Update: I have posted a photo on my business website.

After getting the design sketched out and the feature set documented, last week I spent 3 days continuously designing, coding and tweaking. Its a bit of a contrast with the last single column, light on dark design and I still need to add a couple of bits to it but I am pretty happy with the outcome.

For those of you reading via RSS, get over here for a look and let me know what you think.  More information about the coding and development can be found on my web design site Eminent Style.

He is currently looking for a publisher and I am looking for books for my coffee table so if you know one, help me and him out!

Trouble is, blogging didn’t really pay the bills, but I do feel as though I might be neglecting some of the readers (sounds arrogant but its not meant that way). Well in a moment of free time, in rather a cameo role, here comes another couple of posts that might help somebody in the same way they helped me. I hope its not another three months after today that I post again but it could be…..

I went for reasonably priced laptop from Dell (yes, I know, no Mac Fan boy here yet). My logic was that while the sky is almost the limit regarding spec and price, I was unsure of how much i was going to actually use it. So, I found a great deal through the Dell Outlet store on Ebay, as recommended by Jeff a work colleague and I am very happy with the result.

The laptop is a quick dual core with a gig of Ram and a hard disk that suits my work related needs. Significantly through I managed to find one with the 1440 x 900 True Life resolution which was essential really for my web design which is the primary use. While its a fantastic screen, amazing quality, unfortunately it highlights the shortcomings of my desktop screen. Vista though, which I really like generally (its on my main desktop PC) was a head ache with the wireless networking and I have a network ‘engineering’ background.

Its well worth the effort and the money though!

Its amazing he looks so healthy, great news for him and his family. More details on the BBC website.

As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.

All my sites went down today for about 60mins around 5pm (GMT) with my host denying all knowledge. Not the end of the world but a reasonable explanation would have been appreciated. Especially as this is the 7th day this month there has been some length of downtime! I have been putting it off for ages but a few more issues and poor responses from my host and I might end up making the move. Where do you recommend?

Can’t explain it at the moment and as I wasn’t working on my sites at the time I wouldn’t have noticed had it not been for the excellent Pingdom which monitors my sites like a hawk. For those who work on more than one website or administer an e-commerce website Pingdom is essential and should be in every ‘web masters’ (for want of a much better expression) tool kit.

Errors

Thanks to Gary King for the heads up this morning, he informed me the comments on my site had broken. It seems a rarely used forum on one of my sites had crumbled under the spam bot pressure and filled 150MB of space in my database. My fault for not disabling it. Anyway all working now and comments are up and running again – the forum, retired!