Archive for February, 2007

Weekly Wind down

Posted by: Sarah Date: Feb 26 2007 : Personal Comments: 1 Comment

Yep it's Sunday night again, back to work tomorrow after a nice long relaxing weekend.

This week I was quite impressed with myself. I got quite coordinated with work, delegating where necessary, and felt like I covered quite a bit of ground. Well I did until Wednesday afternoon! We were already planning to go out as it was Dave's Niece's 10th birthday, however at lunchtime he had a call from his sister asking if he was free for the afternoon to go with her to Macclesfield (just south of Manchester) as she was meeting someone from the company she works with to help go over an application form for promotion. After discussions I agreed to go too as I knew the way (just by where my Brother lives!). However despite setting off in reasonably good time, the motorway was just gridlocked. So a bit of cross country driving and it took us over 2 hours to do the 1 hour journey! It was a long day. We had dinner (3 courses!) in the pub restaurant next door, and didn't get back home until gone 9pm, still needing to go see the birthday girl!!

Thursday we hit Costco, the local cash and carry. Unfortunately on the way there my car (the VW Polo) decided to develop a slight rattle when going over bumps. Not good considering we're due to drive to Cardiff in it on Wednesday! So early tomorrow morning it's off to the garage. Luckily it's free parts and labour for the first year under warranty. I'm guessing a nut has just come loose but then again I could be wrong, we'll find out tomorrow. At least the shopping in Costco was good. Having a trade card finally paid off as we walked in and were offered fresh coffee and freshly baked cookies and cakes! Plus a few other tasting sessions (and the people doing the sessions are happy to give you more for a quick chat!). We definitely saved at least 20% – 33% off the street price of everything we bought. Back there on Tuesday to get a deal on wine at just under £3 per bottle (£4.50 odd in Sainsbury's per bottle).

Other than that it's been a quite week. I've happily stayed in all weekend – it's hardly been nice weather. Yesterday I spent working on my own sites, today I've just spent the day reading various sites, searching for some info on Timeshares and a specific rip off company for my parents, and pretty much taking it easy.

Hope the weather clears up. It's been pretty naff all weekend. We'll be in Cardiff from Wednesday to Saturday so evenings out would go nicer without the rain

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Dynamic Currency Conversion

Posted by: Sarah Date: Feb 24 2007 : AIS Comments: 1 Comment

I know a lot of people simply put their prices in US Dollars for products on their site but I decided today, whilst working on a shopping site, that I wanted to be able to display both British Pounds and US Dollars. Of course I don't want to be updating the site every other day especially with the current fluctuating exchange rate! So after a quick search I can across Dynamic Converter which offers a free service (for up to 10,000 requests a month). After setting up your default settings you get some JavaScript which you add into your site and that's pretty much it. At first I was looking around and added in some span tags but discovered that you don't need them! (Yes it's really that simple). The JavaScript seems to read your page and whereever you have a price denoted by a price symbol (eg. £ or $) it will automatically add your conversion afterwards in the format you've specified in your settings.nnSo I've simply set it up so that it shows the prices in British pounds (as it's a UK domain and mainly gets UK visitors), but the conversion is shown in US Dollars in brackets afterward eg.nn

£8.99 ($17.62)

nnThe great thing about this is that it's dynamic, so the converted price will always be reasonably accurate. Also despite the use of JavaScript, if a visitor comes to the site with JavaScript disabled then they will simply just see the British price. It's a rare occurance so I'm not too worried about this.nnYou can offer your visitors the option of a variety of currencies, using links, flag icons or a drop down list.nnThis was only the first dynamic converter I came across in a quick search. If anyone knows of any others I'd love to hear about them.

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Using Feedburner

Posted by: Sarah Date: Feb 24 2007 Comments: 2 Comments

I don't get Feedburner at times. I first set my feeds up to go via feedburner to get better statistics reporting on which of my feeds were being read. The downside with using feeds from your own site is that it can skew your stats, as a feedreader will hit the feed file every half hour / hour / couple of hours etc. and this can show as a visitor or several visitors even though the person hasn't physically come to your site! So I figured that setting up Feedburner would help a little, plus give me more of an idea of how many actually subscribed to my site feeds.

However Feedburner doesn't report how many are subscribed but rather how many people are reading. For example on Thursday my count jumped to 20 on the frontend feed (my blog compilation), yet feedburner now reports it was zero yesterday. As you can see, it's quite confusing figures! Perhaps it only increases when I post as between posts there's nothing to report to the feedreaders. However looking on other people's sites, their feedburner stats seem to continually have a consistent figure, whether they've posted or not. Maybe I just don't look elsewhere often enough!

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Productive Afternoon

Posted by: Sarah Date: Feb 22 2007 : AIS Comments: 10 Comments

For those of you who actually visit the site to read the occassional post I put up (as opposed to the feedreader users!) you may have noticed I've had a productive afternoon fixing up and changing this site slightly. I don't know how it started but I wanted to clean up the way the site looked a little. Then I spotted the validation errors in my HTML Validator firefox extension. I hate having validation errors on my site if I can help it (yes I know there's still one there! it's a javascript and I don't know how to fix it!!). As far as I'm concerned, the more valid and less bloated your code, the better a search engine spider can move around your site.nnI've also upgraded to WordPress 2.1 finally, plus added the excellent Admin Dropdown Menus plugin (which I'm so used to now I add it onto every WP site I use!). Anyone who goes into their WP Admin often should really take this plugin for a test run. I've tidied up my links a little and moved the bulk of them into their own page, just keeping the most read ones on the front end.nnI'm now just after something to put in the blue area of the header. I was thinking a skyline but I can't find anything appropriate. You see, this is why I don't design