The Barsley Brief

Although I am a strong Wordpress fan with several wordpress sites, which apart from basic set up require no Web knowledge to use, I wanted to learn the language of the Web, specifically XHTML and CSS.

I have three reasons for doing this :-

• To be able to make basic changes to the Wordpress themes I use
• To be able to make my own websites from scratch
• To enhance my understanding of the internet, websites, etc

I chose the book Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML for this after reading several Amazon reviews and have been very pleased with the book.  Each chapter of the book teaches a different area and the books website provides free materials (HTML and CSS examples) so that you can build the sites and develop them chapter through chapter,

I found this really key, learning HTML is like learning a whole language (something I haven’t been good at!)  so I believe it is important to walk through these test sites seeing them develop chapter by chapter rather than jumping into your own site.

That said, this book isn’t for everyone, as the book states this is not for a “kick-butt web developer looking for a reference book” (though marketing say it is for anyone with a credit card) as it walks you through HTML, XHTML & CSS in a logical order rather than being a reference book you can easily flick back to.

Please leave a comment if you are aware of any books which should be my next step – I feel this book has given me a great knowledge of the “grammer and structure” of HTML & CSS but am now looking for a book which I can flick through to find the attributes etc while setting up a new site.

My next steps -

I’ve got a couple of site ideas that I’m working on, I am hoping to make these into hand coded sites, Wordpress is great for blogs, but for “real” websites, I think either the site should be hand made, or built off of an advanced CMS system, either way HTML, CSS & XHTML would be an asset.

Also I have started reading Head first Web Design to learn more about the process of setting up a site, planning the process, layout colours etc

Leave a comment and let me know your favourite web books or anything you want to say!

Visiting a friend yesterday I discovered Spotify.  Its a little hard to explain what Spotify is in one sentence so I’ll just use the description from their website.

What is Spotify

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.

We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.

So basically Spotify is an internet radio station where you choose the songs.  Either by choosing the genre and year or by artist, album, song.  Make your own playlists and you can listen to your favourite songs again and again.

The Basic Functions

Spotify Search Screen

Above is the Spotify Search screen for the search John Williams as you can see this gives an impressive 1361 tracks.  One good function is to then sort by popularity and just start listening.  Alternatively you could add tracks to your own playlist (I have set up a playlist call favourites.)

Spotify, The Artist Screen

From the search results screen I clicked on the Artist which matched my search and it brings up the above screen, this is amazing!  It lists the top tracks (by Spotify popularity) and every single album the artist has released or been featured on.  There is also a biography, and an artist radio, this is a really interesting feature, if you know the artist you like but want to broaden your musical horizons, Spotify will play on the Artist radio your selected artist and similar artists that you may enjoy.

My only complaint about this screen is it doesn’t have the sort functions that the search results screen has ie if in search results there were a mixture of artists so I select my main artist I now can’t search by popularity.  Of course I could set up a playlist and do this.

Radio

If you don’t know what to listen to just use the radio function when you can select the genre(s) and the decade(s) and let the music play.  My only complaint with Spotify is this function, there are so many Best of’s and re-releases that the music isn’t necessarily from the year you want.

What’s the catch

There isn’t much of a catch, there are three pricing structures.  Free, day pass (currently 99p) or a Monthly subscription (currently £9.99 a month).  I listen to the Free service which has adverts.  Listening for 30 minutes I only heard one 20 second advert, much better than my local FM radio station where I hear adverts more than I hear music.

Song availability

There are occasionally songs or albums which are highlighted in Red to show that they are not available in the United Kingdom (often because the  but often just by clicking on the track you want to listen to you can find it available on a different album.

A Warning

I always think it’s worth having a basic understanding of how a program works, Spotify works through P2P (Peer to Peer) don’t worry not all P2P is illegal dispite what the papers try to make you believe.  But it does mean that once you have downloaded a track to your PC you will be sharing it with other Spotify users (otherwise imagine the massive load on their servers) so if you have limited internet access this is probably not for you.  Also therefore Spotify will be storing songs on your PC (not in a format that you can use them other than on Spotify).  You can manage the amount of disk space it uses in the preferences.  By default this is set to 10% of free space.

Suggestions

I’m sure I will grow to love spotify in the coming days / months / years and it is still a young service which is developing.  My suggestions would be, get the year to be the year of the song not the year the album was released (I don’t want to listen to 60’s music if I select 00’s on the radio function) and secondly and I am hesitant in saying this, perhaps develop a social side, see what your friends are listening to, Starting from nothing it is a bit daunting trying to build up whole playlists, perhaps if I could just copy the best bits from friends lists.

Summary

If you listen to a lot of music at your desk this is brilliant, It gives you a jukebox that you can queue up, listen to in high 160kb/s quality with almost every song ever on it!  I look forward to delevloping my playlists and really getting into it (I’m sure I’ve missed several features out.).  Also it is seemless no buffering ever (yet) I can jump to different points in a track and as I click it starts playing

Find out more about Spotify here at http://www.spotify.com

Try it out and leave a comment letting me know your thoughts

Just one more thing

If your wondering I have spent approximatly an hour writing this post listening to Spotify and have heard one short advert!

Recently I’ve heard of an unusually high number of friends who have had computer issues which lead them to lose data.  This has caused me to question how I back up my data and how to safeguard it.

In the past I have experienced this myself having my main hard drive fail.  I was fortunate at this time that I had a second external hard drive which was real-time synchronising all of my files.  However while that is fine for hardware failures it wouldn’t protect me from Viruses or Natural Disasters (or clumsiness!).  With this in mind I also have an offsite backup on a DVD in a Fire safe.  Even so I don’t think my backups are sufficient.  As I speak  can’t remember the last time I replaced the DVD with a recent backup and my external hard drive has made scraping noises for the last few months but as it works I haven’t got round to replacing it.

So I wanted to re-evaluate my backup options and see what has changed since I last looked

Offsite Backups

I mentioned that  back up to DVD (occasionally) despite DVD’s being so cheap I feel bad about “wasting” money by using them.  A “modern” solution would be to use a USB Key.  Looking today at Play.com I was shocked to find the Sandisk Cruzer 16GB USB flash drive for just £15.49.  16GB is enough for me to back up all my photos and documents.  If I needed more memory I could buy a portable hard drive which have massively decreased in price.

Cons – Remembering to back up regularly

Real-time Back ups

My old Iomega External hard drive came with a real time backup program which allowed you to select folders on your main hard drive which it would copy to the external drive.  This was brilliant as if a file changed it would still save the old file up to 5 versions.  This meant any for large documents I was working on (eg my University dissertation) I had multiple versions of which saved me a few times when I deleted the wrong paragraph and saved!  Iomega Automatic backup is no longer available to buy and although it is a simple good piece of software that does exactly what it says on the tin, I have my eyes open for something better / new.  Any suggestions.  One I have found which looks promising is Live File Backup

Cons – Doesn’t protect you from Viruses or natural disasters, eg Fire or Cups of Tea disasters (CTD’s)

Sky Drives

This is a new area for me which looks very exciting, Skydrives (I just love the term, not sure if they are really called that) involve saving your files in the cloud (Internet).  Several companies offer this and I’m yet to decide which is best.  Obviously you have to factor in that you are trusting your personal data with another company.

• Microsoft Windows Live Sky Drive http://www.skydrive.live.com

• Pros
• 25 GB of storage
• Password protected or shareable with your Windows Live Friends
• Cons
• No easy backup option (that I can find) you have to manually add files.

• Mozy http://mozy.com/home
  

• Pros
• The Worlds most popular (According to Mozy)
• PC software allows you to select files / folders to back up
• After the initial backup, MozyHome only backs up files that have been added or changed, making subsequent backups lightning fast.
• 128 Bit SSL Encryption
• Cons
• $4.95 a month

• Dropbox http://www.getdropbox.com/
  • Similar to Mozy but 2GB free and it doesn’t let you choose folders, you have a “Drop” folder that you keep files you wish to back up in.

Conclusions

My conclusion is that I don’t know the perfect solution and I don’t think there is one.  I think the best approach is a multi pronged one.  I will soon have to splash out on a new external hard drive and will use this a real time document back up.  An offsite backup will be especially useful for items which don’t “date” like my photography collection.  Finally Skydrives I think will be good for backing up documents as well.  I currently use Drop Box which is ok, but as it is a “drop folder” rather than choosing folders to sync I need to remember to update it.  I chose Dropbox because the first 2GB are free and I’m tight!  However there are rumors of Google introducing a G-Drive, this could be the perfect solution in the future as surely it will have at least 5GB of storage.

Back to the title

Back to this post’s title How do you back up your data – I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I’d love you to leave a comment saying, if / how you back up your data and what you recommend.

As a few of you will know I have been “tweeting” on Twitter over the last few weeks (Follow me here).  Several people have asked me what is Twitter or how can I use it so I thought I would write an explanation.

What is ?

Twitter is a Micro-Blogging tool which allows you to send and read user updates – known as Tweets (limited to 140 characters a Tweet).

Following People

To get the most out of Twitter you need to follow people.  Then everytime they Tweet it will appear on your twitter homepage as an RSS feed.  Many people and companies are on Twitter.  Here are a couple that I am currently following and enjoy their updates

Stephen Fry – http://twitter.com/stephenfry - Stephen Fry’s Tweets are always worth reading, he always has insightful and unusual things to say.

Retail Week – http://twitter.com/retailweek – Retail Week – The Trade publication Retail Week uses its Twitter account to Tweet breaking news.  This is often the first place I hear the news as they Tweet it as soon as they get it!

How to read Tweets

You can of course log into the Twitter website to read Tweets.  However the best way to use Twitter (IMHO) is to use a Twitter client of which their are several.  A twitter client will keep checking your twitter account for new updates so they will just pop up on your desktop (or mobile device) also you have more functionality all on one place.  My favourite Twitter Client is Tweetdeck.

A guide to Tweetdeck and Twitter Etiquette.

Tweetdeck can be downloaded here http://www.tweetdeck.com

Above is picture of Tweetdeck.  As you can see it allows you to see several types of Tweets all at once in several columns.

As default it will show

All Tweets – Every Tweet you send, or someone you’re following writes

Replies - When you Tweet you can use the @ symbol to reply – eg @Charlesbarsley means that you have read one of CharlesBarsley’s Tweets and you are replying to him.  A reply will only appear on their Feed, eg if you reply to me it will show on my feed but people who are following either of us will not see it unless they go directly to our Twitter page.  Tweetdeck shows replies as their own feed which helps you to easily follow conversations.

Directs - A direct message is sent with the d symbol at the start of the message eg d Charlesbarsley.  A direct message can only be read by the recipient.

Retweet – If you enjoy someone else’s Tweet and want to share it with your followers you can Retweet it with the RT command eg RT @Charlesbarsley – (or just click the Retweet button in Tweetdeck) – By retweeting you can share the post while allowing your followers to see the original poster incase they want to follow them.

Those are the main twitter commands, you can write your own tweet, reply to someone elses, send a direct tweet just to someone or retweet someone elses tweet.

Other Tweetdeck  / Twitter functions

Shorten URL’s – Often you’ll want to include a URL in your post.  Tweetdeck has a function to automatically shorten it as it will be included in your character limit.

Favourites - If you want to save a post favourite it.  Twitter has its own favourite feed.

Groups – If you follow so many people that it’s hard to follow the messages or you want to group the people you follow you can create groups.  Then you can see a separate feed for each group of the people you follow.

Twitter Search - You can search the whole of Twitter for a word and see an updating feed on Tweetdeck of posts which include that word.  If you’re following a news story or subject this could be a great way to keep up to date.

Summary

So hopefully this post has helped you as an introduction to Twitter, I’m two week’s into Twitter and I am still not sure quite how I want to use it, I am very picky about who I follow as I want to read and enjoy every post but I am not sure what I should Tweet about myself.  At the moment some of my Tweets are quite random, I think I want to tweet more about retail / Computing News, and what I’m doing.  I also want to Tweet less about completely random things which people don’t want to hear about.

Follow Me on Twitter

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe too is the Daily Dilbert.  I enjoyed today’s cartoon so much that I felt I had to put finger to keyboard.  Here it is…

I particularly liked this cartoon as I attended a seminar last year discussing customer reviews for eCommerce sites.  The most known use of customer reviews is Amazon.  I have been in the habit of rating everything I buy on Amazon, it is quick an easy to do by just clicking a star or if you have longer you can write a full review.

But obviously if your the retailer bad reviews could damage your sales, I have seen on sites before reviews warning that the product isn’t as advertised, or that it fell apart or just the user didn’t like it.  Also I have seen reviews which gave me the tipping point I needed to buy – Eg giving a bit more information into the specs or talking about the ease of use etc.

I know several companies encourage their staff to write reviews.  This can be a good idea if it is a flagged that the writer is a staff member.  Often staff who work with the product may be able to provide a greater insight into the product and give more reasons to buy.  However I’m sure companies are also out with their staff writing how great everything is!

Customer reviews are a great benefit to other customers but they can also help retailers too!  A good retailer will analyse their one and two star reviews and look at how they can re engineer their products to be better and meet your customers expectations.

Click here to see todays Dilbert