Workalone UK Sometimes, when you work alone, you need a little help

Matt Smith: The Eleventh Doctor It's been a day since the announcement, so I thought I'd bore you all with my thoughts on Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor.

When I first heard the news I though "who?", like most people, but then I looked him up on the web and realised that I knew who he was.

Yes, he's young. But I don't see that as an insurmountable obstacle. His work in things like "Party Animals" and the Sally Lockhart dramas prove that he's a capable young actor. And I trust Stephen Moffatt to do the right thing. So, all in all, my response is "This could work. Let's wait and see".

One of the interesting things about this announcement is how far in advance it has been made. I know it made sense for David Tennant to announce that he was leaving the show along with Russell T Davies, but did we really need to know who was going to be the next Doctor a year before he appears on screen? And that appearance is likely to be no more than thirty seconds of blinking and gurning. It's likely to be fifteen months before we really see how he works in the part.

I can remember all of the new Doctor announcements back to Tom Baker. And I'm sure we've never known who the new Doctor is so far in advance. Usually, I think it's more like four or six months. David Tennant was announced in April 2005 and appeared on screen briefly in July. His first full episode was in December - eight months after the announcement. With Smith, we'll have to wait almost twice as long. I realise that the production team wanted to put and end to all of the speculation and that they really didn't want to keep the secret once filming starts later this year, but surely building up the anticipation for this long has a high chance of backfiring on them. It also has a chance of rather overshadowing David Tennant's last appearances as the Doctor - which would be a shame.

Of course, this is pretty much all guesswork. Anything could happen in the next fifteen months. As I said above - the best approach is just to wait and see and to not engage in pointless speculation.

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Have a great new year, to all those still in yesterday back in the UK, I'll just let you know that its already started for me and its pretty good, I look forwards to sharing it with you, I just received a nice email form one of my most favorite companies in the world tiled 2008: A year of pressure points. Godspeed and have a great one, I'm off surfing / boggy boarding with my daughters as its also the youngest girl / my middle child's 6th birthday. hooray.

I'm really happy with Umbraco as a blogging tool since I got livewriter support hooked up writing a blog post is now an extremely quick process and I don't need to worry about anything expect the content of the post.

Yesterday I was sat thinking about what tools would improve the quality of my posts and came up with a couple of ideas for Umbraco packages that I would like to see. As time is limited and I'm not sure I'll have the time to build these packages I thought I'd outline my ideas here and possibly inspire someone else to pick up the ideas and run with them.

The first idea is the more simple of the two. I'd like that when I publish a blog post that certain keywords are automatically linked to URLs. For example the word Umbraco always gets linked to umbraco.org or the phrase Liverpool gets linked to the official Liverpool website. These words and phrases would need to be setup in a configuration file.

I could see this idea working as an Action Handler or some kind of button on the TinyMCE toolbar. The latter is probably a better idea as you may only want to add links to certain blog posts. You'd also want to verify the links that had been added to the blog post in case the code had made any mistakes.

The code itself would be pretty trivial. Just some regular expressions parsing your blog post body.

The benefit of this functionality is that you can enhance your search engine rankings by having reciprocal links with other sites and manually adding these links to each post can get quite time consuming. I may get around to building this functionality myself it is probably only a few hours work.

My second idea is a little more abstract and probably needs some more thought. I'm painfully aware that my blog looks rather plain. The blogs that stand out for me use some kind of relevant images within the body of the post.

The idea of going and sourcing an image for every post I make is quite painful. What I'd like is something that would auto suggest some images based on the tags and body content of a post.

I'm speculating that the functionality would search either the Umbraco media section or some kind of online public image library (or both). With events in Umbraco 4 I'm imagining it would be quite easy to create a Lucene index of media items. Some kind of classifier may be used against the body of the blog post in order to determine the keywords for the post.

Again, I Imagine some kind of button on the TinyMCE toolbar opening a popup with thumbnails of  suggested images. When a thumbnail is clicked the image is inserted to the post body with any required scaling performed automatically.

So, those are my thoughts. It turned into a bit of a longer post than I imagined. If nothing else, it serves as a reminder to myself when I'm looking for a new project.

My site is back online after a little enforced downtime. I was having real stability problems using a WebFusion VPS and as far as I am concerned their introductory VPS package is unfit for purpose. I'd strongly recommend that you don't attempt to host an Umbraco site with them.

The more eagle eyed amongst you may notice that a couple of posts went missing. I'll just say that I have learned the hard way to check whether my scheduled database backups are running or not.

Anyway, I am back up and running on a dedicated server. Hopefully my site(s) should be a little more stable now.

Some time in the fog of the last couple of days that hides between Christmas and New Years I received an interesting email from Ecogeak informing me of an interesting idea in font design, the idea was to create a font that cut down the ink needed in order to print with it, it does this buy having holes in the body of the font, humm I wasn't sure about it when I read it but it looks a damn site better then I thought it would and am looking forward to the opportunity to use it in action.

I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now -mainly due to my own laziness but I thought I'd finally pad it out a little. It would appear that Google have release a new method of ranking your own results for certain terms:

Once you've promoted a page you'll notice a little green arrow to the right of the title link and the results will come back in this order every time you search on that term while you're logged in.

At the moment I think it's just stored against your profile but I would imagine at some point in the future they'll start monitoring what everyone else is promoting and adjusting their results accordingly.

What I'm interested to know about is how it affects SEO, I can't imagine they'll add too much preference to the promotions otherwise we could be in for another Google Bomb situation where your competitors promote or demote your site.

The Perl Foundation Migrates the Perl 5 Development Repository to the Git Version Control System That's not news, of course. You all read that story on the front page of use.perl a couple of days ago.What's new (I think) is where you can find the press release. It's on PRWeb. For those who don't know, PRWeb is the best-known press release distribution service. The TPF Git press release will now be arriving in the inbox of hundreds of editors and other interested parties who have subscribed to technology news. And that, of course, increases the chance that the story will be published in the tech press and that people outside of the echo chamber will read it.When the Git news broke a couple of days ago, we were discussing it the london.pm IRC channel. acme had published the press release in the usual Perl news channels, but someone suggested that as we had a press release, it would be nice to get it out through the standard press release channels.It turned out that Dave Hodgkinson had a) a PRWeb login, b) half an hour to spare to register the press release and c) the $80 it costs to use the service.I have no idea how successful this will be, but it seems to me that if the Perl community has interesting news like this, then it's worth spending the occasional $80 to get that news out on the wires.It's got to be worth a try. Thanks to Dave for his efforts. Update: Over on ZDNet, Joe Brockmeier adds his thoughts to the discussion.

Today I took delivery of 2 packages from the UK containing 2 sets of metal type the first is Bodini Italic 24pt and the second is Gill Sans 6pt and my intention is to make some beautiful objects using them for sale through an online store I am developing for this site, via the lovely Etsy and through the Saturday Market on Waiheke Island. On the subject of type I received word today that one of my first fonts is to be distributed in Japan as part of a book on Dingbats, the book is Type Dingbat published by BNN and it looks a great looking book

You may have noticed the previous post is a digest of my tweets over a week. The other day I was thinking how I never  get the time to blog (thanks to my new daughter) and what I waste of time it was re-designing my blog!

It didn't make long to realise that I'm actually blogging all the time - or micro blogging to be more accurate. Your twitter statuses are normally quite a good representation of what is on your mind and what you are working on which is normally what my blog is all about.

I took about an hour to put together a Perl script that uses the twitter API to grab all of my statuses over the past week. From there, the script uses a template to render the statuses as markup and then connects to Umbraco using webservices to create a new blog post. I'll schedule the script to run weekly and produce these digests.

The result, mirco blogging becomes real blogging.

americans: Ever step into the middle of the road and shout taxi at the top of your voice like in films? Or do you just extend your arm. at Thu Dec 18 08:53:09 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@dillorscroft don't worry about it too much mate, i think it is my underpowered VPS playing up. at Wed Dec 17 14:32:39 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

@dillorscroft no, v6 at Wed Dec 17 14:21:53 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

buy yourself a piece of soap history http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7786583.stm at Wed Dec 17 13:39:29 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

using umbraco webservices seems to have driven my server mad. at Wed Dec 17 13:34:32 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@dillorscroft @umbraco can the webservices do any useful logging? I'm getting an HTTP 400..... at Wed Dec 17 12:48:53 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

@dillorscroft cheers got it! at Wed Dec 17 12:35:26 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

getting 'The user (xxx) does not have access to this service' from umbraco webservices, how to enable the user? at Wed Dec 17 12:23:53 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@umbraco got it! http://www.homepub.com/site/uk/index.php at Wed Dec 17 10:07:11 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to umbraco

@umbraco i really wish i could read the description. it looks very very cool. at Wed Dec 17 10:06:20 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to umbraco

my daughter has now forced me to give up the occasional pint after work.I'm doing everything I can to conserve energy. at Wed Dec 17 09:13:36 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

Start tweeting early in life http://tinyurl.com/5rqj3v at Tue Dec 16 15:44:57 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@simmdk any smaller and the gui would be unuseable, it's a tradeoff at Tue Dec 16 13:00:35 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to simmdk

starting today with kraftwerk. don't like coldplay but at least their blatant rip off on the radio reminded me to listen to computerlove at Tue Dec 16 09:05:30 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

having a clear out http://tinyurl.com/5nhl58 at Fri Dec 12 14:54:48 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@timgaunt yes, my terms are now 50% in advance, because of situations like yours you don't go to a restaurant and pay 2 months after eating at Fri Dec 12 13:48:38 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to timgaunt

Just to go some way towards proving that I'm not just a one trick web pony I have finished my first that I can recall but hopefully not my last piece of packaging design. It was for a UK company that makes a delicious sounding bread, not that I got to try any with me being the other side of the world on Waiheke Island in New Zealand for the entirety of the project, but I am going to have to try and make myself to satisfy my curiosity.

In conjunction with the UKUUG and O'Reilly, I'm running two days of Perl training in London in February.The first day (the 25th) is a beginners' course and the second day (the 26th) is a lot more advanced.Full details (including a sign-up form) are on the UKUUG web site.Hope to see some of you there.

@dillorscroft @umbraco can the webservices do any useful logging? I'm getting an HTTP 400..... at Wed Dec 17 12:48:53 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

@dillorscroft cheers got it! at Wed Dec 17 12:35:26 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to dillorscroft

getting 'The user (xxx) does not have access to this service' from umbraco webservices, how to enable the user? at Wed Dec 17 12:23:53 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@umbraco got it! http://www.homepub.com/site/uk/index.php at Wed Dec 17 10:07:11 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to umbraco

@umbraco i really wish i could read the description. it looks very very cool. at Wed Dec 17 10:06:20 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to umbraco

my daughter has now forced me to give up the occasional pint after work.I'm doing everything I can to conserve energy. at Wed Dec 17 09:13:36 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

Start tweeting early in life http://tinyurl.com/5rqj3v at Tue Dec 16 15:44:57 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@simmdk any smaller and the gui would be unuseable, it's a tradeoff at Tue Dec 16 13:00:35 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to simmdk

starting today with kraftwerk. don't like coldplay but at least their blatant rip off on the radio reminded me to listen to computerlove at Tue Dec 16 09:05:30 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

having a clear out http://tinyurl.com/5nhl58 at Fri Dec 12 14:54:48 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox

@timgaunt yes, my terms are now 50% in advance, because of situations like yours you don't go to a restaurant and pay 2 months after eating at Fri Dec 12 13:48:38 GMT 2008 from TwitterFox in reply to timgaunt

I thought I'd share some festive "fun" today. For quite some time now I've hooked into the build events within Visual Studio but I think this is just taking it too far... Basically the script now increments the version number of the DLL (if relevant) automatically, times the time for the build and adds it to a total build time to date (stored in an external txt file) and finally prints out whether the build was a success or not -basically some of our projects are taking a while to build and I wanted something that was "clearer" ;) I'm thinking about adding Christmas trees next, anyone know how to do them in ASCII?

I thought I'd share some festive "fun" today. For quite some time now I've hooked into the build events within Visual Studio but I think this is just taking it too far...

Basically the script now increments the version number of the DLL (if relevant) automatically, times the time for the build and adds it to a total build time to date (stored in an external txt file) and finally prints out whether the build was a success or not -basically some of our projects are taking a while to build and I wanted something that was "clearer" ;)

I'm thinking about adding Christmas trees next, anyone know how to do them in ASCII?

Do you really want what you do to be classed as "it'll do"? At the moment it would appear that a lot of businesses are happy to say "It'll do" rather than put that extra mile to "It's excellent". We've been avoiding "it'll do" like the plague for over a year now and although it's not always easy is so much more rewarding and produces a much better end product. I don't think this applies just to work you produce, what about a job advert or your working environment? We've just started looking for new offices and staff, in both cases and we wanted more than "just another job" or "it's just another office", I want people to love working with and at The Site Doctor so we've been working hard to make it a reality. Finding THE office in THE location doesn't cost that much more (perhaps another month looking and a few extra quid) and making our positions that little bit more enjoyable won't really cost a lot more but will make our employees enjoy working with us and ultimately more loyal. Does it really cost you more? I don't think so no. Getting a really special office will make you feel happier at work, feeling happier at works means you're more creative, being more creative generally results in being more productive. Feeling appreciated and enjoying your role will also increase the likelihood you'll want to rock up at work each day and do more while you're there so in both cases, going the extra mile will pay off. What about marketing campaigns? Well it's the same thing, who talks about an "OK" viral advert? What buzz surrounds something "that'll do" in contrast to one that really goes the extra mile like the advert from Nike a while ago? I wonder how much more it cost to produce that against how much it cost to produce one of the awful run-of-the-mill TV adverts that are around at the moment? Ask yourself, do you really want to settle with "it'll do"?

Do you really want what you do to be classed as "it'll do"? At the moment it would appear that a lot of businesses are happy to say "It'll do" rather than put that extra mile to "It's excellent".

We've been avoiding "it'll do" like the plague for over a year now and although it's not always easy is so much more rewarding and produces a much better end product. I don't think this applies just to work you produce, what about a job advert or your working environment?

We've just started looking for new offices and staff, in both cases and we wanted more than "just another job" or "it's just another office", I want people to love working with and at The Site Doctor so we've been working hard to make it a reality. Finding THE office in THE location doesn't cost that much more (perhaps another month looking and a few extra quid) and making our positions that little bit more enjoyable won't really cost a lot more but will make our employees enjoy working with us and ultimately more loyal.

Does it really cost you more? I don't think so no. Getting a really special office will make you feel happier at work, feeling happier at works means you're more creative, being more creative generally results in being more productive. Feeling appreciated and enjoying your role will also increase the likelihood you'll want to rock up at work each day and do more while you're there so in both cases, going the extra mile will pay off.

What about marketing campaigns? Well it's the same thing, who talks about an "OK" viral advert? What buzz surrounds something "that'll do" in contrast to one that really goes the extra mile like the advert from Nike a while ago? I wonder how much more it cost to produce that against how much it cost to produce one of the awful run-of-the-mill TV adverts that are around at the moment?

Ask yourself, do you really want to settle with "it'll do"?