And all free today...

...said the kiddy catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

But not all free stuff has a nasty catch. How about these, which I find myself recommending again and again.

OpenOffice.org - includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, and database. If you have used Microsoft Office, you will feel at home, and if you haven't, you never need to!

ippimail.com - yes, another web based email account, but this one raises money for a charity of your choice. This HAS to be better than Hotmail & Googlemail.

Firefox - some people still think you have to use Internet Explorer - wrong!

If only certain retailers gave you these as standard...

Keeping it Simple II

Time for a few more shameless plugs for websites I have worked on recently.

Firths Solid Surfaces - Corian surfaces for kitchens and anywhere else.

Apartments in La Tercia, Spain - for people looking for a Spanish golf holiday

Physis - Social & Market Research, and Consulting.

Once again, simple designs, quick to load, does the job.

Sir Henry rediscovered

From the mid-70s to mid-80s, many hours were spent listening to Vivian Stanshall's sessions on the John Peel show, telling the tales of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. Several phrases from there have stayed with me ever since ("If I had all the money I've spent on drink...I'd spend it on drink!")

Some parts of the saga were re-worked for a CD, but I assumed that the remainder were gathering dust in a BBC archive, never to be heard again. So thank goodness for home taping.

The Perfumed Garden has three pages devoted to the Stanshall sessions, with .zip files of the recordings.

Now I can die happy.

Shopping for beginners

I have been asked to work on improving an existing web shop, which was set up using Actinic Express. This is one I had not come across before, but it seems to give you an online shop pretty quickly and easily. The problem is, the options for changing the look are pretty limited - a handful of templates and a fairly confusing panel where you can change some colours.

Previously I had used Zen Cart, many more options, and as a result, much more complicated to set up.

The owners of the shop gave me a simple question - should they stick with Actinic Express (£20 a month, plus a bit of my time to tidy it up), or get me to re-build the shop in ZenCart (free, but a lot more of my time). After seeing how far they had got with Actinic, with no help from outsiders, I advised them to stick with it. It may not be the most elegant of packages, but it does the job. 4bumpsandbabies.co.uk is still work in progress, but is looking better already.

You too, part III

Another gem has turned up on Sellaband - Luckyhorse. A duo who sound uncannily like early David Bowie, and some wonderful songs. Well worth a listen.

I should also mention Bim, the sort of floaty vocals & electronica act which I would normally ignore, but they just leapt out at me.

Menawhile over on SliceThePie, things still seem surrounded by mystery. Scouting continues (and continues to pay for my investments in Sellaband), but the showcase voting and finance raising part of the exercise is just not transparent enough.

Keeping it simple

Some of my earlier posts on web design hinted at my Keep It Simple way of working, but here are a few examples of sites I have worked on recently -

Northstar Services - cleaners, just wanted soemthing simple to publicise their cleaning services.

Tek2 Fly fishing wanted a site which was 90% static, with an events page which they could edit.

Northern Scientific sell and service vacuum pumps.

Mark Azopardi wanted a simple, clean site to show his artwork.

Nothing flashy. Nothing expensive. Just happy customers.

Picture This

Another useful weapon has been added to my website armoury - Gallery2.

I was asked by a photographer if I could set up a site for him, which he could update, as easily as possible. I had already stumbled upon Gallery2, and decided to give it a go.

The webhost I use included it as an option, part of the Fantastico Deluxe package, which got around all the usual problems of how/where to install 3rd party add-ons. To cut a long story short, it was a doddle to use, and the working website was live within 24 hours.

Definitely recommended.

Too long, continued...

As I was saying, leave them wanting more. This week I have found one of the best debut albums I have heard for, ooh, quite a while.

Vandaveer is an acoustic project by Mark Heidinger, previously heard in The Apparitions, a power pop band from Kentucky. The album, Grace & Speed, is a collection of ten songs, mostly one voice, one guitar, and each one close to perfect to these ears.

Total album length? About 33 minutes. Can't wait for the next half hour to be released.

Hark! The sound of Ramones spinning...

Last Sunday I saw one of the strangest Sunday paper CD giveaways yet.

A while back the Mail gave away Tubular Bells, much to Mike Oldfield's dismay (although apparently it gave a nice boost to sales of his other masterpieces).

This time, it was the Star, a paper which I normally avoid. In fact I normally avoid Sunday papers altogether - either total garbage or too much to read in a day. Anyway, those nice people at the Star were giving away a Ramones CD, "featuring all of their greatest hits". And yes, I fell for it.

What you actually got was seven tracks taken from "We're Outta Here", a recording of the very last Ramones gig (Aug 6th 1996, The Palace, Hollywood). Not their finest hour. Sheena Is a Punk Rocker is half sung half mumbled, or maybe half forgotten. And on Rock N Roll High School, the "rock rock rock rock" line sounds like a duck in distress. You also got a fine spelling mistake - the first track is apparently "Blitzkrieg Pop". And there's "Teenage Labotomy" too.

But the fun starts when the seventh track is over. Ten seconds of silence and then what can only be described as background music for a corporate safety video. According to the sleeve, these "bonus tracks", eight of them, are performed by Stewart Dugdale, and have absolutely nothing to do with the Ramones. A quick Google of Mr Dugdale show that he writes and records copyright-free music. But why do the Star pad out their CDs with it?

Answers on a postcard please. In the meantime, I will add it to the small pile of free newspaper DVDs we seem to have acquired (thanks kids), and go back to listening to "It's Alive", which possibly was their finest hour

In case you have just switched on

A new feature seems to have crept into virtually every documentary/reality show I watch on commercial channels. Not only do we get an ad break, but when the programme returns, we get a summary of everything that happened in the previous section, as if we have either had a sudden attack of amnesia, or just switched on.

Also, just before the ad break, we usually get a preview of what's coming up after the break.

So all in all, there isn't actually a great deal of content, but the best bits get seen two or three times.

Very guilty of this was "Dumped", the otherwise OK saga of a group of people trying to live on a land-fill site. I taped three hour-long episodes, and managed to watch all three in well under two hours, by missing out the adverts and the bits which assumed my brain had gone out with my own rubbish.