As there is only 2 weeks left before the end of semester 2 and the start of the exam period in my final year at UWE i’ve been thinking about what I’m going to be doing post UWE.

At the moment i’m thinking it’ll be something to do with the web but as what i’m not absolutely certain. As a result i’ve decided to stop trying to do affiliate marketing projects (which for the last 7 years keep ending up down the rubbish bin) and concentrate on building a website which will (attempt) to show off my coding skills instead.

I’ve been coding with PHP and MySQL now for a while (with a brief stint in ASP while at college) so i’m going to try and develop a product feed / api tool, really to see if I can do it.

The tool will read in product feeds and reprocess the feeds to a particular standard chosen by the user. It will also feature a (kind of) api solution to save users from downloading full feeds from merchants.

I realise their is already solutions which have this, similar or more functionality than this but this was one of my ideas for my final year project which I decided against and I want to see if I can actually do it and have something which confirms to myself what I can actually do.

As it’s a code based project I think it has more chance of being completed as it’s normally when I get to content that I start getting bored of projects and move on.

Good Luck to me

Has anyone seen this? I was having a few problems with my FTP service today (I think it was only temporary, working again now ), anyway as part of my attempting to solve the problem I investigated the firefox FTP client, FireFTP - something which I heard of only a couple of days ago (although I imagine it may have been around for a while).

It’s basically a fully functional FTP client that sits right inside of Firefox, better than internet explorers ftp client (from version 6) which requires me to have two windows open at the same time (something which always annoys me). Yes I know their are other FTP clients around but their either too expensive, they take up too much processing time or I find too complicated to use.

The FireFTP firefox FTP browser on the other hand is free, sits right inside of firefox when it’s opened and is fully functional! Even better if you combine it with a selection of the other firefox plugins available you could have a full webpage editing and upload application for free inside of firefox (I may investigate that one day

I know it only launched a couple of weeks ago but I’ve had a few ideas for the website and in order to implement them I’m going to need to shut down access completely.

That is not to say it will be gone forever, it will be back just as soon as I’ve implemented the required changes (it may take some time though knowing my development skills) and tested them and then got some offline business interested - will only re-launch if when this stage is successful .

P.S. Thanks for your comment earlier Phil

I’ve been wondering about this since before I even launched Smoolah but I’m more seriously considering it now after only securing one ‘real’ registration since launching the second version of the website just over 2 weeks ago.

The original reason for having a registration was to help ensure that it was students who were using the website (it’s not a guarantee of course as anyone could enter false information and I would be none the wiser). However with a very low sign up I’m wondering if it’s worth leaving the sign up in place?

The future plans for the website (student discount wise) is to list any existing discounts already offered by business’ - I’m not intending to attempt to negotiate new offline discounts (online is a slightly different matter) as this would require additional systems which I think would make it too similar to other student discount schemes like student beans (it would either require a card or a voucher printing system). Although currently we have no take up - looking to switch to letter and phone calls, emails have been highly unsuccessful lol.

For business’ that don’t have an affiliate programme (mainly because their offline) a listing in the offers directory is free of charge (somehow I don’t think any business would be prepared pay for a listing on such a low traffic website like Smoolah lol).

So, what do you think? Should the registration process be dropped from Smoolah and make the offers directory entirely open? I’m asking because I really have absolutely no idea!!!

OK, this is weird I have just updated wordpress to the latest version (using wordpress automatic upgrade - a must have plugin by the way!). The upgrade went smoothly as normal but the whole dashboard has gone through a colour change and may take me a little while to get used to.

Anyhow this is my first post using first impressions are good

One thing I would like to mention which I think is a very good feature is the ability to modify the permalink easily. It’s actually called a permalink and it’s located underneath the title of the post as oppose to being called a slug and hidden away on the sidebar.

This would be especially helpful for those affiliate programmes where the merchant requires us not to include their brand name in our urls (something which has been recently spoken about by Kieron).

So go… upgrade your wordpress installation (better yet if you haven’t got it yet get the automatic upgrade plugin (only takes a few clicks to upgrade each time and no pesky downloading to your computer either )

I was trying to test out google apps (the gmail side of it) - I kind of wish I hadn’t now.  In order to use the google apps version of gmail you need to change your DNS settings and create MX records pointing to gmails servers.

Now this worked - yay, but in order to do this I had to point the domains name servers records at 123 reg, of course this nobbled off the Smoolah website (replaced it with the 123 reg holding page) leaving me with the task of which A records to create to send users accessing smoolah.co.uk to my clook hosting.  Needless to say I couldn’t get it working

So now users may well see a 123 reg holding page when trying to access Smoolah - wow!  I’ve put the nameservers back to Clook but nothing has changed yet.

In  the meantime I’ve found this great little article which tells me how to amend the host file on my computer so that I can continue to work on the website at the Smoolah domain!

Sorry to post this here but when it starts up I think outlook has been deleting my emails from my server without downloading them into outlook.

I discovered this because last night I checked my email through mail2web and had an email from buy.at (the newsletter) but when I opened outlook this morning to fetch it, it hadn’t downloaded anything - logged into mail2web and the email has mysteriously vanished :S

The reason i’m posting is to ask if anyone has recently sent anything to info@smoolah.co.uk could you please resend - i’m using Clook’s online webmail manager and mail2web from now on.  Would use the gmail api but I can’t get it set up with the way my hosting account is set up.

Cheers

It’s been almost a year now since the very first version of Smoolah launched as a simple student money saving blog, later in the year it went away having attracted a reasonable amount of traffic but not enough to sustain it. However it’s now back in a slightly different form.

It still has one main goal - to help students save money, and this goal will be achieved by employing (eventually) a various range of tactics - starting with the student offers directory, this directory will contain offers (online and off) which will help students save money on the things they buy anyway. The directory however doesn’t only list the offers, where applicable it describes how the offer could be used to save even more money.

As an example some may remember the article about cheap train travel that was on the Smoolah blog the last time round - a couple of the tips in the article have been added onto the page promoting theTrainline.

In addition Smoolah still features a blog to help promote offers that don’t quite fit into the offer directory (ie ones that are very short term or offers which contain multiple codes for different products). As the last time the Smoolah blog will also feature money saving tips discussing how students could save the money online and off.

New features will be added to support the core aim of Smoolah over the next year and beyond…

Smoolah Needs You!
Smoolah is currently actively seeking voucher codes and offers that are relevant to students. If you think you have an offer that students would be interested in please email me details to info@smoolah.co.uk, I can provide test account details so that you can see how the voucher would look on the website if required.

I am looking for exclusive (preferred) / generic / bespoke vouchers and offers - the only requirements are that they are relevant to students and represent good value for money to students.

Take a look: Smoolah.co.uk (I appreciate my design skills are a work in progress)

First things first, sorry if you’ve already heard about OpenID (i’ve read that it’s been around for about a year) - I only found out about it today from the ProBlogger Blog which will probably explain it a it a lot better than i’m about to

If you look to my comments section below you will now see the OpenID logo next to the field asking for a website address. This is to show that this blog is now enabled for OpenID.

What’s Open ID?
My explanation wouldn’t be any good so here’s the wordpress plugin explanation:

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using little more than your blog URL. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites.

Using It On A Blog
Using it is very simple in the context of a blog:

1. Readers of your blog enter their comments as they normally would
2. In addition they also enter their blog address (optional)
3. Your blog checks with their blog (by login) if it’s actually them
4. Your readers blog confirms with your blog that it is them
5. Their comment gets a ‘confirmed’ link back to theirs

So now instead of having multiple accounts with multiple blog owners who require a registration (and then remembering the login details) you can simply login with your own blog login info). 1 login, multiple blogs

Setting Up For WordPress
If your using wordpress (like me) it’s really easy to get setup (took me less than a few minutes). Download the plugin from the wordpress plugin directory here. Unzip and upload to your plugin directory and activate - your done!

For more information on OpenID you can check out the OpenID Foundation website which explains everything.

What do you think of OpenID will it catch on? And will you be using it on your blogs any time soon?

Ok, I admit - not my most original post title but never mind Basically i’ve been having a little bit of trouble coming up with good colour schemes for my websites anyway for a new site i’m developing i’ve decided to make sure the colour scheme is the right one for the design.

As usual my first attempt at design turned out ok but not spectacularly brilliant and i’ve come to the conclusion that colour choice is a major problem.

So today i’ve decided to do something about it and I found this nifty little website called colorschemer.com, i’ve only just found it but my first impressions are good.

It’s basically a colour scheme gallery where users can rate how good they think a suggested colour scheme is, i’ve been looking for a fun colour scheme and I think i’ve found one thats just about right.

I’ll see once i’ve applied it What do you think of colorschemer.com? How do you chose your colour schemes and is it really important?

UPDATE: If you want to use the schemes the best way I found is to take a screengrab and then use the eyedropper tool in photoshop, any better ideas?  The download didn’t work