Archive for May, 2008

As you’ll all know by now i’m heading to London in a few days time (this coming Tuesday).

EVERYTHING has been booked and done online… flights, boarding cards, hotel, train, attractions, theatre tickets, airport parking

Not only do i get everything cheaper by booking online, but i can also skip the ticket queues in all the attractions and walk straight past the airport check in desks watching people lose it over ridiculous excess baggage charges and hidden check in fees I’ll also watch people get turned away from the airport car park because it’s full and they don’t have it pre-booked , whilst i can drive past them laughing

The internet really saves so much hassle and does away with all the usual crap you usually have to put up going to airports/holidays… queues, queues and more queues.

We then come to getting around.. where is everything? Well i’ve been in London a couple of times now so i’ve a rough idea of where things are, plus i can check out google earth or maps in advance if i’m unsure

If i still get stuck or have to take a detour for some reason, no problem, no stress… this is where my n95′s sat nav comes in I used that last year to get us to a few places…

For the first time ever, i’ll be totally relaxed going away as i know everything is booked and paid for in advance and i don’t have to deal with humans only for eating out. All it takes is a few hours of planning and investigating before you travel and it makes life so much easier

Whilst some people have state exams starting on wednesday, i’ll be in the Tower of London looking at the crown jewels around about the time the exams get handed out

Quite the contrast. After that then, i’ll be off to the IMAX, home to europes largest 3d screen for an hour long 3d film session.

Then i’m off to Madam Tussuad’s wax museum for a while… we’ll probably head down to Buckingham Palace after that and then hang out at Big Ben / London eye for a while at night… and that’s just Wednesday

On Tuesday we’re heading to the West End… won’t have time for much else by the time we find the hotel & check in. Dirty Dancing is on… my favourite film of all time

Thursday, it’ll be get up and head to the airport so really it’s a flying trip… 1 and a half days really. Just as well too as BeerChief should be ready next week and i’ll need to be on hand to make sure everything goes smoothly

I’ve just spent the past couple of hours designing a 404 error page for BeerChief.

404 error pages are a huge weapon to pull out when the chips are down. It shows professionalism and attention to detail if you have a custom 404 page.

The BeerChief page i’ve just designed is clever, very clever and i can say comfortably that if/when BeerChief crashes our 404 page will get a few laughs and also some brownie points with the techies.

It’s just one area the big guns don’t take advantage of… bebo, facebook and myspace all have pretty basic 404 pages. Nimble.ie have none! A blank page! Fubar also have a pretty basic/boring one… hi5 don’t have any…

Anyway, no pics yet… i’ve kept everything on the hush hush up until now and i’m not going to spoil the party at this late stage…. a couple more weeks and it’ll all be revealed

I said today i had a list of stuff to do…

My plans were thrown in to chaos this morning with car trouble… ended up leaving the car in to the garage and i have to go back for it this evening… more time lost!

I really need a brand new Mini Cooper S… as soon as i get together about €40k that’s what i’ll be getting Only another €40k to go

Anyway, by writing a list it always seems to increase my work rate… Here’s 5 new logo’s i’ve created for domain names i already own. Hopefully i can come up with templates for them all now

All created in full vector graphics. All somewhat related to the respective sites overall themes. It took about 3 hours to do all those logos believe it or not… i try to take my time and put some thought in to them.

They’re all decent domain names too… bar stupiddrivers, which is a .net, the rest are all .com’s. Definitely worth something if i can produce quality templates to match and a bit of high quality content. GroundRage & DesktopSnaps i plan on holding on to as i have lots of plans for them… We’ll see how things pan out though, if i need cash they’ll be put up for sale as well as NOTHING comes before BeerChief.

I’d sell myself to keep BeerChief alive and kicking

I don’t think i’ve ever mentioned Google Alerts on this blog before and yet it’s probably one of the most useful tools you can have as a webmaster.

It’s simple… key in your website name, let’s say ‘BeerChief’, give your email, hit ‘create’ and bam…

Anytime the word ‘BeerChief’ is mentioned or picked up by the googlebots, you’ll get an email telling you where it has been mentioned. It means as soon as an article or blog post has been written, you’ll find it straight away. So once i launch BeerChief, i’ll be able to keep track of each and every article, forum or blog post written about BeerChief.

So nothing slips under the radar and i can respond to and act upon criticism or praise etc… let’s say BeerChief’s server is knocked out but i’m not aware of it… no doubt somebody will post a question or a comment somewhere asking if it is offline and i’ll instantly see that and can then act upon it…

So Google Alerts is really cool feature and i high recommend you use it for your own name or blog or sites as not only can it act as an ‘early warning device’, it can also hook you up with fans and loyal readers and ensures every word written about you is seen. I’d say i have about 20+ google alerts at the minute… the danger is of course, you don’t want to pick a popular word/s, otherwise you could be bombarded with emails

But you can also set google alerts to notify you of events once a day or once a week so you can control how many alerts you get… but i like to keep them ‘as they happen’.

So within the next few minutes, i’ll get an email telling me ‘BeerChief’ has been blogged about and it’ll give me a link to this blog post Pretty cool!