The Agency Dream

The agency I have now is not the agency I wished for!

What do I mean by that? I had a dream of being the ‘best’ agency around, with work that everyone would envy, designs that would make people say wow to, an agency that people who are passionate about the web would aspire to design like and want to work for, basically an awesome agency. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got great staff, I’ve got a great office environment and we work with some great clients but we’ve bent too many of my/our morals on the way.

My agency would be amazing, if it wasn’t for clients.
We would produce stuff of dreams, with no boundaries, no ‘make my logo bigger’, no compromise and no IE6 but we would also be out of business. At the end of the day we have to pay wages and bills and the only money we get are from clients, so although they’ve ruin my dream they also make my dream a possibility.

Don’t get me wrong we have tried to draw a line, we have tried to explain to clients that a bigger logo isn’t the way forward, we tried to explain that it’s not wasted white space, its part of the design and brings balance to the page and increases usability, we’ve tried really hard to explain that it’s not what you want that matters it what your visitors want to see but in the end it’s up to the client. The only analogy I can think of is trying to explain to a child that sweets aren’t good for them, no matter what you say, no matter how many white papers or proofs you bring to them they are still going to eat sweets.

I have come to a few conclusion:
1. That to produce something amazing we have to produce it for ourselves for no other reason that we simply can; without the annoyance of clients, money or a brief. The only issue with this great idea is time and money.

2. We need to produce a product that we can love, like a web app with features and designs we decide upon, with users that want to use our software without the ability to interfere.

3. Sometimes we need to stand up for our principals and tell clients that we are unwilling to make the changes they want, despite the cost or emotional turmoil that may bring.

So what are am I going to do about it?
We are going to dedicate 1/5 to 1 day a week to a internal project of our choosing, but until we make our millions from our internal project we will still be saying “yes, if you really want..but you really shouldn’t because…” to clients.

The Best WordPress Social Sharing Plugin

I’ve never found a social sharing plugin for wordpress that I liked. With my old site I resorted to adding the social sharing icons (Digg and Reddit) manually to the html and php but since then a few more social shares have popped up: Facebook like, Facebook share, Twitter share, Google Buzz etc.

Most of the wordpress plugs have a rollover popup of some sort with hundreds of tiny icons for every social network on the web, recently however I have come across “Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons“.

Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons in my opinion has the import networks Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Reddit but also has the all important Facebook “Like” button and the new Twitter button. The plugin also gives you a choice of small or large icons which look lovely.

Download Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons

iPad vs Kindle Review

I been trying to decide whether to buy an iPad or kindle for a while now. I thought I would write up a quick explanation of why I ended up buying an ipad for anyone else out there trying to decide between the two.

Kindle

Basically I really like the new look of the kindle, it’s small, has a massive battery life and can hold 3500 books; furthermore it has some web browsing features and it can handle PDFs. I also heard it has some social media integration like Twitter but not sure whether that is actually true. I’m not a big reader and the reading I do is mostly on my iPhone just before I go to bed or when i’m on my pc going through my RSS reader catching up on all the blogs I follow. I did however think that because the kindle was so small and light and cheap I would be much more likely to carry it around and also the books I would buy would also sync with my iPhone kindle app. The final feature I was really keen on was the clipping and highlighting as I do this with normal books however I never go over them again and I though the kindle might solve this by having a library of clips I couldnsearch though.

iPad

I really like the idea of the iPad, ten hours battery, internet, lots of apps and just looks cool. The only things that were stopping me were the price and the fact it was Apples 1st attempt at a tablet and I remember the 1st iPhone being a bit rubbish. Moreover, no tethering, closed OS, no camera and did I mention it’s really expensive but it does have lots of apps.

Why I’ve ended up buying an iPad

It came down to a couple of things, I use my Google RSS reader a lot and the kindle doesn’t have apps that support this and I use Twitter a lot and again I wasn’t sure about the kindle’s integration with this. Also I came to the conclusion that I could use the iPad kindle app to buy all my books and if I ever decide to get a kindle they would just sync across anyway so no wasted money.

So now that I’ve got one

It’s great, it’s basically replaced my home computer and laptop for surfing the web and I have also found myself using my iPhone apps a lot less at home. I ended up getting the cheapest one as I didn’t want to be tied into a data plan and also I thought most my stuff would be on the cloud so I wouldn’t need a huge amount of storage. Before I took the plunge two friends highly recommend it for me and I’m glad they persuaded me because I love it, I’m just waiting for my case to turn up to I can bring it everywhere I go.

Things that are rubbish on the iPad

I have made a list of things which bug me with the iPad, some of them will get fixed when iOS 4 gets released for the iPad (currently on version 3), some will only bug me and some Steve Jobs will never fix.

• No multi-tasking
• Apps and websites that are built for the iPhone only look and work like shit for example Facebook app, Skype app, Google Reader website, google tasks etc.
• Speakers are in mono, could really do with a couple of speakers when watching video.
  Within the App store you cannot filter via free, paid and popular like when you view the app store from the iPhone.
• When the screen is dark, like when watching films, the reflection off the screen is really bad.
• No tabbed browsing for safari, this one really bugs me. They,ve basically used the same browser on the iPhone and it’s not enough. Tabs are really needed especially when surfing s few websites.
• No podcast subscribe you still have to sync with iTunes. I don’t mind this so much on my iPhone but syncing my iPad every couple of days is really annoying.
• Safari and apps seems to crash a lot but hopefully iOS 4 will fix this.
• Finally no flash, again don’t mind it too much on my iPhone but because my iPad is now my primary surfing tool I really notice the absence of flash.

Conclusion

I bought an iPad and haven’t looked back but I’m not using the kindle app as much as I hoped I would mainly because the apps and internet is too much of a distraction. Even with the looming samsung galaxy and blackberry play tablets on the horizon I still think the iPad is the best tablet around, at least until the iPad 2 is released. And what of the kindle? well I’m probably going to end up buying on of those as well, it’s only £110 after all.

Oh yeah, I also wrote this whole review on my iPad with the WordPress app.

Setting up a Cron with Plesk using a PHP File

I have a Server with a Plesk control panel and I wanted to automate a PHP script using a cron (or crontab). Within Plesk it’s called a scheduled task. The problem is its not that user-friendly (but like everything it’s very easy once you know how) so below is how to do it.

In the above screenshot you will see that the fields look pretty straight forward however there are a few tricks you need to know. To get a cron to run every minute, hour, day or month you need to use a asterisk (*).

Once you’ve set the frequency of the cron you need to call a command. For PHP files you need to do the following:

• Give the path to the php folder, (usually just php)
• Type in “-q” (this suppresses the HTTP header output)
• Finally, give the path to you php file

The example above runs the following script every day at 00:07 in the morning.

php -q httpdocs/crons/stats.php

If you just put the php file into the command it will throw an error.

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu

So I been getting rather annoyed with CentOs recently, mainly due to the lack of PHP support above 5.1.6, especially with all the cool features of 5.3. Also I always seem to have massive trouble installing anything like Mcypt or Memcache.

So I thought I’d give Ubuntu a go and I’m now a convert! Everything went smoothly, not one issue or problem. The support forums are brilliant and almost all questions have already been answered. I dont know whether I’ve just got lucky (I guess only time will tell) but Ubuntu is now my first port of call when setting up a new server.

Below is a line by line tutorial on how I got setup with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. I don’t go into too much details on how to edit the files using nano or vi but you can have a look on my previous posts or online, otherwise you can sftp in using root and change the files that way, (my preferred method).

Install Lamp on Ubuntu

sudo tasksel install lamp-server
You will need to enter a root mysql password for mysql

Change Apache Default Web Location on Ubuntu

If you need to change the default root location from /var/www to something else you can do so in the following file location. This is useful for using frameworks such as Zend Framework.

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Create file and add Fully Qualified Domain Name to Apache config (auto adds all in conf.d)

Create a new file call fqdn in:

/etc/apache2/conf.d/

In the top of the file write the following where mydomain.com is the domain name pointing to this server.

servername mydomain.com

Enable mod_rewrite on Ubuntu

a2enmod rewrite

Edit “AllowOverride None” for default site (usually the first 2 found on line 4 and line 10). Change to the following

AllowOverride All

Found in:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Disable Directory Listing on Ubuntu

Inside: /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
Add "-" before the word Indexes

Options -Indexes

Restart Apache on Ubuntu

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Install Memcached on Ubuntu

apt-get install memcached
apt-get install php5-memcache

Install Mcrypt on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

Install APC on Ubuntu

apt-get install php-apc
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

When you get erros you need to type

apt-get install re2c
apt-get install gawk

Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Other Useful Info on Ubuntu

PHP.ini Location in Ubuntu

/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini