My site is now back up at holdingbay.co.uk

After freelancing for two years and never finding time to get a new look up, I have finally got a start to it back on line and shall endevor to do some writing on it in the next month.

So have a look at Holdingbay and sent me feedback or job offers. It is just a theme and only started working on it for a week so not looking to win awards just need a space to talk about my work and me.

Do we need Website Production training courses to grow the roles?

For all my time building sites in house at companies I have had production staff to work with. They tend to come from all different backgrounds and often did not apply for that job. Production staff are sort of cs-junior frontend-data-marketing-writing-helpful types. These are people who learn how to process the data and images and work the website. They are not a one role person that does just content entry or advertising or sales. They are helpful to process or batch process and a little layout raw material into resource or finished work.

I was recently asked to freelance on a big site doing a  upper end version of this, setting up tools and reports and batching data into the writers and marketers but for the time and possibly the budget it did not fit. What they were finding hard is often people dont look for this as a role so were finding it hard to recruit.

I have been talking with my team and some friends about we find it difficult to find or train people to be able to block out sites and then train the client.  So we want a short course or cert that our clients could even do as a paid version. The subject would be Joomla/CMS Production Training.

What we would need:

Know how to use joomla 3

Know how to make menus

Know how to make module

Know how to make articles

Know how to make categories

Know how to build a page from a blank install with the parts

Know a base set of extensions

Know basic html needed for use in an article and what it might be used else where

Know the different use of html, css, js so they can ask issues intelligently

Make images the right size and file format

Plus level:

Can look at a design and have idea what plugins and modules they would need to make

Know how to research new extensions and suggest them

Be able to train the client on these things

Be able to offer first level support on these

Know when a problem is a bug or an error in the setup they can fix

Plus level variation if html skills:

Build some template parts from html they were given 

Task ideas:

Migrate a wordpress or static site to Joomla

Load data from a spreadsheet into joomla

Get images from any source and put in the site the right sizes

Add all the base menu + articles needed to the site

Add sample 10% content to the sections of the site so that layouts can work and client can see and do

Change a theme on a joomla site and update it

Update extensions 

Do backups

Maybe install joomla from scratch to make a new version

How does anyone feel about this sort of role and how you fill it or do the work?

As a php developer i just want to set the structure for the site and build the extra modules not fill it out so i can see if one thing works.

When work slows for winter, my mind moves to Startup

So, I have been pondering my bootstrap idea for a bit over a year now, and feel that if I dont make time for it I wont do it. So have been taking the time at christmas parties and meet ups to pitch it to other people. This has been a very valuable idea, a. because drunk people are difficult to persuade so takes good clear effort and b. some of the people I have talked to early in an evening have turned to very possible leads.

It has given me confidence in the idea and trying to keep it simple. I have two or three business people interested in trying a beta of it so , better get my coding skates on over Christmas.

All I will say for now is I need to name it, and its and Analytics SaaS web app, and is not a real time dashboard in node. (like the all sub 20 year olds and measure bowling were running, kids ! )

Also thanks to Peter and Emmanuel who might work with me on this and have been good sounding boards so far.

Looking back at my 2012 web predictions with @haydens30

Just took a look at the email I saved to my dropbox 12/12/2011 for a look back at my 2012 web predictions with @haydens30. I didn't do too bad if maybe 6/12 months early on some. 1. Yes. I think we can say social is at a high, not sure if it will go higher or just settle. 2. Yes. More learn and bootstrap businesses and ones focusing on profit not user numbers. 3. Yes. Not sure they made a backlash but even Rupert Murdoch digital paper has struggled to stay open 4. Yes. Cant go a day without someone saying it. 5. Yes. And predicted RIM fail, even though was fairly clear, I am happy with it. Almost time for this years ones. Anyone else? 2012 web predictions In response to Hayden Sutherland ( @haydens30 ) 1. Social will peak late in the year so we will either have a crash or first it will need stronger understanding of kpis 2. New business models that make sense to use for online businesses will become usable. More work practice understanding not money business. 3. The first newspaper to fold or stop printing will come and blame online. 4. Responsive design will be what it is requested from the start 5. More old tech will be abandoned and die. Like adobe giving up flash to progress. Mobile forms of apps will mean you don't need the old legacy option. So RIM and others will fall. "the fall of old to evolution" ie company will build new and let old die

Launched rebranded and now responsive Luxury travel site Mirus Journeys

Launched a site rebrand under a new name of Mirus Journeys this week while at Wild Dog Design - http://www.mirusjourneys.com/ Its my first big responsive site (based on Joomla 3 for those who are interested). Been a nice project to work on and John who did the front end dev and Stan who did some of the design have been good to work with. What do you think?

Whats more exciting than an Arduino

Whats more exciting is getting one in the post and thinking of what to build with it. I have wanted to build something with electronics for a long time but electrical diagrams and believing it a bit hard have put me off. But I went to the Build Brighton hack space last week where they did an evening on RaspberryPi, and Python. Python I can do and the stuff some people were building with trail and error excited me again. Looking at the two systems RaspberryPi is more a full computer but small, and Arduino is much smaller but better to interface with. Even better you can stick an Arduino on a Pi for greater flexibility. So though I would like to program it in python I think starting with an Arduino will be better as I'll have to work my way round 32k rather than a high celling of power. So on my christmas list is lots of electrical tools and kit. Hope I can get my son interested in pressing buttons and lighting LEDs too. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/120948981096?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649 This is the kit im starting with A new world of Sketch and soldering awaits. (Interested if you are also doing the same?) :)

Top Chef Chris Bailey first Popup Restaurant in Brighton

My favorite Chef Chris Bailey starts his first Popup Restaurant in Hove, Brighton. He is calling it "Chris Bailey's ‘Taste of cheese’ Menu" Looking forward to the cheese inspired menu taken from the host Cheese Shop La Cave in Hove.
He is doing a 6 course amazing menu for just £35 a head. From talking with him the tickets are going fast and it should be great night.
I hope I can squeeze in to this one but am looking forward to making it to the next one he puts on in a few weeks too.
p.s. he is my brother but I did not get him a Michelin Star his great cooking did ;)

Learning to make vim fast and lovable editor

.. Or settings and tips I have learnt to make vim nicer, but are not on by default. ( I will keep adding to this )

I am using vim as my main editor for a few years but since freelancing I am learning to use it even more.

Vimrc settings

My changes to vim at the moment look like this

syntax on
set bg=dark 

" indent
set cindent
set smartindent
set autoindent 

" tabs
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2
set tabstop=4
set showmatch " Show matching brackets.
" auto complete + C-n
set showcmd " Show (partial) command in status line.
" case search
set ignorecase " search ingore case if all lower search
set smartcase " Do smart case matching (flips igonore if use any caps)
set incsearch " search as type
" highlight search
set hlsearch " highlight all searches " :nohlsearch
"set visualbell
"set cinkeys=0{,0},:,0#,!,!^F
set cinkeys=0{,0},:,0#
set cinwords=if,else,while,do,for,switch,case   " Which keywords should indent
imap <C-e> <esc>$a
imap <C-l> <esc>g_
:nmap <C-n> :tabnext<cr>
" Press Space to turn off highlighting and clear any message already displayed.
:nnoremap <silent> <Space> :nohlsearch<Bar>:echo<CR>
" Press F4 to toggle highlighting on/off, and show current value.
:noremap <F4> :set hlsearch! hlsearch?<CR>

Outside of the config you can open files in tabs inside vim and then tab between them

vim -p file1 file2 file3

then use 'tg' to go to the next tab

Open a grep search of files as tabs in vim

vim -p `fgrep -l cust_function core/*.php`

This would search for 'cust_function' in the dir core for php files

Vimdiff - visual character level diff from cmd line

vimdiff is much nicer to look at if you have to understand merging files on the cmd line.

if you migrate from

line by line without checking white space (so ignore tabs/spaces which can change with editors and versioning)

diff -w filea.php fileb.php

 files side by side if you need to see context of more than a couple of changes

diff -wy filea.php fileb.php

In this view you can scroll up and down but right edge gets cut, you can see marks in middle of page
| different
> change to right version
< change to left version

But those two show only lines. Vimdiff shows colours to show character changes and move around in a visual way

 vimdiff filea.php fileb.php

And if you add this to ~/.vimrc you dont see the white space changes which is nice.

set diffopt+=iwhite

When in vimdiff you can move between windows and also which is nice, push and pull changes between versions.
So move to change "dp" pushes change from left to right side. The other way "do" pulls it from right to left

To switch windows in vimdiff or to navigate windows in vimdiff or to change windows in vimdiff try the following: The ":vertical" command can be inserted before another command that splits a window. 

MOVING BETWEEN WINDOWS          

CTRL-W h        move to the window on the left         CTRL-W j        move to the window below
CTRL-W k        move to the window above 

CTRL-W l        move to the window on the right         CTRL-W t        move to the TOP window      
CTRL-W b        move to the BOTTOM window 

Moving windows  

CTRL-W K        move window to the upper 

CTRL-W H        move window to the far left
CTRL-W J        move window to the bottom         CTRL-W L        move window to the far right 

source: https://groups.google.com/group/bash-tips/browse_thread/thread/90ecf1f0555354e7

Have Vim jump to the last position when reopening a file

if has("autocmd")
  au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") <= line("$")
      \| exe "normal! g'\"" | endif
endif

Auto complete comment block lines.

" In edit mode
" #b<return>
" type text
" #e<return>
:ab #b /************************************************
:ab #e ************************************************/
:ab #l /*----------------------------------------------*/

Show hidden characters, leading and tailing white space with

:set list

Then you can see if you have lots of white space as $ will be on end of lines
Next you can run a zap trailing white space

:1,$s/[ <tab>]*$//

and off with

:set nolist

source: http://www.oualline.com/vim-cook.html

Not quite vim but useful

You can get a sort of auto complete from your history file. So for example
cd PageUp
changes to
cd /file/path/i/used/earlier

or if your jumping around
cd /file/path/PageUpPageUp
becomes the last bit
cd /file/path/i/used/before/that

Change it here:
vim /etc/inputrc
Then uncomment the lines for using PageUp and PageDown to fill the rest of your cmd propt from your history
# alternate mappings for “page up” and “page down” to search the history
#”e[5~”: history-search-backward
#”e[6~”: history-search-forward

Freelance project work in Brighton or Remote from home

As we come into May 2012 I am looking for Freelance Web Development project work in Brighton or Remote from home from end May and June onwards.

Any sort of updating websites or maintaining them or building them new. I am a PHP web developer and also to project strategy and Social Media and SEO supported by Web Analytics.

So you could be anywhere in the world but I live in Brighton so will be talking to you from here or meeting you near by.

thanks

tristan

This week I have mostly been looking for freelance work and django

This week I have mostly been getting my head into Python and learning django for my new blog/portfolio site. I want to find some more evening feelance work so time to get my pencil and code out on something for myself and get my self a new site so I can show some of the work I have been doing and see if I can get some more.

Things I have learnt about django so far that had caught me out:
It caches code to memory so use the test server and restart alot, this caught me out as sometimes files would update and sometimes not.
The django 4 stage tutorial is good and worth doing but I was trying to skip ahead and bring in other snippets for template creation and they were breaking because I had missed some small details on imports. So worth going slowly. The tutorial is nice as it does things basically and then goes back and layers over the last function with more features so you build up knowledge.

Still here

Not so happy with the new minimal Blogger so am learning more Python and django so will be seeking to have some hacking weekends next month and get something new up and make more effort to post a bit. I find twitter so easy to brain dump, share and blog in that its hard to take the time to write more.

1. get fit
2. get a django site up
3. post more blogs

Podcast take away lessons now included in Spanish course

Get extra value from your Spanish evening course from Cactus Language courses UK.
The Spanish courses in the UK and USA now have 10 hour lessons added to the 10week course. So you can take your teacher with you for extra training and extra help with your home study. You'll learn faster and can listen again at your own pace.

This is extra to your course so extra value from one of the UK's leading and most popular courses in London and 25 schools accoss the UK.

Come see them today.
Http://www.cactuslanguagetraining.com/en/languageminis

Are 1milliontweets worth the $1 they cost

I hope it becomes clearer as the idea grows and the promotion for this new cause to use Twitter gains steam.

@1milliontweets is an account for a charity that is asking for $1 to tweet through their account. They hope to reach 1 million tweets and their by write a book and raise some money for their causes. The Twestival for water charity was really well supported and I feel went with the theme of twitter for social gathering. This seems to cache in on the million dollar homepage that got a lots of publicity.

For a charity fair enough, but for twitter in this way I am not sure how good it is on a new account. When I wrote this had 173 followers, so the value to people sending messages at the moment is around that mark, where as after a few hundred thousand messages $1 will go a lot further for a company. Also with twitter being as it is you could just @1milliontweets or #1milliontweets in your message and it will be almost as effective.

Anyway we can watch and wait for how this works for them.

Launching a new language learning site

We have just started to beta our new site. Learn about learning Spanish or start learning French as well as Italian, German and English. We will be adding more languages to the site soon.

The site is for people to share what learning a new language was like and us to share ways of learning and where is good to do it. So visit www.cactuslanguagetraining.com/en/ today.

Expressionengine related articles code

Just found out a way of doing related entries in a slightly nicer way than just (In same category, latest first).
Use track_views and get counts for weblog entries not just templates. you can then sort buy the view count, giving you the most read stories.

It is not ture related articles but at least it is most popular articles in a category, and it will keep updating, but not jump as much as sort by date.

You can remove the {view_count_one}, just for effect.

Single Entry page: (you will need to look at the source)

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{weblog_name}" orderby="date" sort="desc" limit="1" track_views="one"}
{title}
--{view_count_one}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

{!-- Followed by --}
{exp:weblog:entries related_categories_mode="on" limit="3" orderby="view_count_one"}
{if count == "1"}

Related Articles

{/if}

• 
  {title} {view_count_one}
  

{if count == total_results}

{/if}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Yahoo! Web Analytics gets out and closer to the whole web

Dennis blogged about Yahoo! Web Analytics getting out to Yahoo advertisers and Store owners today. I think there are alot of people like me watching and waiting for IndexTools release as Yahoo! Web Analytics for the last five months.

I really want to move from Google Analytics to Yahoo Analytics as IndexTools seems such a great product from the demonstation I saw Dennis and SnowValley do a great talk in London a couple of months ago. Dennis is really good so hope this runs and runs.

Bill and Windows still have it - no marketing and too much money - http://ping.fm/6Ncgu

Sharing comments accross the net

I heard about comment sharing or pooling across blogs from Leo Laport a month or two ago but now we are getting closer with our new product trying out http://www.intensedebate.com/ and http://www.cocomment.com/ seemed a good idea. Also using Gravitar sites well with me.

I am trying intensedebate on this blog even if it will not get all the comments it could. They have a WordPress version coming so will have to wait for that. I like the idea of not having to register lots of places to comment and also to comment on idfferent pages on different sites about the same thing.

Currently working on

I am currently doing alot of work with Expression Engine and waiting for version 2.0. We have built one site with it and are working on a new CMS version of CactusLanguageTraining.com to be called Cactus Tailor-made which just need enough resource to finish writing the copy and some forms work. And our exciting new project of sharing our knowledge of language learning and trying to find the right path for people.

Google local pulling more review sources

Noticed that google local is pulling more sources for reviews:

Touchsouthampton.com
Tripadvisor.com
Trustedplaces.com
Igougo.com
Viamichelin.co.uk
Viamichelin.fr
Viamichelin.it
Viamichelin.de