 5 days in the future.

After processing the order we send out our security letter which is basically a letter detailing his order but it also says the following: -

     'Hello Mr. Atkins. Many thanks for your order. As you have requested goods for either collection or for delivery to an alternative address we are sending you this letter as a security precaution. Please can you call us on 0114 220 2250 to confirm the following password {random letters and/or numbers] to ensure you are in receipt of this letter. Unfortunately we are not able to deliver your goods until this has been done. Yours sincerley, Distinctive Doors Sales Team.' etc.

Two days later we receive an email from 'Mr Atkins' asking us to confirm delivery of the items on our quoted date.

We also receive a telephone call from a rather bemused Mr Atkins. This Mr Atkins informs us that he is in receipt of our security letter. We thank him for calling to confirm but before we can finish he informs us that he has NOT placed the order.

It turns out that the original Mr. Atkins is not the card owner, is pretending to be Mr. Atkins working for a company called 'Oceanadon Properties' and is attempting to receive the doors using the real Mr. Atkins' card.

So you can see here how this procedure saved us a lot of money, allerted Mr. Atkins to the attempt to defraud him (he contacted his bank and they cancelled his card, these guys had already made other orders besides ours which I believe Mr Atkins was not aware of previously) and saved the bank and other retailers further losses from continued fraudulant use.

I believe that this procedure often helps fraudulent orders even getting to this stage as we tell the customer that they have to go through this security check in order to receive the items (in this case 25 of our Amadora Walnut doors plus frames and fittings) as often they potential fraudster bails out at this stage knowing they cannot receive the letter and the real card owner would be alerted.

If you (the retailer) do not already have a procedure like this in place I would strongly recommend that you implement it.

The follow up story in this case is that we (and the real 'Mr Atkins') informed the police and they were considering of visiting the delivery address at the time and date we had initially intended to do our delivery with a view to 'knicking' the fake Mr Atkins. If I hear any more on this I will let you know.

More info. on card security can be found at Card Watch and at the BBC News website.

I hope this info is useful to anyone reading and that you can use it to keep your money where it belongs, in your own pockets.

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I was just doing a quick Google search to evaluate some of my SEO changes which I have been mentioning here in this blog.

As part of this, to find some info, I googled my name. Its always a disapointment to come up as the top listing as I have heard it said that this = ubersadness.

Anyway, so I click the first result. It comes up with a page from a guy we used previously for our SEO. His name is Richard Dennison and he runs/works for/owns (I don't really know what he does to be honest as, as it turns out, he talks bollocks) a company called WSi New Media. I'm not going to link to his site as I don't want to give him the time of day.

Before I get really into this I will give some back story.

In the last revision of our site we needed some SEO work doing. I had known Rickard from a previous relationship as he had worked as a business advisor for the (now defunct) Business Link South Yorkshire. He left their employ and became a freelancer under the WSI banner.

So he suggested himself for our SEO work.

As part of this he had suggested that I use a shopping cart style system which he could sell us and maintain. I forget the price but I think it was about £6k. Now a massive ammount of money so I asked for a demo. It was a total piece of shit. So I refused. I should have run a mile right then but as he had offered good advice when working for Business Link and he was doing some consultancy work for then still. I didn't want to upset them, so we decided to have Richard do some SEO work.

Long story short it took about 3 months and then about another 2 months before I could work on the site again following his contractors messing some stuff up (Frontpage Extensions - yeah yeah I know but Microsoft Frontpage was easy for us to start with).

We got the site back up and back in a manageable state.  A year after this Richard acts as a consultant for a barcoding project I am doing. In/Out easy as pie. Money in his pocket. Little contact with us. I didn't want any TBH. But the project got done. (We had also doe a switch to Sage Line 200 which he was a consultant on at the initial stages too).

Early this year I had been looking at competitors sites etc. I stumble across a site belonging to a guy who I have had dealings with previously. Another door supplier in Sheffield. I knew of this guy as I had been a whitness in a court case that Sheffield Trading Standards had had against him (or at least this company, maybe not the guy/owner etc.). The case was eventually dismissed as Trading Standards ran out of  money from their prosecution budget (the case kept gettign adjourned and they had to keep paying for expert witnesses).

I notice he has a new site and recognise its shitty nature. 'I know this stuff' I say to myself. So looking deeper I see that Richard Dennison's company WSi New Media has built this guy his new site.

WTF springs to mind? I have had a relationship with you for about 6 years, using you as a consultant, a supplier etc? and you give knowledge I have given you about my market to my competitors? How nice.

So anyway, Dennison is out of my professional life from now on.

I hear through the grape vine that his company is struggling. 'No fucking wonder', I think, 'if thats your business plan.'

Next thing. Earlier in the year we launch our new site and I start with the SEO stuff again. The guys at Ardes.com have a meeting with a consultant about SEO. Guess who it is. The feedback I get from their meeting is that 2/3rds of what he was spouting was rubbish. 'I could have saved you your time', I say. I could have told them all about it had I known who they were meeting.

Back to today and finding my name in Google.In this screencap you will see a quote apparently by me giving WSi very high praise. I never ever said a single word of that stuff. On the same page are a couple of other companies who's directors I know. I have asked them their opinion of their 'quotes' and in both cases I get a 'not me' answer.

My point is this: why does a company have to make up quotes about itself to sell its services? Wel... I think we all know the answer to that.

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One of the things we did with the previous site was to rename all the images to contain 'real life' words. So instead of being called something cryptic and automatically generated by the server (eg. 1545687464_d.jpg) we made the filename contain the product name. In this image you can see a screenshot containing the webpage for a Jeld Wen Canberra Hardwood Folding Sliding Door Set. I have also shown a picture of the image file itself. This image is called _Jeld_Wen_Canberra_Hardwood_Unfinished_large_20080625141651.jpg_. The first part (Jeld_Wen_Canberra_Hardwood_Unfinished) comes directly from the product description. The next part (large) is the scale of the image (because we also have thumbs and extra large detailed views) and finally the numbers are the date & timestamp when we uploaded the file.

The other thing to ensure we did was to have a very descriptive 'Mouse Over' text. This also helps in browsers with images turned off. This image shows the pop-up from another set of folding doors called Wellington.

So what is the benefit of this? Firstly the hope is to get the desired relevant keywords on the page more, but in a context sensitive manner (ie. it is not a good idea to just spam the page with these keywords as this would be marked down by Google). Secondly, but less obviously as it does not work too well just yet, is the hope that Google Images will pick up on these files.

So now we have at least twice the amount of keyword use on each of the product pages.

The next thing we needed to change was the CSS to ensure the correct use of header tags.

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Unfortunately for us our update was not as liked by the Google Algorithm update called Jagger as our old site was.

There is a blog entry about this update at the www.evancarmichael.com website. This is an article by Atul Gupta who works for Red Alkemi, who's services include SEO work. So he should (hopefully) know what he is talking about. I will come back to this later (if I remember), because it's important.

I am now of the opinion that because our old site had had a very good standing and since, in one form or another, the site had been around since before Google even existed, we had some kind of Hey, they're Old Skool, they should have high ranks sort of a thing. You know? Something left over from Google's Florida update.

So when we had these new drastic changes this all went to cock.

The first thing I really paid attention to was the fact that a lot of our URL's changed to something very cryptic. In my first SEO post I mentioned a blog entry by Ray Drainville from Ardes.com (our Rails Developers) in which he covers some stuff from a seminar we attended. One of the points he makes is

     'URL: Having a URL that reads /leather/laptopcases/yellow/ is far better than /categories/2/products/6—this is a problem that Rails developers suffer from, perhaps all the more if you’re into RESTful URLs;'

and as our site is built in Rails it suffered from the problem in the latter example.

This was som,ething that I mentioned to Ian White (again from Ardes.com) and he patched the site up very quickly to then serve URL's like

     'http://www.distinctivedoors.co.uk/categories/3-external-oak-doors/products/762-arta-oak-satin-double-glazed'

which links to one of our Oak External Doors. Hopefully you will see that this URL contains several important elements. Firstly the part '3-external-oak-doors/' is taken from the product catergory name and automatically inserted into the product URL path. The last part '762-arta-oak-satin-double-glazed' is the actual product text.

These changes are very very important. And they helped us climb back from the second Google page to third position. This was a relief but not quite good enough as we had always (as far as I can remember) been number 1 or 2.

So... what to do next?

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So at the beginning of the year we took delivery of our new website.
 
The new layout  really clarified each product group. This had been a key requirement in the design brief I had given Ardes.com. We also required the retention of our existing colour scheme as our old website. Ray re-used this colour scheme to great effect and enhanched it greatly adding additional extra colours for our shoping cart.

The 'cart' part of the site really suprised me. They had designed the page layout to include the cart on every page of the site. This meant that a very clear navigation structure could be maintained while keeping the customers selected items with them; no navigating away from the products to view their chosen items.

This was a great system. One example is that we sell lots of different interior doors, specialising in oak door patterns, as well as handles, hinges etc. The big bonus with this cart system is that the client can see their chosen items as well as items they may also want, ensuring a match. Let me give an example to clarify: -

We sell a particular range of doors called Wordsworth which has many different options. The best sellers are the solid pattern (for bedrooms, bathrooms and the like). So lets assume the client puts 10 of the Wordsworth 4 Panel Internal Oak Doors into their cart and continue shopping.

They also want some glazed doors and find the Wordsworth 4 Light Sandblast pattern and add 4 of these to the cart also.

Lo and behold there is a difference of opinion. Maybe the husband wants some clear glass so he can see his collection of tropical fish which are in the dining room while ihe is in the living room watching TV. So they decide to look at the Wordsworth 4 Light Bevel Glazed pattern. If you look at this image you can see that the customer views the cart goods as well as the new selection. Then without leaving this page they can decide to add this new door or stick with the other.

The same sort of thing applies to choosing door fittings. Viewing the handles whilst also being able to see the door greatly helps selection of matching items. You don't really want Georgian levers on a flush oak door now do you?

We thought this design feature was a great, erm., design feature.

So all in all we are well pleased with the site.

But........

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Our new website was designed and built by the guys at Argument from Design. I had asked them to start looking at a fresh new face for our site as it had started to look a bit dated. Also, a lot of new technologies had come out and it looked as though we could benefit from getting on board with them.

Previously Ian White and Ray Drainville at Ardes.com had talked me into using a new development platform (am I using the right words here?) called Ruby on Rails. Both Ian and Ray were keen to use this as it speeds up website development (meaning my budgets stayed intact - Yay! for Rails) providing a faster turnaround. Cheaper, smoother, faster websites with speedy delivery. All good stuff I'm sure anyone will agree.So I had agreed for them to move away from PHP while developing another site of ours called Distinctive Windows (currently offline).

During development of the windows site and in the period between finishing  that and myself wanting to start this new project ardes.com had become pretty decent Rails Developers to say the least. Ian has really got into the free software vibe with Rails and has lots of Rails plugins in the public domain. He has even given a speech at  RailsConf this year.

Incidentally, if you are into Rails development then you may want to read the Ardes Rails blog to pick up some decent tips and free stuff.

Anyway, I digress.

Oh no look - its time to go home. I normally finish about 7pm but tonight I have the luxury of being able to go home with everyone else as I'm going to see Will Young at Sheffield City Hall.

I'll have to finish this later then.

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I've decided to start a new blog.

This time its NOT going to be an ongoing personal cry-baby diatribe. This time its just a diary. A place for me to jot down thoughts and ideas. A place for me to come back to remember stuff.

There will be no poems this time as that didn't work out too well for me last time.

I doubt anything world changing will come out of this thing unless the DfEE finally decides to give me my £20 million budget for my own version of M$.

To anyone who pm'd me, sorry for not replying. I didn't really ever visit my last blog or profile. It was set as a tab but I never really visited, only closed the tab. Too many memories attached. All in the past now though.

Ok then; here goes.

/reset -f

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