I’m a Mac user, and whilst I wouldn’t describe myself as an ‘Apple Fanboy’ who worships the ground they walk upon I have to admit they are pretty damn good!

I used to use Windows systems, right from version 3.0 through 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, the awful Millennium Edition, the brilliant 2000, XP and then Vista. Around the time I was using Adobe products with Vista I started to get frustrated with Windows. I found it rather unstable, and resented the fact that it needed regular reboots to keep it ticking over. Usually a reformat was called for  every six months, and I found myself spending more and more time trying to keep the operating system running rather than actually getting work done.

I’d been watching the development of Apple’s OSX quite closely, and ultimately decided to bite the bullet and buy a Mac, but before I spent the two grand needed to get the machine I wanted I thought I would give Linux a quick look. So I did – I gave it a quick look, didn’t take to it, and bought a Mac. Shortly after my purchase I wrote a brief comparison of the operating systems (over a year ago now) on this blog, you can read the article by clicking here.

It’s a decision I have never regretted. The Mac is on all the time, never needs a reboot, has only crashed once in two years (and it was a Microsoft product that caused it!) and has just worked. Perfect! Having said all this, it’s an expensive machine. It has an 8 core chip with 10Gb of RAM, four hard disks and a fast video card, so I would expect it to perform well. However, when my five year old PC laptop started to struggle with it’s Windows Vista installation requirements (an issue with the age of the hardware rather than the operating system) I figured it was time to perhaps give Linux another look before I splashed out on another MacBook.

My PC Laptop is really a spare computer. It’s the one I take to meetings when I need internet access, and all I really need from it is an office suite, web browser and email client. The stumbling block with Linux two years earlier was that I required the Adobe Creative Suite for my work, and this isn’t available unless your on Windows or a Mac. With this computer that wasn’t important as it’s not my main work machine.

I took a look online to see what was around and one of the most popular versions of Linux available was Ubuntu. You can download Ubuntu free, and then burn a DVD disk image. From this DVD you can either install Ubuntu to your hard drive, or you can try it out direct from the disk. I decided to format the drive and install Ubuntu direct.

Installation was dead easy, and within half an hour or so I was ready to go. All of the software I needed was already set up – this included an installation of the excellent Open Office, social networking tools, the Firefox web browser and Evolution email client. In addition to this there are numerous imaging applications available which allow you to organise and browse your photographs.

If this software isn’t enough then installing more is far, far easier than I remember in previous Linux versions. Under the ‘Application’ menu there is a link to the ‘Ubuntu Software Centre’, and from here there is a range of over 1,000 software titles covering just about everything you can think of. Installing a title is as easy as clicking ‘install’ – the system takes care of the rest.

But the real surprise to me was how everything just worked as soon as the installation was complete. There was no searching for printer drivers, no problems with network cards, nothing like that – it all just worked! The Linux kernel already contains all of your hardware drivers, and as soon as it detects a piece of hardware it loads the driver up automatically and activates it. You could take your Ubuntu laptop to an office anywhere, connect it to a printer and 9 times out of 10 it will work with it straight away, automatically.

Linux is far less resource hungry than Windows, so my old laptop now runs as fast on Linux as a brand new laptop does on Windows. Start up time is halved, shut down time is around 80% faster, and there’s a much snappier feel to it.

Overall I’m very happy with it. It’s a very well specified system, incredibly stable (a large percentage of the world’s web servers run on Linux) and very cheap, in fact everything I’ve spoken about so far is absolutely free! It’s not quite as polished or pretty as Windows 7, but if all you want is an operating system that works on older, slower hardware then it’s hard to beat.

Would it be enough to move me away from a Mac? In a word, no. The reason for this can be summed up in three words, and that’s ‘Adobe Creative Suite’. I know that there are other applications you can use instead, but in my opinion Adobe make the best software in it’s field by a considerable margin, and it’s so ingrained in the way I work that I don’t think I could consider anything else. A modern Mac with plenty of RAM and the astoundingly good OSX operating system is still the number one choice for me, although I hear that Windows 7 has done a pretty good job of catching up.

Where Linux really shines though is with computers that have older hardware, like my old laptop. It’s breathed new life into it, it’s given it a reprieve from eBay, and it’s turned it from an infuriatingly slow Windows based PC to a quick and snappy machine with a range of software that has most users covered.

Has Linux finally come of age? I think it has! For so long it’s been ‘almost there’, but today it’s an extremely accomplished operating system and I’ll certainly be keeping it on my laptop for the foreseeable future.

We’ve been running this blog for a few months now, and one of the reasons we decided to launch it was to see first hand what effects it would have on our search engine rankings.

We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?

The trick is to write about things that you think potential customers will search for, hopefully meaning that they will see your post in their Google search results and potentially consider using you for their project. Here’s a list of our top ten search engine hits so far, in no particular order – and all from posts within this blog. We’ve included the ranking in Google out of the total number of returned results.

Bear with me on this one, and read right through to the last result, which we think is quite staggering!

• “Vive la Tour”
  Position 7 out of 4,630,000

• “Dragging the shutter”
  Position 11 out of 388,000

• “Nikon 85mm f1.8″
  Position 10 out of 577,000

• “Building up contacts”
  Position 4 out of 273,000,000

• “Should I sell online?”
  Position 6 out of 128,000,000

• “Free high res desktop wallpaper”
  Position 9 out of 597,000

• “Reasons for being standards compliant”
  Position 6 out of 9,330,000

• “Photographer portfolio online”
  Position 9 out of 10,400,000

• “The myth of the fold”
  Position 25 out of 175,000

And finally, our personal favourite:

• “Is size really that important?”
  Position 1 out of 108,000,000!

So, naturally at the end of this our top tip is to start writing a blog and link from your blog to your main website! We’d recommend having the blog on the same url as your website, for example our blog address is www.elmnet.co.uk/blog, rather than www.elmnetblog.co.uk.

The reason for this is that although having external links to your site is a good thing, the value of each of these links subsequently decreases if they are all from the same url. If you have ten links from your blog to your main site then every link counted after the first link is worth considerably less in Googles view.

It therefore makes sense to write good, search engine friendly copy, and then to host this on your main website domain and let other sites link to you because your content is interesting. This means that you now have many more inbound links from different sites all pointing to your domain, and Google can’t get enough of that!

We thought we would try a little experiment! We’ll write a new blog post based on the most interesting idea suggested to us, and in one month’s time we’ll see how it does when a Google search on the subject is performed.

You can suggest a topic by leaving a comment, dropping us an email, or  via twitter.

If you’re upgrading from the previous Apple operating system then it just costs you £25, so it’s got to be worth a gamble! There’s been a lot in the press recently about it, so what’s it really like?

I always tell myself that I won’t be an early adopter of technology. I should wait until a new software package or operating system has been out for a couple of months and let all the other impatient idiots discover all the bugs. Of course after a couple of days I just can’t wait any longer and order the new product, and the new Apple operating system (OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard) has been no exception.

Apple like to name their operating systems after big cats. We’ve had Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and now Snow Leopard. The similarity in name of the new operating system to the previous incarnation is no co-incidence. The new Snow Leopard operating system boasts very few new features, and once installed looks incredibly similar to Leopard, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The bulk of the changes are all ‘under the hood’. It seems that Apple have made a decision – that rather than add new features and applications to appeal to the mass market they would rather simply improve the way it works and maximise it’s efficiency when used on modern hardware.

The biggest change has been to the main kernel. This is the central part of the main operating system, and it’s been changed considerably to work better with the new multicore processors available today. There are pleny of web articles out there which go into great detail about this so I’m not going to go there, but I will give a few comments of my experience in real life with the new system. At the end of the day this is what is important.

Installation was a breeze and required no input from me once it had started. It took around 40 minutes, and when the new system restarted just about everything worked straight away. No problems with the Adobe Creative Suite application, and of course all the Apple programs were fine. It was the most pain free upgrade I’ve ever done.

There are a few subtle interface improvements but nothing major, but the clincher for me has to be the improvement in performance. The Macs we’re running here are no slouches. We’ve got quad core Mac Pro machines with fast Intel chips and around 10GB of RAM, so they were fast to start with. Snow Leopard really does take this to the next level though, and I’ve found that there is a noticeable increase in speed. This is especially evident in the Apple applications like Time Machine and Aperture.

I estimate that Time Machine runs around 30% faster, and Aperture (my photo editing package of choice) runs like a rocket. From a standing start it opens a vault file of 15,000 images in around eight seconds, which is around two thirds the time taken under the previous system. Safari is so quick that you don’t even realise it’s done what you asked, and the new Mail application zooms along nicely too.

I haven’t noticed much difference in the Adobe Creative Suite, but I believe that when CS5 comes out it will be written to take advantage of the new operating system so we’ll hopefully see real benefits then.

But we’re just talking seconds here and seconds there aren’t we? This is true, but if you consider that Apple will charge you a couple of hundred quid to upgrade a processor by .3GHz and you can get a similar increase in performance with this £25 upgrade then it’s got to be a good thing.

Overall the OSX operating system is maturing very nicely, and is without question in my opinion the best on the market. It’s fast, reliable, stable, in fact it just works, which is all that most users want from their machines in the first place.

Databases are not very glamourous. They are the domain of techno geeks and nerds who spend more time writing queries and testing them than doing anything else. I like them!

In it’s raw form, a database is just a collection of tables, almost like a spreadsheet really, but for a database to be really useful there needs to be a relationship between these tables. All elmnet customers who have a content management system have a relational database in the background running the show. In brief, whenever they update their content they are in effect updating a database, and the changes that they make are instantly reflected in their website.

A database table may contain fields such as ‘title’, ‘section’, ‘content’ and ‘date’. These fields may contain entries such as ‘Welcome to my site’, ’1′, ‘My site content goes in here’ and ’29th July 2009′. The clever bit is that the entry under ‘section’ relates to another table in the database, so although the value of ’1′ means very little by itself, when the database looks into the table called ‘sections’ and finds that the section with the ID number of ’1′ is called ‘About Me’ it all starts to come together. And because this section is referenced by a number we can change the name of the section if we like. We could rename it to ‘Who We Are’ for example, but as it still has the ID number of ’1′ the database integrity remains intact.

The purpose of this post though is to consider the more traditional database, and it’s potential to be held online rather than in a database application such as Microsoft Access. We’ve recently converted an MS Access database with over 18,500 entries into an online version for a customer of ours. The database contains information on previous and current visitors to events, and all the things that could be carried out in Access such as searches, filtering, exporting, updating, inserting and deleting can all be actioned using the online version. It’s been converted from an .mdb file to a mySQL database and it’s all queried using a custom coded, very user friendly web based management system, rather than the far more complex MS Access procedures.

Any set of results can be exported in a format that Word can use for mailing list labels, and as the system is stored online and backed up automatically it’s safer. There is also no problem with multiple users accessing the system at once from any location in the world, and it’s easily extendible – an email marketing system has been added on which talks directly to the email address field of the table that contains the customers personal details. It’s all password protected, and all access is logged.

So, when you think of the internet it’s worth remembering that it’s basically one big network used for sharing information. It doesn’t have to be a trendy website, it can be a complex database application made very simple.

It can streamline your operation and present you with information in a far more effective manner than you may have thought.

Content Management Systems – the perfect option for a business?

On paper at least, probably! A Content Management System (or CMS) is in it’s most simplistic terms a web based system that allows an authorised user to log in and make changes to their own website without needing to pay a web designer to do so.

We like them for two reasons. The first being that we think it’s important that a business is empowered with control over their main marketing tool so they can react appropriately as business activity demands. The second is that from a business point of view we find that we are more productive if our energies are spent on business activities other than entering content to websites, something which can be easily achieved by our customers with a little training, saving them money in the long run.

At elmnet we don’t use a third party content management system. Each one is written specifically for the customer we are working with. We find that each customer has their own individual requirements in a CMS, and these vary considerably. We’ve had customers who have needed a full sales database system with automatic emailing of delivery notes and order tracking, right through to those who need one click multiple image uploads with automatic resize and thumbnail generation. No two are the same and we think that commercially available CMS systems, good as they are, are never really a substitute for a custom coded job.

Simplicity is always the key. We’ve actually tested our CMS systems on a variety of age ranges, from an eight year old to right up to the ‘Silver Surfer’. Our guinea pigs managed to create sections, add pages and upload images, and to be honest they did a pretty good job of the whole thing! It’s all very ‘point and click’ – if you want to add a new page you click the link titled ‘Add a New Page’. If you want to upload a gallery image you click the link titled ‘Upload a Gallery Image’. Get the idea? It’s all pretty intuitive stuff – I mean if an eight year old can do it surely you can?

So, often the question isn’t ‘how difficult is it?’, it’s more ‘how much time do I have?’. As web designers we have to always bear in mind that most of our customers don’t have the luxury of sitting at a desk in front of a computer all day working on websites. It’s tough to get the right balance, but the first thing to consider isn’t necessarily what you want your content management system to do, more how much time you have to update it. We’ve had customers come to us before asking for the full works, but in reality they simply can’t find the time in their business lives to give the attention they need to their website on a week to week basis.

It’s always a balance between what you want to say, and how much time you have to tell people about it. If you’re pushed for time we can build you a low maintenance site that you’ll be able to keep up to date with the minimum of effort. If you run an office with the staff available to update a site as often as you like then of course we can build a system that will give you this facility.

And if you’re the busiest person on the planet then of course we can maintain your site for you – but wouldn’t you rather be in control?

Today I discovered the importance of having an up to date backup. I actually managed to delete a mySQL database which held all of the content of this website.

Rather that than delete a mySQL database that held all the content of a customers website, but I was very upset for a few seconds – until I realised that sitting on my desktop was a full backup of the database taken that very morning. Within a minute it was all restored back to how it was. If I didn’t have the backup I would probably still be trying to remember what all the pages consisted of and entering all the information back in manually.

So, that’s what this post is all about. Backing up! It’s said that there are two types of computer user – those who backup regularly and those who haven’t lost anything yet. The day that hard drive fails and you lose those irreplaceable baby photographs is the day that backups all of a sudden become important.

Apple’s OSX operating system has an amazing backup system built in called Time Machine. You simply buy a big external hard disk, tell Time Machine that you want to use it for backup and that’s it! OSX then takes an hourly backup until the disk is full. It then overwrites the oldest backup so you always have a good number of recent backups to choose from. You can go back and find versions of a file anywhere from how it was an hour ago to how it was last month. And it works – it really is amazing!

Working on the web makes things a little easier as the files are then on the Mac, on the external hard disk via the Time Machine backup, and also on the web server down on Canary Wharf. This is another rapidy growing service – that of ‘cloud computing’. Backups are all carried out online, your files are all synced with a server so all your precious files are held safely off your own premises. This is perfect for home users, but at Elmnet we have huge high resolution files that would take ages to upload – even on the fastest of broadband connections.

Whichever way you decide to do it, if you’re not backing up now then you really should think seriously about starting to do so very soon. The way to look at it is to consider what you would do if your computer was destroyed right now. Where would that leave you?

At Elmnet, we will shortly be introducing the facility for customers to login to their account via the web and take a full backup of their entire site and any associated databases. It’s such an important thing we think that customers data should be safe – and they should have the facility to look after it themselves.

Back in 2005 Macromedia (creators of Dreamweaver, Flash, Freehand and more) were bought by Adobe (makers of Photoshop and Illustrator to name but two) in a deal worth around $3.4 billion.

Adobe and Macromedia were the two big players in the design industry, and I remember being a little uncomfortable knowing that there was now only one real choice. Competition is a good thing. We embrace the fact that there are other graphic designers around, it helps you stay on your toes knowing that you have to be good to get by. Now there was just Adobe.

In September 2006 Adobe bought a small Romanian development company called Interakt. Interakt were scripting Jedi’s – they wrote the most amazing extensions for Dreamweaver (called the Kollection) which helped speed up dynamic web applications. The first thing Adobe did on purchasing the company was to discontinue a few of these extensions, leaving us to search for alternative solutions to our developments. They renamed it “Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox” and sold it under the Adobe banner.

Last month Adobe announced that they would be discontinuing the Developer Toolbox extension, which now leaves a lot of developers potentially having to change their entire workflow in the longer term. I know that a good PHP programmer can write a lot of this code themselves, but the toolbox was a great time saver. So Adobe go from buying a company in 2006 to closing it down, taking the staff out and employing them in Adobe posts, and then discontinuing their products all within three years. I know it’s been seen many times before, and will be seen again, but I don’t have to like it.

When I set up my broadband account I carefully researched the options and decided to go with either Nildram or Pipex. They were both owned by the same company so I went for Pipex as they were a little cheaper. I remember thinking “These guys will be fine, anything but Tiscali”. Next thing I hear Tiscali decide to buy Pipex. “Oh well, at least it’s not ‘Talk Talk’” was my first thought, as they had been reviewed recently and came out with shocking results.

In Spring 2009 Talk Talk purchased Pipex from a struggling Tiscali. Bloody typical!!

And the point is? Well, I guess I’m just having a rant. I don’t mind change, in fact I embrace it – but only when it’s for the good of all concerned.

A few years ago the idea of running an office without Microsoft Windows was an unlikely scenario.

Since Windows 3.1 came out, and subsequently the 95, 98, 98SE, Me, NT, 2000, XP and now Vista variants it’s pretty much been at the core of most computer systems. But could you run your computing life without it? What are the alternatives?

At Elmnet we run Apple Macintosh computers. We’ve used PC’s before, and they were OK, but we needed more processing power and the only machine really up to the job was a Mac Pro. The newer Intel Mac Pro range allow the user to install and use just about any operating system, for us this is very handy for checking websites in different browsers on different platforms. Before we launch a site it is checked in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari on Vista, XP, Mac OSX and Ubuntu Linux. In doing this we’ve become quite used to different operating systems, and we reckon that a user can quite easily get by without having to turn to Microsoft.

XP is old now and is showing it’s age, but it still works and as long as people are unimpressed with Vista will continue to feature. Personally I quite like Vista, but then our computers had plenty of RAM in them – vital for Vista to perform even reasonably. The problem is that Vista needs at least 3GB of RAM to function properly, and could benefit from much more, but the standard 32 Bit operating system can only handle 3.5GB max. For us this is a non starter – our work means that we need at least 8GB, but a standard office instalation can probably do fine with Vista on 3GB.

Linux is both the new kid on the block and the old timer! It’s been around for forty years, but it’s new to lots of people as it has become increasingly reported on in the computing press. It is more complex to set up and administer than Windows, and there are not as many applications available for it, but it’s far more stable, just as productive (most web servers are based on Linux) and some of them are even free. If you want to try it out download a Live CD of Ubuntu – you can run it direct from the disk without changing your computer configuration and see for yourself.

The jewel in the crown for me has to be Apple’s beautiful OSX though. It’s come a long way since it’s introduction in 2002, and is quick, stable, full of features and doesn’t need that much RAM to work well. One of the reasons behind it’s stability is Apples insistence that OSX only runs on Apple computers. This means that they can control the whole hardware and software package leading to a much more tightly integrated and efficient overall package.

The verdict?

OSX wins for sure, but at a price. Macs are not cheap, but they age well. If you’re an advanced user then you’ll love Linux, as there is plenty of opportunity to tinker under the hood! If you’re not an expert though, and you don’t have the budget for a Mac then I would still go for Windows over Linux for now as it’s easier to maintain and there is more out there for it. Linux will have it’s day, but that day isn’t here just yet!

Do you have a compact camera with a 10 Megapixel sensor? Whilst not wishing to rain on your parade, in my opinion this is pointless. Ken Rockwell sums it up quite nicely here:

“The megapixel myth was started by camera makers and swallowed hook, line and sinker. Camera makers use the number of megapixels a camera has to hoodwink you into thinking it has something to do with camera quality. They use it because even a tiny linear resolution increase results in a huge total pixel increase, since the total pixel count varies as the total area of the image, which varies as the square of the linear resolution. In other words, an almost invisible 40% increase in the number of pixels in any one direction results in a doubling of the total number of pixels in the image. Therefore camera makers can always brag about how much better this week’s camera is, with even negligible improvements.

One needs at least a doubling of linear resolution or film size to make an obvious improvement. This is the same as quadrupling the megapixels. A simple doubling of megapixels, even if all else remained the same, is very subtle. The factors that matter, like color and sharpening algorithms, are far more significant.”

So when you go out looking for that new digital camera stop for a second and have a think. Think about the quality of glass on the front of it. Think about the size of that sensor rather than the number of megapixels upon it. There is no point in having 10 Megapixels on a sensor the size of a pin head, you will see far superior results on a camera with half that number on a sensor twice the size.