studiowhiz ramblings

Wow, it seems like an age since I was last helping out in the back end for Swhiz. What a thrill and a privilege it is to be able to contribute to my all time favourite place on the net once again! Thanks K.

This section I’m starting is to take interested persons on a journey with me as I discover the joys and challenges of becoming a concept artist. For those who remember from years gone by you may recall I used to produce web sites for clients, so this isn’t too huge a leap into the unknown. I hope… Read the rest of this entry »

I am getting fedup with Google & their poor service

 Has anyone else noticed that Google are loosing their shine? I have to admit I do love Google and the services they offer. I use them on a daily basis and I find myself relying on them. In fact I have recently recommended a charity & a couple of businesses switch to using Google Apps.

However in the last few days I’ve loaded up my Gmail account to be presented with an incorrectly loading page. The image on the right here is a pic from my mail box. As you can see it’s not looking right. Yet I can log into my other accounts no worries. I can switch from Flock to Safari and login to this account and it looks fine. Read the rest of this entry »

Right, it’s about time. I had been using a free theme for Studiowhiz for a while now - and while it was a lovely theme it was high time I did something myself.

Now I’m not totally done with this one yet, and I’ve not tested at ALL in IE (put any bugs in the comments) I do like the concept of this design. I hope to refine it over time and add little touches to it, but for now, it’s done.

Have a look, have a play - pass your comments below

Something is brewing, you just know it is. It’s almost 11pm, the latest I’ve been up for a long time.

I’m doing CSS, HTML and would you believe I’m actually sculpting WordPress to get it to do what I want for a change.

So yes, something is brewing, I think you might like it, I hope you do. I will admit I am drawing heavily from other successful … oh wait, I’m giving to much away. You are just going to have to wait.

I have a word of warning, I’m not going to name names, but I know who you are.

I learned very early on in life that what you say can come back to you. When they do their effects are often amplified. This is very true when you are in business. If you have a client facing role, if you go to a job interview, if you are sitting with friends around a coffee in a mall you words have a far wider reach than you think.

Read on to see 5 rules to live by Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there all you web nutters … I’m thinking of a little side project. And I need your input. If studiowhiz was to offer hosting to you would you consider using it? I’m not just talking any old hosting, I’m talking about hosting that will allow you the ability to run PHP beside ASP, Perl beside Ruby on Rails, MySQL beside MSSQL, pop, imap and all that usual stuff.

We could give you the flexibility you need to build the web apps you always dreamed of. Our hosting would scale as you do, with a small monthly fee & pay as you go add ons, hosting with us could be the advantage you need. You’d have access to 24hr, 7day support, your site would be hosted on some of the most robust systems on the net today.

Would you be interested? I’m considering this as one way of helping grow Studiowhiz. As this site continues to grow and I have more ideas we need community support to do that. By offering a service we all need & use we can get fantastic hosting and any profit will be funneled directly into the growth of Studiowhiz from a blog to a resource.

I would need 10 people/websites to consider driving this forward (that would see you paying around US$13 a month). Oh and yes this would potentially be a ‘cloud computing’ solution (don’t ya love buzz words). Register your interest by either a comment or drop me an email webmaster [at] studiowhiz (you figure the rest out).

Edit:
I now have 2 or 3 other parties interested so need maybe 7 more to register interest

The image you portray can help you win, or loose customers.

Recently everything and anything to do with property has caught my attention. Why because I know that in years past a great number of people have made wise choices around property that have netted them great wealth. On a more personal note I’m facing a potential 3% increase in my mortgage rate this year - 3% I can’t afford. So I’m looking at options.

I left work today and jumped in my truck (flickr pics) to drive home. As I pulled out of the side road I park on, I noticed a vehicle with some form of advertising at the top of the windscreen. I noticed because it was backward - I guess so you could read it in your rear vision mirror should this vehicle be behind you. So I drive on a little more (traffic = bad) and realise the advertising was a URL.

I forget the url (it was way long), I remember it was orange and I remember 2 words out of it. Passionate and Property. Now let me paint you a picture. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest post by: Paul Sanderson
Hi all. Mr K is letting me ride his coat tails and allowing me to guest post over here at this wonderful place.

A little about me:

I’m a Pisces, 26, love long walks along the beach… oh wrong site… (Edit: Bl**dy oath, what sort site am I running?)
The long and short of it is that I am on a journey to become a dot Com Mogul. Yes that could be a bit pretentious but that’s the challenge. The plan is to use the techniques and advice that other “successful” blog owners are always talking about. Readers of page92 will be able to learn what works and doesn’t directly from my experiences.

One of the main factors that makes me think I am going to be successful is that I have a clearly defined set of goals. Mr K has talked about goals in this post here, but today I wish to let you know the way I went about setting goals.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been pondering recently about a large (maybe) section of the market that Apple & iTunes haven’t tapped. See here in New Zealand you can’t buy an iPhone (well not legitimately anyway), but see I don’t need one (I want one!!) as I have a perfectly good (terrible, useless, horrible - did the designer EVER try to make a phone call on this thing?) iMate JasJam.

My JasJam is 3G (the iPhone is not), my JasJam has WiFi, and my JasJam has external storage in the form of SD Cards (iPhone does not). This makes the JasJam a perfect all in one device for playing all the wonderful music I have on my iTunes & iPod. I also like to go to Starbucks & I have an iTunes account … but I don’t have iTunes Wireless Store access.

So why is there no iTunes for my Windows Mobile? Why can’t I plug my iMate into my MacBook Pro and sync my iTunes music & podcasts? Heck I might even consider paying for it (bwa ha ha ha.. like fun!).

To you my readers I ask: what Mac (OSX 10.5) software is there that can sync my audio with my iMate & what Windows Mobile software is there to play it?

As you know from my earlier post I’m rusty when it comes to coding. We’ll I’m working on a small project in my weekends (which I’ll unveil in the coming weeks) and while it’s more a proof of concept than anything, I’m using it as an excuse to brush up on my PHP skills - not that I program any more in my day job (yeah!)

So I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve found - that are probably old news to you.

Remove duplicates from an array: a really, really simple thing to do.
Lets say I have an array $myArray = (’Red’, ‘Green’, ‘Red’, ‘Blue’, ‘Red’, ‘Yellow’) and I didn’t want Red in there 3 times. PHP has a nice little function called array_unique().

$myArray = ('Red', 'Green', 'Red', 'Blue', 'Red', 'Yellow');

$clean_array =  array_unique($myArray);

$clean_array now looks like (’Red’, ‘Green’, ‘Blue’, ‘Yellow’)

Insert multiple rows with one insert:
I always thought you couldn’t add multiple rows to a table with an insert. I thought each insert had to be a single row. Well this is not so as I found out today. Lets say you are adding 10 items to a ‘tag’ table (id, tag) you can do it like this:

INSERT INTO 'tag' (tag) VALUES
    ('apple'), ('windows'),
    ('css'), ('seo'), ('html'),
    ('design'), ('xhtml'), ('lcd'),
    ('usb'), ('crt');

Of course you can dynamically build the values and pop in many rows at once. I saw a post on some blog (I’ve misplaced the link since getting this to work) that mentioned adding many megabytes of data this way - I can’t say I’d recommend that as a particularly efficient way - but for adding maybe 50 tags it’s jolly fast.

On a side note, anyone know of anyway to get mysql to return the id’s for the rows it just added. If you are adding one row at a time of course you can use ‘mysql_insert_id()’ to return the id (only if you are using auto_increment) of the previous insert. Sadly this doesn’t seem to work with multirow inserts.