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…..

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

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!

I have been looking at Virb in some more depth through the beta phase recently. I am a sucka for well designed sites, and Virb fits nicely into this criteria. Certainly Virb offers an awful lot for the designer in us all and has been developed from the ground up with this in mind. Complete customization of the front and backend like this, has not been seen before in popular social network and should encourage many people originally put off by the blinding customizations popular in MySpace. Structured ‘Modules’ incorporating content from third partied like YouTube and Odeo can be created and placed in your profile and as a user you have control over the html and CSS – heaven! No more div overlays!

Conversely, most social networks downfall, the ‘MySpace design effect’, is alleviated in Virb with the simplest solutions; a ‘remove customization’ button prominently placed in the header. Clicking this button restores the original, clean, simple and most importantly neutral default theme that ‘ships’ with each new profile and is remembered when you return to the profile.

Labeled by Christina Marie, “MySpace for Grownups”, Virb certainly fits the bill. With de-facto social networking features and advanced abilities to come like importing blog posts via RSS, Virb has done an awful lot right.

So where does it fit in? My thinking is that currently the MySpace monolith might be too big at the moment but in the future there are going to be a lot of existing users from Facebook and Bebo that may move as the site snowballs. One thing I am sure about is that there is space for a mature social network in this crowded marketplace. Vox, the closed social network or social blogging platform, had better watch out.

From their blog.

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com.

Though still in ‘beta’ I have used Gmail for a long time now with virtually no problems. If you haven’t moved your webmail across from other inferior web email apps, now is the time to do it. Gmail is quite simply excellent.

1. Go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Preferences’
2. Expand the ‘Video’ option and click on ‘Output Modules’
3. Change the ‘Video Output Module’ from the drop down list to ‘DirectX Video Output’
4. Expand ‘Output Modules’ and click on ‘DirectX’
5. From the settings that appear, take the tick out of the ‘Use hardware YUV->RGB conversions’.
6. Save your settings and exit.

Step 3 in the process.

Firefox is still the best browser out there, we all know that, but some of the little features and touches that these guys add are quite simply amazing.

Everyone using Firefox 2 should know that you can drag your tabs to re-organise where they are listed from left to right which is a powerful feature in itself. From an organisational point of view though I quite often work with an Active Collab tab first, my SideJob account open next and maybe my delicious account after with whatever I am reading thereafter. Occasionally I need to move these around if I start browsing something and then get down to work which and this feature is handy and a time saver.

What I didn’t realise until today is that I can move tabs between Firefox windows! In the same way that you would drag a tab left and right to re-organise, you can drag a tab down to another Firefox window, where it would maximise, and then place as you would normally on the tab bar. This excellent feature also works for links, dragging the link to another window and letting go on the tab bar reloads that link in a new tab. Alternatively drop it on a current tab to load in that tab.

Is this another case of Firefox staying more than one step ahead of IE7?