What I Don’t “Like” About Facebook Marketing

June 2, 2012 | Comment

It seems quite popular at present for companies to ask me to “Like” their page on Facebook. In some cases you are asked to do this in order to receive something, maybe an entry to a competition or perhaps a free download. Sometimes I will purchase an item and when the order confirmation email arrives it will have a line asking me to “like” the company or product. Either way this makes me pretty uneasy.

I have no issue with exchanging my details in return for something but what I don’t want is to have some sort of implied endorsement … Read the rest

Why I’ll Not be Using Google Drive (and it’s got Nothing to do With Terms & Conditions)

April 27, 2012 | Comment

So this week Google finally got round to releasing its cloud storage option, Google Drive. Within hours of them doing so the internet was ablaze with outrage over the terms and conditions and just exactly what they could or could not do with your files once they are uploaded. Many used this as the primary reason for not using the service and instead sticking with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive etc. I have, for me, a much more compelling reason not to use Google Drive – app support.

I have just over 20gb of storage with Dropbox, all of which I have … Read the rest

WordPress “Plugin upgrade Failed” Solution

April 4, 2012 | Comment

One of the (many) things I like about WordPress is its ability to be able to automatically upgrade both the core installation and the plugins. This can also be one of the most frustrating part of WordPress too.

Those that have attempted to update their plugins using the automatic option may well be familiar with the following:

Unpacking the update

Deactivating the plugin

Removing the old version of the plugin

Could not remove the old plugin

Plugin upgrade Failed

Searching the forums reveals lots of frustrated users and very little in the way of solutions. I was one of these … Read the rest

Say Hello to Evernote Hello

December 18, 2011 | Comment

I really like Evernote I really do. It is probably one of only a handful of apps that I use every single day without fail. But I just don’t get their new app Evernote Hello. I think this quote from a ReadWriteWeb article sums it up:

It’s completely awkward for any social encounter where you’re meeting two or more new people at the same time.

I just cannot imagine saying to someone “do you know I am really likely to forget who you are so do you mind if I take your picture?”. That’s going to kill the conversation right … Read the rest

Rapportive

December 6, 2011 | Comment

What I love about Google Chrome the most is that it has a vast number of really great extensions to do almost anything. Not only that there are also competing extensions so you get choice too.

One are where there is plenty of choice is in the personal profile space, in fact Google has it’s own extension for this too. In this context I am talking about the ability to display detailed personal information for a contact alongside an email that you receive from them. There are a number of players in this space including Xobni and Google themselves but … Read the rest

Slideshare Participates in Rip-off Britain

November 8, 2011 | Comment

Slideshare is one of a number of online services that allow you to post and share presentations to a wide audience. We have been using it at work to promote some of our own presentations for a while now. It works well but has a major drawback on the free edition in that it looks ugly and is full of ads. That’s fine as I get something for free and if I want I can upgrade to get rid of the ads. So this is what I decided to do – upgrade our account and get a better looking page.… Read the rest

Evernote Web Clipper now a Rival for Instapaper?

May 24, 2011 | Comment

One of my favourite tools has got to be Evernote, the service that allows you to upload pretty much anything and have it indexed and available to search and view pretty much anywhere.

Evernote have today upgraded their Chrome Extension to extend it to offer “smart clipping”. Previously when you clipped a webpage to Evernote unless you highlighted the bit you wanted stored you simply got the weblink. Now it automagically seeks out the body of the web article and stores that. The only other app that I have seen do this is Instapaper the read-it-later service. While it is … Read the rest

Mac Folder Action Scripts and Evernote

May 15, 2011 | Comment

For reasons that I have yet been able to fathom the functionality levels between the Mac and Windows Evernote clients is subtly different. For example on Windows there is the very useful ability to be able to add a watched folder that when anything gets added to this it automatically gets added to Evernote. This is not an option on the Mac version. However, all is not lost using Applescript and Folder Actions Scripts it is easy to replicate this action.

I say that it is easy but that is only the case if you are au fait with the … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Small Scale Outsourcing

October 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Outsourcing is big business. I should know as I have been using it for over 10 years now to get access to some highly skilled and cost effective development and testing resources. But what happens if you don’t need a resource for a long term project or just want to get access to a skill that you don’t have in-house?

For example the business I work for often needs access to designers to do small scale work for our website. We can’t afford to retain the services of someone locally as we simply don’t have enough business to put their … Read the rest