The workshop covered how to use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (amongst others) to help your business connect with customers, but also went on to show how use social media to get your customers talking to each other.

Business Link provide free events and networking breakfasts/lunches accross the Midlands and you can find out more here: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/eastmidlands

Click the player below to hear it…

Download MP3 file

Not the one I saw, but the camera is identical

Tidy up your front gardens, everyone!  I saw the Google Maps car in Corby again this morning. I saw it yesterday, too, so hopefully they will have finished this area soon.

Sunbathers caught!

For those of you who don’t know, Google is driving along every road in the UK taking photos for their StreetView feature in Google Maps. It was a bit controversial in the US, with Google caught taking pictures past “Private Road” signs and one occasion where two topless sunbathers were photographed on the side of a road.  However, after introducing a number of new technologies that blur faces and number plates, they have obviously decided to make a start on the UK.

Starting with the major cities (which are already available to view) Google hope to capture StreetView images of the interesting parts of the UK.  So, why are they taking photos of Corby?  It’ll be interesting to see if they go down my street – maybe I should clean the windows?

Take a look at what’s available now -  I’ve already found Paula’s Mum’s house in Aberdeen – see what you can find!

I’ve had a great time in the last 12 months.  I learnt PHP properly (not the learn-a-you-go way I was doing before) at a course in Wiltshire and I have put it to good use developing a number of web applications, both at work and at home.

I’m still a big fan of the osCommerce project and have built 2 installations since I joined the company.  The most recent for Apple Bottoms UK which will go live before the end of thsi month.  In fact, processing the images for that store has been enjoyable to watch, as you can see below.

The main application I am developing is entirely from scratch and has allowed me to learn all aspects of Web Application Development including the log-in script, user privilidges, action logs, uploading of images, dynamic resizing and editing of images and more and more.  With bigger web projects coming up (both at work and my own little schemes!) I’m looking forward to continuing at TownsWeb for some time to come.

In an effort to give you a little insight into my work, I’ve included images of my drawers (ooh er!) and my latest direct report, Megatron.

I hope you enjoy!

You need to rename/remove the CTF temp files in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avg8\update\download…. Dont delete all the .bin files in there unless you want to re-run all updates since your original installation (reinstallation seems to cause a problem in IEs Link Scanner which causes IE to Crash). Only rename/remove the avginfo files that end with .ctf.

I found two .ctf files in that folder and removing them both solved the problem.  Alt-tabbing back to AVG and clicking [Update] started the process off.

A quick and easy solution and I hope it’s useful to some of you out there!

You can log in to demo the system usign the username ‘demo’ and the password ’1234′

Comments and suggestions are, as always, most welcome!

“PHPmyDirectory” (a working title – I have since found someone else using it!) is presently still in beta and so I have been adding a lot of new features. Most recently I added templates so that the 3 different instances I have running (see links below) can all look slightly different. A config file allows you to select the template to use and to change a number of labels throughout the site (like title, keywords etc).

Splitting the data, templates and scripts apart allows me to work on single elements at a time – simplifying the development process. It also allow me to upload the latest script across all three instances without affecting the individual styles.

Finally, because the whole purpose of these sites it to get into the Google rankings, I have used the Apache mod_rewrite to make some nice friendly URLs. This was surprisingly simple to implement and means that to Google and the visitor, my site appears to have hundreds of .html pages, not just 3 .php ones! Cool, eh?  it also means that the same content can dynamically appear under more than one category without having to duplicate it in the database

With mod_rewrite:

• http://www.northantslive.co.uk/category.php?catoid=4 becomes http://www.northantslive.co.uk/directory/computers
• http://www.northantslive.co.uk/listing.php?id=7&catoid=4 becomes http://www.northantslive.co.uk/directory/computers/7/townsweb_archiving.html
• http://www.northantslive.co.uk/listing.php?id=7&catoid=5 becomes http://www.northantslive.co.uk/directory/building_services/7/townsweb_archiving.html

Next step is to dynamically create keywords and descriptions based on the content from the database.  Any other ideas are welcome, too! Although it’s not ready yet, soon I hope to release it so others can work on the code too. Anyone interested should obviously contact me.

Present instances:

• http://www.northantslive.co.uk
• http://directory.greenpanda.co.uk
• http://directory.ukforumz.com – Now offline (03/12/08)

The idea behind the website is to see film locations across the whole of the UK, but the unique aspect is that Paul has been adding modern photos that match the exact film shots.

The film that he was looking for that week was scenes from Octopussy that were filmed on the Nene Valley Railway.

We took a few photos on the way – and when I got back and looked at them it reminded me how beautiful Northamptonshire really is. Sure, it’s no North Yorkshire, but the majority of it is green and we should be thankful! Take a look at more photos after the link.
More photos

Photos Copyright Jack Harker 2008