New Project in progress

So I have been working mostly on one new project but looks like others are in the pipeline. Most of my time is being taken up with a new Application Called System and Helpdesk Management. what is a management system based around the ITIL. This is an open source project at the moment but who knows where it will go. the basic aim is to build a one stop shop for ITIL but is highly customizable by the Administrator of the system. anyway to read more about it go to the System and Helpdesk Management Blog. This will eventually have its on web site but I only have one set of hands.

The other project in hand at the moment is top secret so I am not going to give anything away on that at the moment except to say we are look at new technology to create it. primary using Ruby what leads on to the next item I hope to be changing my system environment to Add a Linux web server to host Ruby based sites. I let you know how this goes but it will consist of a major change to the present network. so there many be some downtime.

other news I am slowly adding more resource to the resource section and I am still looking for Experts for the forum so if you interested in helping others out join the forum let me know you expert area and I will promote you to expert on the system.

Stoned ideas is still looking for new members  don't be put off by the name the idea behind the site is to make friends and have a good laugh.

Final new design for  The Hitchinson Family site is live I have used some of the code scripts that I have talked about on here so why not check it out and see them in action

MP3 and Backup

So in an earlier blog I talked about including mp3 to be selected and played by the user on a web site, I suggested a couple of systems to do this, well now I have opted for a third option its called the webpod but the whole of the Search This Site should be interesting to most web developers, if you want to see what webpod looks like then visit our family web site and have a look at our music page.

Now on to backups ok for people like me I uses an industrial strength backup system to tape. so I Rarely look at backup systems aimed at the home users, it was only the other day when I was visiting my father in law that I took another look into this area. here the basic story, father in law purchased his first home PC when he retired. been a users for quite sometime in the office so can do the basics but has never had to install software or back up anything. its a big learning curve going from a total end users with support on tap to a PC owner, so over the last few months we have been slowly teaching him new stuff. now he purchased his PC from Dell and although I am not a lover of Dell in the corp Environment I think the PC's they make are fine for home uses. First problem came about a month ago when he kept getting out of disk space errors what is a scary thing after just a few months of a new PC so we set up a remote connect and I had a look, I discovered that Dell had create a 10GB partition and had by default configured Vista (yuk yuk yuk) back to backup all pictures all video and just about everything else and its dog to this 10GB partition, the second problem is Vista backup doesn't do incremental backups or overwrite old backups(that I can find) so 10GB went very fast.  So I cleaned out the old backups but within a month the error message was back. So I had a look to see if you could be more selective about what you backup, Simple answer not really, you can say only backup my pictures and Doc but you can't say Ignore this folder as I have the contents on DVD so it was time to go looking for something else and I found this Cobian Backup I have to say I was Impressed no end, not only can you do incremental backups and also select how many full backups you save but you can ask it to backup to a zip file saving more space but still easy to access even if you don't have the backup software installed scheduling is easy, good interface generally a very good all round produce and its open source too. So if your stuck with Vista dump Microsoft so called improved backup and move over to Cobian Backup, 10 out of 10 to the developer   

del.icio.us Tags: Backup, MP3, Web Design, Vista, Microsoft

Firefox Extensions must haves

Ok I said I would tell you about my must have Firefox extensions, normally my first must have would be the Google tool bar but that's pretty much comes as standard, so i leave it as read that you have that one if not get it! So Onward.  The first extension I always install when I put Firefox on a new PC is simply called Web Developers, Its a great toolbar with tools for CSS Forms Images Cookies also some hand tool to resize your browser so you can test your site in different resolutions. a great tool and my number one must have.

The second must have also relates to web design work IWEBtool, This tool is more aimed at promoting your web site rather than the design, there are tools to help with the design but most are aimed at the age old game of increasing you Google page Ranking.

Ok My third selection is the Del.icio.us Bookmarks mainly as i use Del.icio.us as my online book marking tool for general bookmarks along with my own site for technical Resources.

My next tool is called Clipmarks sometimes you only want to save one part of a page or maybe a picture for future reference, this is what clipmarks excels at, you select the section that you want to save with the clipmarks tool and hey presto as if by magic its saved for you future reference. dead handy for blogging or just for while your doing research. 

Now we come to Firebug, what's a great tool for diagnosing problems with pages both HTML and other including asp and JavaScript.

so there we have it my top five

More to come

del.icio.us Tags: bookmarks, Bug Finding, Extentions, CEO, Development, Web Design

Music forum and photos

So I started the task of rebuilding my personal web sites a couple of weeks ago. The issue wasn't so much the content more the design so that always makes life easier. It content that's always the harder bit, finding things that fit together and grouping them in the right way, This site (Techietone) was the first to be rebuilt. I have added some new features, like personal rating on the resources and a contact form but the main difference other than moving over to using blogger is the Forum, I have used a third party bit of software for this because although I could write it myself why reinvent something that's already out there and working really well. the application is pretty easy to configure and I will be producing a How to for MySql soon. The system is ASP based and therefore you need a host that will allow ASP. Anyway if you want to check it out for yourself here is the site http://forum.snitz.com/. they have a great forum themselves for asking question but if you have a question feel free to ask me.

My next two challenges that I had was for the family web site, Nikki (my dear wife) is in charge of content on this one so I mainly worry about the technical side of stuff and trying to meet Nikki's requirements what makes it fun at times, there was two main reasons for changing the Photo Gallery, the first from a technical point of view was that the present one is Perl based and although I love Perl I love standards more  and the web server that the site is running on is primary a ASP server so I wanted to remove all the Perl applications so I could remove Perl. Again I could have written it myself using ASP and MySql but firstly I couldn't be arsed to design it and then write it, secondly I wanted to avoid a database system because we have a lot of photo's and the thought of importing all the URL's or actual pictures sent a shiver down my spine. the second reason behind replacing it is that Nikki hated the way it organized the pictures on a very simple by album name method. So it had to go we are placing it with ASP Online Photo Album, The basics are very easy to set up, some of the graphics used was a little crap but easy to replace, This is generally a good system and easy to create a great looking web site, be aware thou even thou most of it is classic ASP there is one module that uses ASP.NET so you need a host that supports ASP.net (these days if the support ASP they generally support ASP.net).

what bring me on to my last challenge what's far from sorted but I thought I would let you know what I have found so far, Nikki would like an MP3 Player on our web site, she got the idea from Facebook and well as we have a complete section on music it seems like a good idea. The first system I looked at was amazing and I might still implement it for personal uses in a secured environment. its called One Web MP3 Server its still in beta but wow this is a fully functioning MP3 server that allows you to listen to your music from anywhere you have a web connection and a browser. you can create play lists and search you music collection. but great as it was it was so over the top for what we wanted and would have been hard to integrate into the rest of the site. So I kept looking and that's when I found these people codefuse they have 9 different styled Flash Mp3 players that are very simple to use and work using a simple XML file to list the mp3's. this is the system I am working on implementing at the moment, I let you know how it goes. so here are all those links again

http://forum.snitz.com/ for the Forum

ASP Online Photo Album for the photo Album

One Web MP3 Server  for the Mp3 Server

codefuse for the mp3 player

Hopefully you find this stuff handy

del.icio.us Tags: Mp3, Music, Forums, Photo, Gallary, web Design, Code, freeware, Open Source