Time for Reflection

Sun, 20 December, 2009 – 2:55 pm

This will probably be the last post of the year. I know there's two weeks left still but there's so much going on in my life that I doubt I'll get a chance after today!

It's been a mad rollercoaster of a year from setting up as a limited company, getting engaged, losing a good friend, moving to a much better house, the birth of my nephew, getting married, making new friends, and now preparing for Christmas in our new home. So many highs but one major low.

I've also been a bit lost as to how to proceed with this site. It's gone through quite a few ideas and changes of subject content, from a personal blog with tech posts, to a business and tech blog, back to personal and tech with a bit of business and money making thrown in. My posting has slowed down a lot, at first due to writing twice a week for Blogging Tips, but I took a leave of writing for there over 6 months ago.

I feel like I've exhausted the subject of WordPress from the technical point of view, but maybe not from real world example point of view. A lot of what I write on WordPress and PHP could easily be found on hundreds of other blogs and sites. Plus I've not been keeping up with other blogs, my feedreader wonders who I am if I ever go there!

So over Christmas I need to work out what to do. I'm not going to drop the site but I need to get some focus back, possibly get my new design implemented (it's on paper, that's about it!) and kick start blogging again. I think it'll start to cover a broader range of topics, and as my photo blog just gets no attention from me at all, I'll probably bring my photo posts back here too.

Got lots to work out for the new year! There's a few things I can't really go into just now but January and the rest of 2010 is looking good :) Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and have a happy new year :)

Posted in Personal | 10 Comments »

Married!

Sun, 15 November, 2009 – 5:19 pm

The day came and went, 31st October and now David and I are married. We spent a week in the Dominican Republic too. Now it's time to get over the jetlag, partially back to work and partially getting a lot of admin sorted including getting my name changed everywhere!

Normal service should resume soon :)

Posted in Personal | 12 Comments »

Busy, busy, busy

Fri, 21 August, 2009 – 6:41 pm

Whenever I think things are slowing down for me, suddenly life gets busier again! At least it's not quite as stressful as this time last year.

From a personal point of view I've been window shopping online and working out everything I need for my wedding which is now in 10 weeks time! It's quite fun, especially as I enjoy shopping!, and we're both really looking forward to the day when it finally arrives. It'll be great to see all of our family and friends, and the food sounds fantastic :)

Workwise we've been quite busy. I've been working a lot on a calendar availability system using jQuery and PHP to control it, update dynamically and refresh to keep the calendar updated between a number of users. It's a bit of a challenge and a lot of reading to find out how to do things and how to do them the most efficiently, however it's great fun and different from the normal websites we work on.

I've managed to get a migration script in place for my Page Menu Editor plugin for WordPress. About 6 weeks ago I discovered that the developer on the All in one SEO pack plugin had integrated my code into his plugin at the request of a number of users, which rendered mine a bit obsolete when both are running. However, there was no migration script and he'd used different option names to me, so nothing was copied over. Having both plugins on a number of sites myself, it's a pain to sit and copy it all over manually. So I've now set up a simple migration to allow users to do it themselves if they wish, so if you do use both plugins then an upgrade should be coming through soon with the new migration system.

Finally, our new venture Blog Themes Club is going well. We've added a new theme and I've been adding a number of additional page templates to all our themes to hopefully give our users more than just a basic theme. We're looking to add another new theme next month too and have plenty of ideas for themes to keep us going for a while.

It's all going well :)

Posted in Business, Personal, WordPress | 5 Comments »

PayPal Donations and Fees

Sat, 25 July, 2009 – 12:53 am

Recently I wrote about losing a friend of ours. Leaving behind such a young family and naturally having concerns for the initial financial issues that his family would potentially face, we had a collection on a forum for them. I arranged this using my personal PayPal account, and posted up a donation link for donations to be made.

Now I have two PayPal accounts (don't worry, it's allowed!). I have a business PayPal account which accepts credit/debit card payments, and all income received is charged a fee unless it comes from a payee who's paid to waive the fee (usually from somewhere like Text Link Ads that do bulk payments). I also have a personal PayPal account to accept donations off my site towards the use/upkeep of plugins, help given to people etc. and also it means that I can easily test PayPal scripts such as an IPN, on client sites. I use my personal account to make a payment to my business account. It avoids the potential of never getting a refund from the client (yes this has happened before!). In fact it's what PayPal advises.
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Posted in Business | 12 Comments »

Moving House, PayPal Donations and other stories…

Tue, 14 July, 2009 – 10:14 pm

It's been about a month, I know. It's been a long year already. I really miss blogging and everything keeps getting in the way, work mainly, but more recently my personal life has become quite busy, and not for the better.

This is very much a personal post.
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Posted in Personal | 8 Comments »

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