scrumpyjack

I met three ace guys yesterday: Sean Leigh , Jeremy Harding and Alan Mann. They are all techy/web entrepreneurs and are making big bucks out of big ideas. They know some crazy people in the domaining field. It turns out that there a lot of wealthy people doing domaining. I found out yesterday that there are some people out there that own thousands of domains with no websites attached to them! Craziness! They obviously have a lot of money. The reason I met these great guys though is because they found me and this brings me to a little tip: Get your name out there! It turns out they found me through a service I signed up for and hardly use, Elance. The data from Elance was probably shared on a network of other services, which they stumbled across. My profile on this service is sketchy at best. But it was enough of a lead for them to do more digging. Because I'm an active participant on a number of blogs, forums, Twitter etc. they managed to fill in the gaps pretty quick. So...

It's not often I have to worry too much about the minutia of database administration... well, I try not to. But this question on StackOverflow got me intrigued, so I put on my trilby. labratmatt was having a bit of a problem with inserting data into a MySQL table with field defined as DECIMAL(3,2). Can you guess what his problem was? That's right.... 9.99! How did you guess? This has got to be one of the most popular MySQL-related Google searches. The initial problem is easy to solve... correct the presumptuous field definition. However, the underlying problem is really why his data was being truncated, even inserted incorrectly. You may notice the same if you run MySQL (v5.0+) from a default setup on other field types: VARCHAR for example, where you set a maximum field length. When you INSERT data that is too long it simply gets truncated. Not hugely worrying you may think, especially in development and testing phases. True. But this wasn't enough for me, so I went on a ...

Silverback by ClearLeft is a wonderful usability testing application that makes it dead simple to record and manage your test sessions. If like me though you can't afford to shell out $50 right now, here's a way to do some bargain basement usability recording. All you will need is an Intel Macbook/Macbook Pro running Mac OS 10.6. This comes with Quicktime X, which now has screen, audio and movie recording built — so it can record what's happening on the screen, video from a webcam and audio through your built-in microphone. Ok so it's not quite as polished as Silverback, but it works. Unfortunately, because you can't start both the movie recording and the screen capturing at the same time, they will be out of sync for a few seconds. If you have some video editing software that allows you to match them up and overlay (iMovie doesn't do this yet), a quick bit of editing will go a long way when you need to review those test sessions! The way I do it is: Start Mov...

Hey folks! Nice to have you visit. I've moved just a short distance. Please join me to keep up with my latest antics! I'm going to keep this site up for posterity though :) In our office, we have a small custom, headless 32-bit PC running Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It's ideally suited as our testing platform web server, file server, SVN server... well you get the picture. I've been trying to set up a VPN through a Linksys-Cisco router we purchased (WRVS4400N), but have hit one snag after another (thanks to Cisco's non-support of anything other than Windows). Then it hit me: use Dropbox! A few free Dropbox accounts is all we will need for now between us and it creates instant versioning and backups of all of our critical files - something we weren't doing properly up until now - plus allowing us to interact with the file system locally rather than over the network. A super idea! Problem 1: Dropbox is not officially supported for command-line-only...

I've just been on the phone with a potential client. From our brief chat it's clear that they have experienced problems with "web" people before now. This has affected their view of our services at FlipStorm, even though they know nothing about us. So, how do you overcome that kind of prejudice? You could turn to the salesman's pitch... tell them all the guff they either already know or don't want to know and spin it to make it sound like you're the best. If they buy in, they've got to spend some more money and they might just get lucky. If they are smart though (and your client is always smart , no matter how stupid they are!), they won't go for any of that. So you need to toss them a bone. Prove to them that you are prepared to go that extra mile. Give them something for nothing... a favour! Some of you may see this as flaring up the spec work debate , but before I start a urinating competition, I'd like to mention that there are absolutely n...

By G-Spot I mean the first page of search engine results in Google . A couple of months ago I sent out this email to a friend of mine who asked me to analyse his website ( Damian Brown Photography ). It's quite a specific analysis of his site, but it can be used as a basic framework for most sites out there: First off, page titles (as i call it, the <title> tag): This is pretty key. Most search engines use this as the heading for the search result listing, the link that you click to go to the desired site after performing a search. This is one of the primary places a search engine will look for keywords. However, it shouldn't be too long as it will get clipped/truncated and it should make some sort of sense. I know this may seem obvious, but there should only be one <title></title> tag on the page and it should always be inside the <head></head> section of the page. META tags: Right, to cut through all of the confusion, the only ones you really rea...

The web developer and design community is growing super large and because of that it has been an endless source of advice and inspiration to me. As a large thank you gesture I want to offer my professional advice and support in any areas I can. It may not be worth much in some cases (hence why it's going to be free), but hopefully it will help. I also want to use it to challenge myself with some new stuff that I'm just not doing enough of! All designers and developers face challenges. I have faced plenty. I haven't blogged about all of them yet (nor do I intend to!), but some of the things I've accomplished and overcome may be useful to others. I think that sharing that information is a must to the continuing evolution of software development. I also believe that it should be a free service. So please feel free to leave comments or send me messages somehow (Twitter, email etc.)  asking about anything you would like help with. I will take on almost any challenge related ...