iphones in business - a trial at Berrys

The company i work (Berrys) for is a "people" business. We don't manufacture or distribute goods, we just sell our time. Specifically, Berrys are property and business consultants, but that encompasses a pretty wide range of services, to individuals, other businesses, and the public sector.

Because of this, we need to engage and communicate with our exisitng and potential clients, using whatever format, tool, or technology possible. We're looking quite hard at twitter and the other social media and networks, and because of this, we've just acquired a bunch of iphones to trial with a few key staff to see how we can make the best use of the various technologies. The plan is to initially simply use mobile email (set up with exchange was a breeze), twitter, and audioboo to kick things off, then moving on to other platforms and technologies.

I'm also very interested to see what use our surveyors can make of the apps and tools based around GPS and mapping. A lot of our work is related to property and land, so to be able to use mapping and surveying tools on an iphone, while on-site, is potentially a great boost to productivity. We're even looking at developing our own property app for the iphone.

My only concern so far is the lack of centralised management of the handset fleet, but if using iphones is good for business, I'll just have to put up with that.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty

Windows cannot connect to the printer 0x00000999 (AKA Please, MS, give me a descriptive error.)

I got a call from one of the offices today about the fact that nobody could print to any of the networked printers. 

Simple problem, i thought - probably the print spooler service has failed, or the print server is down, or something. Logged onto their print server, and it seems fine, it could print test pages and everything. It had shut down over the weekend though, due to a power cut, so i wondered if a service hadn't started correctly. A quick look at the services showed everything to be ok, so i did what every self-respecting sysadmin does when in doubt: a reboot.

It took a while to come back online (it's an old server now), but the same problem was occurring. I wasn't getting much joy with googling the error, but had to persist. Eventually, i found a list of codes that are generally unrelated to the actual problem i was getting, but had this specific error code listed as being a problem with clocks being out of synch. 

Ahah! A quick check on the server clock, and yes, the time and date were wrong - much have been the power cut, and probably a failing CMOS battery, which of course on a server that never usually shuts down, you'd never notice.

Flicked the time and date back to the present, and within a matter of seconds, people are printing away with glee.

Just a note to MS: I'd have saved about 20 minutes work if your error could say something a little more descriptive. Just saying.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty

Libellous web content and trying to remove it. (AKA Thank God for google alerts.)

I have a google alert set up for my name, and I think everyone should do the same - i get a few each week, and they're usually innocuous little caches of tweets or reposts of articles, or about other Tom Geraghty's, however, I got one today that shocked me, a little.

There's a website, hosted in Arizona USA, that purports to be a kind of consumer review / warning web site, where people can post about bad service they've received or when they feel they've been crossed by someone they paid to do something.

So, I was a little surprised to see that someone has reported me on there for taking a deposit and then not doing the work (website design). I've never worked in the US, never worked on the type of project they describe, and never take deposits for web design work anyway. It''s either a blatantly malicious post, by someone who doesn't like me (I can't think who, though. I'm a lovely person to know!), or, and this is more likely - it's extortion. I've sent them an email requesting they take down the content, and requesting the identity and/or IP address of the original poster, but I suspect that I'll hear back that they'll take it down for some "admin fee".

I'll update when and if I hear anything. I'm considering going to the police, but I don't want to waste their time on something so trivial. If i do get asked for money, of course, I'll go straight to the police then.

If anyone has any tips, or advice on how to get it taken down, I'd be very grateful.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty

The Lib Dem manifesto.

 

Posted via web from Tom Geraghty

Relay Writing - collaborative story telling

Picture the scene: it's 2003, and I and my (then to-be) wife are sat in a bar in Nottingham, throwing around ideas about writing stories, novels, screenplays and suchlike. We often find ourselves making up little screenplays and stories, and 99% of the time, nothing comes of them.

That night, however, we came up with an idea. Why not create a website where everyone can write a bit of the story? This being 2003, there wasn't too much in the way of social media and web 2.0, so it was more of a novel idea than it would seem now. We came up with a name: "Relay Writing" and decided to initially have four genres of story for visitors to read and add to - Romance, Thriller, SciFi, and Horror. A few days later, the website was live, though pretty ugly, and a few days after that, a new one was online that looked much nicer!

Over the following few years, we received the odd submission, and accept most of them. Some of the rejected ones were either plainly insane, or simply terribly written. We never rejected any on plot alone, as that seemed to go against the ethic of allowing the world to write the story. It's pretty clear that the romance and thriller stories are by far the most popular, but we're not sure why. It's either that these genres are both easier and more enjoyable to write, or that our initial chapter wasn't good or interesting enough to inspire people to follow it up (or maybe it was too good!...)

In 2006, the website got listed in the Writer's Digest top 100 web sites, which got us quite a bit more traffic and a lot more submissions.

Then after a while, essentially, we forgot about it. 

Up until March 2010. After redeveloping another web site using Word Press, I realised that it'd be a great way to reinvigorate Relay Writing, and improve the functionality of it, making it far easier for people to subscribe to updates, post replies, comments, share the stories, and of course submit new chapters. I'm still trying to work out how to order the chapters in the correct way though...

So there we have it - the new Relay Writing web site. Head over and check it out, let us know what you think, and get writing.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty

Berrys Property and Business - developing a website in wordpress

The Berrys website was last developed in 2006, or maybe early 2007. This was just before the whole web 2.0 thing really kicked off, and we thought we were being pretty modern using CSS instead of nested tables for layout... At the time, it was pretty impressive - fast loading, clean layout, some RSS feeds, a dynamic asp.net news function, and LOADS of content. All that content did ok on google, for a fair while, and we did ok on search engine optimisation. But, as Christian Payne recently pointed out, compared to today's sites, we may as well have pinned a bunch of business cards to the wall and hoped people would read them.

In the early part of 2009, i decided to redevelop our web site, but with zero budget, and skills limited to a bit of html and (very) basic php, I had no idea where to start. I knew i wanted it to be dynamic, but I didn't know how. We also had the issue of our estate agency part of the business - so we had to list our properties online. I didn't know how to set up a site that could handle property listings, other than using dreamweaver to edit a page in the old-school fashion. I didn't think it would be appropriate for our agency administrator to learn html just to upload our properties to the web, so something else had to be found. Various off-the-shelf estate agency packages were available, but either rubbish, expensive, or blatantly US-oriented. I also looked at full-blown CMS packages, but they were either way too cumbersome, or expensive (again), or lacked support. Then I came across WordPress. I'd heard of people using it for business sites before, but was a bit wary of using a blogging platform for our business site. Still, I tried it out on a test install and it seemed to do a pretty good job. 

By now, it was January 2010 (a lot had happened in the mean time, and I'm very busy and important). I needed to get a crack on, so i started working from home for 3 or 4 days a week. I started off by working out how to manage the structure of the site - what categories I'd use, whether I'd use pages or posts for various content, and of course, the estate agency section. I didn't want our agency staff to have to do to much replicated work, so wanted the process of getting a property online to be as automated as possible. While digging around in the dashboard, I realised that Wordpress can accept email blog posts, and that gave me an idea. We use SharePoint to manage our property lists internally, and a number of staff have permissions to add properties to it. I could get SharePoint to execute a workflow when a new property is added, which sends an email to the WordPress site, containing lookups from the property list, such as name, address, location, price, etc! Awesome.

It took a while to set up properly, and there are still a few things I'd like to improve (SharePoint workflows out of the box, can't have more than one lookup in the subject line, or attach images or attachments from the list item). The workflow does a good job though, and sends a few other emails to various people when a new property is uploaded, to make sure someone logs in to check the post and publish it, and line managers are aware it's gone live. The property section is split into commercial, residential, agricultural and developments. Getting a decision on the different categories was somewhat more difficult than you'd expect...

We now have a Berrys people section too, where visitors can find out more about each member of staff - the idea being that our business is solely about people and relationships, and potential clients should feel they can engage with us easily. Each person has their own page, with a bit of history, a photo, and links to other social networks such as twitter and LinkedIn (check mine out - Tom Geraghty).  I'm also encouraging our staff to start some blogs, and we have a news category for the more announcement-style news, rather than the more opinion-based blog articles. 

The design is based on a theme called Arras, with a lot of changes and adjustments. That theme was used so we could have a scrolling front page image listing our various services to clients. It works well as a concept, displaying our services without the need to have a long and boring list. We've also got some handy little social media buttons on the right hand side of the pages, enabling our users to share posts on the main social networks. 

There's actually still a lot of work to do, such as fixing some of the issues resulting from the site being hosted on IIS, and various little formatting tweaks that will undoubtedly take just as long as the design of the site in the first instance. The design has a few changes to be made, I'm looking at plugins to help with redirecting 404 errors from the old site links, still trying to get content from various people in the company, and I'm still looking at ways to speed it up as well. In the mean time, we're hoping that google starts to re-index the site properly, and quickly.

Posted via email from Tom Geraghty