Well it’s Friday afternoon and our airport lounges site is up and running and ready to face the public. Or almost…

You may recognise the site theme! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all in the title really. We’ve got a new site we’re working on based on Airport Lounges with a great deal of help from Max Bush at Vivid Lime. It’s a fairly niche area, but having experienced BA Terraces at Heathrow last week, I felt enthused!

The site has “soft launched” today, meaning it’s now live with about 90% of the front-end coding done (go on Happy!), very little content (erm, hurry up me) and a dodgy logo (go on Chris!) and we’re not linking to it yet. Ideally it’ll be ready to rock by Friday.

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I’m currently sitting in my hotel room in the Radisson Edwardian at Heathrow, unable to sleep. Happy and I are down for a few days, to earn our keep. We’ve been chatting over a few beers in the bar having the conversations you can’t have with anyone else you know as they would just stare at you blankly.

A quick run through of the talking points

• Social Networking may after all just be a fad
• Why is it so difficult to use URL rewrite on ASP?
• £3.60 a pint seems reasonable by the fourth one
• He’s too young for kids
• HW may actually only need 8 dynamic pages rather than the 32 directories and hundreds of files we currently use
• Everyone should have a blog

I’m sure there was lots more, but it’s all a little foggy now!

Tomorrow we have the first of a series of meetings with a new client, so I really should stop raiding the mini bar and get to bed. Night all!

An update on the rugby, since I haven’t mentioned it for a while.

Saturdays game wasn’t spectacular, however did produce an exciting finish. With Biggar leading 16-15 into injury time, an onslaught of their 22 eventually provided Hamilton with a penalty and the opportunity to win the game with the last kick of the ball. Unfortunately our goal-kicker missed the fairly easy kick and the game was lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year to one and all. In about one hour my favourite day of the year begins. It’s the 2nd of January, a bank holiday up here in Scotland and also my birthday!

Every birthday for the last 10 years or so I meet my mates outside a pub at 10:50 am and wait for the barmaid to open the doors. We then drink copious amounts of alcohol for the duration of the day. It’s a great laugh, I thoroughly recommend you try it at least once a year.

Highlights from previous years include my only ever early bath, when I was handed a “birthday drink” that was made of a few spirits from the dusty bottles on the top shelf of the bar. As it turned out one of these spirits was actually one of those poisonous type liquids you’re only supposed to swirl round a glass and pour out. It didn’t taste too bad, but I was home in bed by 6pm.

So don’t expect to hear from me tomorrow and most of the next day either! Apologies to everyone who has to start work tomorrow ;)

Blog tagged, that is. I’ve been tagged by Dan and Pete. Since I haven’t posted for a while, this seems like an easy way to slip back into it.

Rules of Blog Tagging - I have to tell you 5 things about me you wouldn’t already know, and tag 5 other people.

Things about me:

1. When I was 11 years old my mother took me to the doctor as she was worried I was too thin. No, really!
2. My RL nickname is Baloo, given to me by one of my rugby mates because of a similar walking style I’m told.
3. I have broken my nose seven times. Or rather had it broken by other people usually.
4. I can drink a Bacardi Breezer in under 3 seconds on a good day!
5. My Great Grandfather was awarded the Freedom of the City of Glasgow for his part in the Boer War. My Grandfather was a POW in WWII for over 18 months. My father quite sensibly became a plumber.

People I Tag:

Don’t really know any of these people, but I do read their blogs!

Darren, Kevin, Jason & Graham

These two are random, just for the hell of it -

John, John.

Love this! Commonly referred to as our “other national drink”, Irn-Bru have been producing humorous TV adverts for years. They’ve outdone themselves this year with a cheeky remake of the classic Christmas film “The Snowman“.

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I’m a big fan of mod_rewrite, Apache’s URL Rewriting Engine. It allows us to hide the inner workings of our websites, to present a page’s URL as an extra description in SERPs, and just looks more professional. When I first used it, the great advantage was the Seach Engine bots found it much easier to navigate a website without falling over several ampersands in our URL’s. Now that advantage has mostly been overtaken by the ability of the bots.

A lesson I learned shortly after implementing mod_rewrite in one of our sites was the danger of relying solely on mod_rewrite to interpret your URL’s. Herein lies the lesson…

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This time of year is bonanza time for internet retailers, the online Christmas rush is in full swing. Every other day someone claims “today” is the biggest day for buying online, and no doubt before December the 25th there’ll be reports about the demise of the High Street. I’m not especially gifted that I can see into the future, it’s just what happens every year.

Believe it or not, this is our slowest time of the year. No one is really that interested in travel, too busy shopping and getting ready for the big day. For us things kick off around the first working Monday after New Year. People get back to work facing the certainty it’s only 350-odd days ’til next Christmas and get to thinking about booking a nice holiday somewhere warm. Or going on a diet. Or taking out a loan.

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First win since our logo was put on the strips, woohoo!