Or indeed, this applies to Joomla, Drupal and many other CMS systems out there.

Yes, I know, I should be following the trend and using them for web work, it`s one of those de-facto standards out there for designing websites (Yes, I include designing and coding (and infact a bit of SEO also) under the website designing banner, UX is rather defined by design also so doesn`t really feel worth mentioning to me at this current moment in time.) but as time goes on I tend to drift further and further away from these popular and worthy CMS` in order to develop and enhance my own.

Yes I do enjoy re-inventing the wheel from time to time, not as often as I used to but still there`s something about it that helps me to understand the processes more throughly and not rely too heavily on third party automation. Sure it does have it`s benefits as long as you stay within the orginal systems boundaries but more often than not those boundaries seem to be too restrictive or just don`t make sense.

Whilst I know my ickle CMS is nothing compared to these giants in terms of a great many features, not least support my customers tend to prefer using it, after all it`s more customised to their needs, sure I could go and write a plug-in for a popular CMS  instead and do things that way but it`s something that keeps on cropping up in phone conversations down here in the south west, with the whole "Ohh, I don`t know how to use that in Joomla", "So how did you do that in Wordpress",etc,etc.

Perhaps it`s that the systems are entirely different in approach to each other. Popular systems have to be all-encompassing to a great degree and offer external sources plug-in ability and huge amounts of testing on different server setups which must be hell to maintain. Also they seem to be more explored, mostly due to their popularity, by hackers trying to find exploits in the system, not necessarily with maliocious intent I should add. Security Companies are hackers too y`know, they just wear different hats.

My system is more based on a 1 at a time approach, some bits are nice and modular and go from site to site code unchanged but everyone needs something different on their site, be it products, ecommerce, shipping set-up in a certain way, blog posts with galleries attached or a whole bunch of other malarkey the 1 to 1 approach I get with my CMS seems to help, obviously with stepwise refinement ;)

Can`t wait to ditch osCommerce completely now btw, hopefully no more of my sites will use it :)

Earl Grey, Hot!

5 cups later this afternoon I`m quite possibly wired for destruction, combining the power of tea and not my usual coffee buzz sensation has clearly unlocked the mad coder again from once within me. Thankfully it only lasts a short while (about 2-3 hours) whilst franctic coding, or possibly anything else, i`ll have to test that out, for science!

Got some more of the home putoid set-up with some handy cables from Refresh Cartridges which is lovely and should mean that I can run my windows installation on a nice fast drive as opposed to my old ATA 133 doobrie which works well but more speed is always nice. Actually, that could quite easily be taken out of context, errrr never mind.

Still feeling a bit broody what with Mr and Mrs Holgates scan but I`m sure my natural nerdyness will overcome that in time, it usually does.

Freaking sweet,I just recieved my tv out cable for my archos, it wokrs really quite well, upscales the resolution and displays nicely on the tv.

The touchscreen works as a mouse instead which is a-okay and i could psdiibly output the content to a laptop for screen recordings which would enable me to do mobile video game reviews. hmm, I wander if thats everywhere on youtube also now.

Oh my god, the amount of freakin` hoops I`m being forced to jump through by Microsoft so I can save my game...

1. Install Windows Games For Windows
2. Update Windows Games for Windows
3. Restart Machine
4. Repeat Steps 1-3 a few times.
5. Check Steam Forums, thi is getting ridiculous
6. Re-installal Windows Live Games
7. Find a hot fix for XP not found on Window Live Search, the link to fit returns a 404, geez
8. Restart PC
9. Install New Login Assistant (WHAT THE FUCK?)
10. Launch Game again to be prompted for a can`t load this game error.
11. Restart PC For the 6th time.
12. Try to Reinstall New Login Assitant Again.
13. Watch it fail to Install.
14. Try to Load up F1 2010 Again.
15. Can`t load this game error.
16. WHY Oh WHY Oh WHY Does this game require this much bloody fuss when every other game I`ve bought from steam just installs nicely and runs without all this extra bullshit. Oh yeah, that`d be Windows Games Live Service. Now I`m left with a gaem which refuses to run and obviously wouldn`t be able to save state. FF$

24zfxmn3gu

So, it was announced recently on Googles Webmaster Channel on Youtube that the worlds most popular search engine Google simply doesn`t use the meta keywords tag for when displaying results for it`s Google search web application.

According to the Youtube video Google hasn`t been using the meta keywords for a long, long time.


View Video on You Tube

However, that`s not to say that using meta keywords is a complete waste of time, far from it. Whilst google is the largest and arguably the best search engine out there, a percentage of people will still use others such as bing, yahoo, altavista, ask, etc, etc. Some of these search engines will more than likely still use keywords as part of their ranking criteria, unless of course they also begin openly broadcasting how they refuse to use the keywords tag also.

Either way, for the moment, as using meta keywords does absolutely no harm it`s still worth keeping them inside a website in my opinion. Maybe concentrating on a more precise description is a good idea now.

Refresh Creations Ltd keeps on giving me lots of website work to carry on with, too much sometimes in-fact and I have been looking around recently for freelance website designers to assist me with some outstanding website projects. 

Recently finished is the new Firebird Promotions site (http://www.firebirdpromotions.co.uk/) Which is a rare example of what I`m going to term  an "Almost E-Commerce" website. It functions on the admin side exactly like an e-commerce site and looks just like one also.

The reason why it is an "Almost E-Commerce" website is that it simply allows you to submit requests for orders as opposed to actual paid-for orders, at request of Firebird Promotions of course.

Whilst developing the Firebird Promotions Site I did have a good look around their products sold and I`ve found that I`m still just as fond of logobugs as I ever was ,since the age of about 7 or 8, perhaps I should order some Refresh Creations branded logobugs or, as I call them "puyo blobs" for promotion later on, although I am tempted by having some cheesily branded mugs or cups to give out to new customers as a surprise piece of advertising in the home.

It has proven to be handy project to allow me to develop my admin system further, previous E-commerce websites produced used a heavily customized piece of shopping cart software known as os commerce which is great, but some customers believed the back-end admin system to be rather unwieldy. Hopefully I can create a compromise between the two pieces of software to make a simpler piece of shopping cart software for my clients to use in the future. Sagepay and paypal integration should be fairly simple as always, Google Checkout, however, has long been a bug bear of mine. We shall see how things develop however.

Somethings in this world of websites are rather strange. Mostly thepeople. Or in some cases, the lack of people visiting sites can bequite disturbing.

Cases in point are as follows:

The first, and most recent site whispurr.co.ukis a luxury lingerie shop which has only just been out and is awaitinggoogles next PR loop (probably around the end of March / beginning ofApril. Since February it seems to have dropped off in regards to thenumber of visitors by an alarming almost 50%. Perhaps it is sufferingfrom new-site syndrome with the search engines even though it had beenequipped by myself with what I thought were some pretty handy tools.Most importantly, blog functionality, wishlists and the ability tocreate custom meta tags. The site has been live for almost 3 monthsthough now. After a nice sales blip in February it`s just not convertedany sales. Quite why this is, I`m not sure.

In complete contrast. A little known website, with roughly the sameamount of traffic, quite a lot older (by around 2 years) called LanaCotone has proven to be possibly the most effective site I`ve everseen! This last month it received barely over 250 unique visitors but completed a sale 58 times in the same period. That`s something else entirely!

Between the two we have some other e-commerce sites which attract a decent amount of business and many, many visitors which are around a year old now and notch up 10-20 sales a month. Is time the only healer for e-commerce, or have I missed something out big style on the whispurr.co.uk website. Only time it seems, and the site owners marketing of their business(es) will tell!

Okay, now I`ve been making websites for a long while now and I`d like to think that I`m pretty adept at most things website based and that I`ve come a long way since the first lil website I built with one of my good mates back when I think i was around err 16-17 ish. (Also known as back when MIDI music was cool!)

Fast forward 10 years and after university, and the (almost 3) years at Refresh Creations and despite learning a whole bunch of programs, tools, scripting and coding languages pretty much every day at work I`m learning something new!

Most recently, Chris Holgate hired an awesome SEO guy called Matt, from another local company called Creative SEO to help drive more traffic to his Inkjet Cartridge Ecommerce Site Refresh Cartridges, a site which I had taken over from a previous webmaster, one that needed a great deal of love and attention indeed.

Despite 3 years of love and attention to the site (amongst all the other sites I now maintain) there are still numerous improvements which need to be made time after time.

2009 to me seems to be the proper year of the blog and the complete integration of social networking into google. One of the most unique social networking sites out there, one which I find interesting due to it`s simplicity over complex networking sites such as facebook, mysapce,bebo and countless others is one called Twitter.

The thing with Twitter that makes it truly unique is the limitations plaed on the user. Each blog or Twitter can only be 140 characters long. Of course, you can embed hyperlinks inside that text but the main gist of the lack of characters means that you have to get your message across quickly to your (for want of a better word) followers.

Attempting to create profiles for all these social networks and maintain them is just too much for one person to keep up with IMHO. Particularly if you`re running a business at the same time and it would be great if someone out there could develop an application that could update a whole bunch of them with just one or two clicks. Guess my next task may well be learning a whole bunch of social Network APIs huh?

Back to the Header and meta tags now I guess. Bye!!

Ahh 2009. Well late january 2009 anyway. Refresh has been busy as always and isn't letting up one jot. Still. there are some exciting projects on the website horizon, including one huge project which has a site as only a part of the project. Yup ryan is making some funky lil game things again! Of course this does mean I'll be wanting to do a whole bunch of direct 3d things and I'm currently figuring out how to do some shiny mesh animation in the old visual basic 6 (yup still using ye olde wingmen engine elemental entertainment guys) Although after a quick chat over the phone I think I've gotta get up-to-date and learn some c sharp and xna/direct x 10 skills for any future projects. Have a look at the refresh creations portfolio for a lok at the last batch of finished sites, my design skills are still improving as well as the php and javascript gubbins. I give in, ajax is a handy tool for some things but i still only use it sparingly. Not been up tomuch gamage recently :( although I played part way through eversion and yup, I can see that game giving people nightmares! anyway, time to prise julie from peggle cyas!

Well Looks like El Alistair has dropped V.A.T to 15% for the 1st of December. That's just bloody great isn't it, hmph. Now All those ecommerce sites have to have extra scripting put in place to cater for this sudden change. This would be fine but I believe OsCommerce uses Global variables for V.A.T which aren't stored per order. At least not on one of the sites I took over at the start of Refresh Creations.

This poses a problem which I'm guessing many web developers are going to either already be aware of or made aware of with quite a shock in the near future. Anyways that's what.ohhh 7 days notice. God only knows what some larger U.K. web-companies are going to do about this!

Well, Refresh Creations has been going for nearly two and a half years now. So I thought I'd reflect on how things have progressed through this blog.

Returning to Paignton and setting up the web design company was decided on the basis of a game of chance. based upon how well I performed on one round of N.E.S. GOLF of all things. under par = start up Refresh Creations, over par = no company for me :(

Thankfully I ended up with 3 under par and now N.E.S. GOLF has clearly been one of the most influential games in my life in the most odd way. I still find myself playing it on the way back from work occasionally and it's actually still great fun!

Anyway, back to the main bits of the article. In the last 2 years the business has gone from a slow supply of customers to what now seems to be a never-ending stream which is great! Stressful sometimes but great! There's been a lot of customers referring us onto other people and i'll be honest, word-of-mouth advertising has been the most effective I've noticed so far.

Sure, search engine optimisation and other advertising campaigns have had their place but word-of-mouth seems to be the way forward. After all, having a company with a bad reputation is probably worse than not having a business in the first place.

I've learnt a lot more about PHP, MySQL and osCommerce since Refresh Creations began and it does show (at least to me) when I look at some of the older sites in comparison to the more recent ones regarding design skills both graphical and coding styles which will probably keep on evolving for a good number of years until I somehow automate my own creative process, that's a scary thought though.

There are still a bunch of things for me to be getting on with including beefy websites from beginning record labels in paignton, the on-going work for Refresh Cartridges which is always fun, branding them with all my shiny designer goo. Making the odd torbay hotel site every now and then to creating custom e-commerce sites for larger clients such as the soon to be completed new site for Peppers School of Motoring in Newton Abbot.

Speaking of which I should probably get that site finished quickly!

Here's to the next 2 and a half years then, with many more awesome websites and tasty e-commerce packages!

Crunch Time. Nice little trip around the crunch, we've all been there as tourists haven't we? But enough Mighty Boosh spiel. Deadlines have this nasty habit of catching up with me, I wish they wouldn't as I've never enjoyed the idea of deadline. They're just so finite. Although I guess they do give me something to aim for.

Problem is though when they start creeping around important dates, such as my birthday, gosh damn it!

I'd like to spend my weekend getting horrifically drunk with a bunch of mates wandering why I'm still unable to stand up due to lack of liver functions. YAY! But nope deadline on the 20th makes this un-possible.  Not impossible but it still sucks. Meh.

Anyhoo Back to making many websites with great haste! (possibly playing Maga Man 9 again tonight hehe)

<RANT>If I had a penny for every browser bug I had to cope with I'd have.. errr... Well, probably over £2.50 by now. This latest miscreant has just about cost me a day, thank you so very much Internet Explorer (again)

Firefox and most other browsers utilize this part of the W3C HTML / XHTML but not you MSIE. Nope, you just go off in your own little merry way and ignore the disabled tag, then go and enjoy eating some more lemons whilst going oh lookee we done tabbed browsing, woohoo!

Guess It's back to using some underhanded javascript with php checking tonight GRAGRGRGHRGHARHGARGARGARGARG ghsaghraharhgahjdfashfsdkj fhdsjkf ydsafkjasd hfdashgjagfahjgfsdafjhads gfdhfd gfhjf gdshjfd gfhjf</RANT>

If anyone is familiar with the awesomeness that is Formula 1 you'll understand what this lil acronym means (Did Not Finish) strangely appropriate that the same initails run true with Duke Nukem Forever which I swear I just saw on gameplay.com with a release date of October 31st! The exact same day that Red Alert 3 is released over here, oh boy, it's going to be difficult to choose which one to pick. If I want to wait years for what will be the inevitable patch to come out for DNF then the chances are my hands will have rotten off before I can play it properly ho ho ho.

Still, fun as it is to poke fun at DNF the last trailer I saw for it is really memorable for the one and only line the Duke says. You'll have to watch or, err, suffer the trailer below in order to truly appreciate what I mean.


View Video on You Tube

It's just seeming too look a bit cheesey for me. That and I'm more excited about destroying armies with a bunch of telepathic Japanese school girls riding bear cavalry which can shoot over 9,000 lasers per minute. Right, I'm off to pre-order Red Alert 3 before I change my mind.

Every now and then a game comes along which makes me scream and shout much more than regular games. Tonights "I can't believe I can't get past level 16 you fuckers" moment was brought to you by Gravitron 2.

Gravitron 2 seems so far to be a clone (admittedly a beautiful, probably just as annoying clone) of ye olde game Lunar Lander. I'm sure there's some extra bits inside it, like the annoying frigging homing missiles and switch puzzle elements and the obligatory fancified graphics which do look all ohhhh and shinnyyy. Maybe I am actually getting worse at games now but this one has me stumped before I've even reached the halfway mark and It's building up levels of anger inside me to kill a whole city, gragghhh!!

So, yes, this game relishes it's old-skool difficulty, not that all old-skool games were difficult but this one seems harsh to say the least. Now that I'm stuck on this level (for the past 2 hours) the game seems to just be leaping around me reminding me that I'm some thicko for not turning slightly more, thrusting the ship a little less to conserve fuel, activate my shields at just the right time to deflect bullets or nudging some of the landscape to
scrape off the last bit of health I've got left.

Fun until the difficulty level just gets in the way of fun. When I'm dying for the umpteenth time from some combined fire from 7 or 8 targetsshooting missiles and bullets at me you'd have thought it'd realize. Ohh, numpty mc sausage fingers here has some sort of inability to beat this part of the level, lets remove some enemies from him shall we? Hell, even Syvallion on the SNES and in the arcades did that!

So far, Gravitron 2 gets 4 and a half heart attacks out of 5. A new record!!

It's almost enough to bring be back to playing Peggle. No, nothing could being me back to playing Peggle again.

Whilst stumbling around the net tonight I ran square bang into a site that made all your standard e book sites seem rather pale in comparison. The site in question is: http://librivox.org/

It's rather a fantastic site for those people who either haven't enough time or can't be bothered to sit down and read a book let alone convert an ebook with some Text To Speech (TTS) program. There's a nicely growing range of books out there on the site and whilst I'm yet to listen to H. G. Wells Time Machine on the way to work tomorrow morning I'm actually quite excited by it's potential. Most journeys end up with me listening to one of the 1up Retronauts podcasts which are rather entertaining for me at least. But a change is nice once in a while.

If you've got a decent enough reading voice you are more than welcome to contribute to the community out there on the site. However, I would appear to have a bit of a chest bug going around at the moment so, that's a no go for the moment at least haha!.

Another budget site got completed by Refresh Creations today, http://www.beautysecrets.org.uk/ not too shabby. Although it is a shame that a few ideas of mine were rejected such as having a beauty tips RSS feed which could have been handy to soup the site up through article lists, etc.

I finally gave in to temptation and bought myself Megaman 9 this weekend aaand oh my gosh! It really is superb and recaptures the feel of playing Megaman 2 for the first time. So far, the game has proven to be quite a challenge and gratuitous swearing at the Wii has been up recently. Having said that I've yet to notice any truly unfair parts in the game bar one area in... I believe it's Jewel Man's level? Where you must do some crazy stuff with a swinging mechanism dependant on your placement on it and a room full of insta-death spikes everywhere but in hole in the middle of the floor and on the ceiling. If you've found a good way of beating this section without using a power up i;d be interested to see some video action of this.

Finally finished off Puzzle Quest today. Most of the game was relatively easy after the first few hours but kept you on your toes to notice any patterns occuring, balancing risk with reward rgarding matching skulls and always trying to keep a bit ahead of your enemies at al; times.

It's definately a game which has to be played a bit at a time due to the length of the game and also that there is only so long you can play what boils down to a highly tactical version of bejewelled, not that that is a bad thing mind, before I get kina bored of going through the motions of another block puzzle.

The final boss of Puzzle Quest seemed kinda unfair compared to previous bosses in the game and I feel that I did really win based a war of attrition / luck. I've yet to play the multplayer version of the game yet but I might give that a while if I can bring myself to put down Megaman 9 (probably best wait until I hit 47 then).

Capcom really seem to have added some nice features to the game, with the addition of best time scoreboards, a huge number of achievements and what looks to be downloadable bonus levels, characters and who knows what else! I'm glad to see the blue bomber getting some well needed attention.

Back to work then tomorrow. Cyas!

I can't quite understand it but I just had about a 2 hour session on Red Alert 2 tonight and it still felt pretty fresh, for a game that I've played for almost a decade, admittedly nt quite so often recently when there are loads of other games like Team Fortress 2 which I absolutely love and the oddly addicting Puzzle Quest which I really must beat sometime soon!

Refresh Creations has been going on for about 27 months now, still making funky websites in Paignton and it's still doing pretty well, nothing spectacular though and I've got to find a way to beat that! I'm hoping to get some more tiny bits of revenue from some well placed google adsesnse projects when I get round to completing them but these do also take time. Paricularly when there are many other, more importatn things to be working on, like clients sites!!!

Just completed today is the rather stonking Ojay Design website which sells a variety of funky merchandise from brand labels like Alessi, Tula and so on, this project turned out to be a lot bigger than initially thought due to the complexities with each product at the outset. This, combined with a whole jam pack of features bunged into it in order to help it stand out from the crowd. I sometimes wander if making something "stand out from the crowd" is quite always the best way to go with design, there is a lot to be said for making something less err. pointy, Yeah, that's probably not the right word to use in this blog but I'll be damned if I let grammar those grammar nazis get the better of me.

Ojay Design is relatively nice xhtml, okay, so it doesn't follow a tableless os-commerce design but if it was it would have taken a LOT longer to complete. I'm tempted to do some tableless designs for os-commerce when I can really see the point of it, when accessability is put on a pedestal above all other pedestals to make them look more like footstools

Yes, I do still have plans of ressurecting the Wingmen project from University, incase anyone reads this but coming home to do more programming after day of programming is pretty difficult to do! Maybe at the weekends perhaps.

Ohh, one more thing, currently playing through ye olde Lylat Wars for the "NINTENDO SIXTY FOUURRRRRR" Below is a video of the first level in all it's shiny action!

View Video on You Tube

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