Archive for the ‘web’ Category

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I sign up to too many websites

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Bad news – my trusty ThinkPad T40 finally gave up the ghost last week and died. Good news – it meant I’ve got a shiny new ThinkPad T60 – the novelty of having a fingerprint scanner to use instead of a password to logon still hasn’t lost it’s appeal.

I’ve been setting it up the way I like it this evening, and one thing that I’ve noticed since losing my saved Firefox passwords is how many different online profiles I’ve got. I’m thinking that perhaps I sign up to too many online gimmicks. 🙂

With that in mind, I thought I’d quickly list the ones I realised I was missing first. You’ve probably heard of most of them, but maybe there’ll be one or two that you haven’t.

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The importance of presentation, part 3

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

I’ve mentioned before about how impressed I was by the difference made by improvements to the style and appearance of our revamped Annual Report last year. This week it was the turn of Solent Youth Action’s website to get the makeover treatment.

Have a look – this is before and this is after. The content is more or less the same, but the appearance has been massively improved, consistent with the style and colour scheme of the Annual Report.

It’s amazing what a difference it makes to how professional we seem. There is a lot more that we want to do with the website to make it more of a tool for the young people that we work with, but in the meantime this is a huge improvement.

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Asking for money online

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

At our last trustees meeting, we decided to give Justgiving a try to raise money for Solent Youth Action. Our page has now gone live:

http://www.justgiving.com/solent/donate

Justgiving provides us with an online fundraising system. It’s a way for people to donate money to us electronically, without us needing to worry about the implications of collecting and processing credit card information. There are fees involved (they’re not a charity themselves, so they naturally need to make money), but we’ve looked into it and think that the fees seem reasonable for what they do.

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What I could see at 5pm

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

BBC Radio 4 program PM asked their listeners today to take a photo of what they could see at 5pm, and send it to them. The feature is called Window On Your World, and the presenter explains it as:

…a picture of what YOU are normally looking at at 5pm. We … want to see … your view of the world as we come on air

It’s a nice idea! Here is the pic I sent in – this is what I normally see at 5pm, still working at IBM Hursley:

photo of my desk

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Getting noticed on the web

Monday, December 4th, 2006

My website is typically a fairly quiet and underused affair. Written while I was at University, it was meant to be an online CV to help me apply for a job. And it served it’s purpose – it got me a few interviews, and on a couple of occasions interviewers would ask questions about stuff that I’d put on my online CV but not had room for on an application form.

I’ve not really got much use for it now, as I’m not looking to leave IBM any time soon. So, it has largely been left to languish. I will update it every now and then with an end date for something – so that I don’t claim to be doing something that I’m not. But I normally can’t be bothered to update it with new stuff, and several projects and side activities have never made it to the site.

I’m explaining this by way of background. I mentioned yesterday about a few emails that I had received about my Windows Mobile wiki note-taking app. I’ve had a few more since, which was surprising as I didn’t think that anyone would have come across my little tool. I’ve got AWStats installed so, out of curiosity, I had a look at my web server statistics to see how many times it had been downloaded, hoping to see perhaps a dozen or so downloads.

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Google Maps mash-ups are easy

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

A colleague from dare2, a youth development charity based in Woking, asked where the nearest IBM location to him was. I didn’t know.

The IBM UK website gives a list of UK locations. But there are two small problems. One – my geography is so bad that I don’t know where Woking actually is. Two – my geography is so bad that I don’t know where each of the IBM locations on the IBM list are. Okay, it’s really one reason, but it’s embarrassing enough that it’s worth mentioning twice 🙂

So, I thought this would be a good enough excuse to try creating my first Google Maps mash-up.

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A lot of us at IBM are blogging

Monday, October 30th, 2006

I had a read of our external site about blogging this evening. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in blogging, and want to see an example of a positive corporate attitude towards it. I especially enjoyed looking through some of the profiles of other IBM bloggers, seeing why they do it, and what they think they get out of it.

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Arranging meetings is easier with Doodle

Saturday, October 14th, 2006

I seem to spend a lot of evenings in meetings. Annoyingly, this also involves spending far too much time trying to work out when is a good time to have meetings. It can be SYA, or Norwood, or Sams, OTL or whatever – but it always involves a bunch of people with different jobs, different commitments, and diaries stored in different ways, trying to find a time when we’re all free.

So, when I read about a neat web-based tool to arrange meetings on 43folders today, I kicked myself for not thinking of this myself.

Doodle is simple, but brilliant. The person scheduling the meeting goes to www.doodle.ch and puts in a description of a meeting, and list of dates/times that they could make. This gives a link which you can email to anyone else you want to invite to the meeting. They then visit the page, and tick the times that suit them. The page aggregates the responses, and gives you a quick visual way to see the best time.

I love it.

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