Digitalquill

Ok so this is nearly a week late but pancakes!!!!

Currently our kitchen at Hillcrest is almost unworkable. It is fairly narrow, lacks storage space and lacks any flow and any usable work surface space. We have decided that something has to be done about it, however, a simple ‘new kitchen’ will not rectify the problems we have with the kitchen.

While changing the kitchen tap I found a newspaper packing the kitchen unit, after taking this out I found it was printed in 1986, making the kitchen 24 years old! It is not as bad as it sounds, the units have dated well and are in very good condition for 24 year old units so they must have been good quality, however, that confirmed that it was time to start a fresh.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we are having problems with our boiler. These were going to be solved in the kitchen plans, currently the boiler is on the kitchen wall, which does not make any sense when we are struggling for storage space. Although we have not decided that we will have to do the boiler sooner than our kitchen plans allow, we are still taking the decision that it should be moved out of the kitchen to provide the extra space for an additional wall unit.

As I mentioned, simply replacing old units for new units just will not provide us with any significant advantage, so we decided to look at taking a wall out between the kitchen and dining room to open it up into a kitchen diner, and then extending the conservatory ac cross the whole of the back of the house and opening up the wall into the conservatory so that it was all effectively a single room. We had plans drawn up for this and we feel that this really does work well. It will give the kitchen dining room (which we hardly use currently) and conservatory a new lease of life and effectively make them the centre of the home.

In addition we love to entertain and have dinner parties. Currently I am cut off from guests while cooking, in this new scenario guests could be seated in the conservatory or dining area while I was cooking meaning we could all talk and relax in the better living space.

This is all very well in theory, however, in practice there are several problems to overcome. In my experience (although limited in terms of building, I do have quite allot of experience in house renovation and development) I do not this this is a big job. The wall that is to be removed is not load bearing, a couple of walls will need to be built and as such footings put in place and we would like a large opening door system on the conservatory, the roof on the kitchen will be removed and replaced with a sloping roof with sky lights in it. In terms of the building that will be it. In my opinion this is something in the region of 3-4 weeks work, however, a builder has quoted 12-16 weeks and £60k which is simply not practice for us, nor can we afford such a figure, especially bearing in mind that this was simply for the building work, no electrical, plumbing, internal finishing or kitchen units.

Once we add on the extras, and any inevitable slippage or things that we have not considered I would expect that figure to be around the £100k mark. Although this will put a great deal of value onto the property, I doubt that it will put £100k onto it.

We are therefore at rather a standstill on the project, unsure where to go and how to proceed. The only solution I can think of is that I do much of the work myself, or find a builder who does not think that I was born yesterday.

I maybe of course underestimating the scale of the work involved, however, I would have to be drastically underestimating it to get to where the builders think it is.

This is all very frustrating as I wanted to get on with these plans this summer, and as such need to get rolling with the planning department and building reg applications.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to Jury service for two weeks. As there is nothing that one can really do to get out of it I had to go.

On the first day I was unsure of what to expect, and it is safe to say that I did not expect what actually happened.

I will not go into the details of the two weeks for obvious reasons, however, there are a few things that can be and need to be said.

The Judicial system is fully supported by the tax payer, and, as with many public sector organizations wastes a huge amount of money, our money.

The amount of wasted time within the system amazed me each day. Nothing seemed to happen on any trials until 11:30, lunch was taken at 1pm for an hour and then a session of a couple of hours was taken in the afternoon. This all means that the time actually spent doing cases must only be 4 hours a day.

I know what my boss would say to me if I told him I was only going to work 4 hours a day, believe me it would not be polite!

The extent of the wasted time and impact on peoples lives extends further than than just the Jury, witnesses and experts have to turn up, barristers, lawyers and court staff all hang about doing very little. This extent of waste just would not be allowed to happen in the private sector, any private sector business with that amount of waste would simply fail.

It does have to be noted that some of the waste can not be helped. Keeping people waiting due to legal arguments or the need to clarify evidence or matters outside the control of the court such as illness or witnesses being late can not be helped, however, I do believe that there is a huge saving to be had if correct and efficient management was brought into the system to properly manage the day to day activity in court. Those managers must have the authority to say what goes without the miss-guided policy that everything revolves around the judges and what they say.

There is also the matter of defendants changing their plea at the last minute which again causes a huge amount of wasted time any money. I would estimate that in the two weeks I was on Jury service, the percentage of cases that did not actually go to trial would be 75% and of those 25% that did go to trial a further 15% change their plea soon after the jury is sworn in. This means again wasted time for the court, for the witnesses who have had to turn up regardless and for the Jury who have at times sat around all day.

The main area where time and money is wasted is in the lack of forward planning for each day. An example during my two weeks was when we are sat around all day in the jury assembly room, we had been told at 10:30 that a trial was about to start, we were the only 15 jurors left, so we would be called for the jury panel.

As we had been told that the trial was about to start, we were held on tenterhooks, we could not leave, could not start any work (I took my laptop in) all we could do was sit and wait.

We were eventually called down at 3:45pm, the 12 Jury members were chosen an the trial as adjourned.  To be fair on the Judge he did apologize that we had, had a wasted day, but when he told us why, in truth my blood boiled. He held up a list of all the cases that he had sorted out that day, none of which involved a jury. Surly the sensible thing to do would have been to deal with the one with a Jury trial first thing, swear int he Jury and then adjourn the trial and let everyone go for the day. We could then have returned to work rather than sitting around in a room watching the clock tick by.

That way the court would have saved the £30 per head for the second part of the day, witnesses and indeed defendants would not have had to be there and everyone could have got on with their lives for that day.

What can be done about this?

I am not sure, but in my opinion there needs to be a wholesale review of the system. As I mentioned before, experienced managers should be brought into manage the day-t-day activities and planning of the court.

In my opinion defendants should be given the chance to change their plea prior to the trial starting, this should be a final chance, it should be made clear that it is the final opportunity they will get and once the trial starts to is followed through to its conclusion. The ability to plea bargain at that time would be past.

Please do not get me wrong, I believe in the process, it is what this country is built on, but the waste, especially in these hard times when the countries deficit is spiraling out of control simply can not be justified.

In the continued trend of catching up with the period of no blogging, many of you will already know that on August Bank Holiday Cheryl and Myself were married. It was the perfect day, and all the planning (one of the reasons why I stopped blogging) all paid dividends in the end.

We were got married in a wonderful place called Simonstone Hall in Hawes in North Yorkshire. It was the Hotel I took Cheryl to after proposing to her at Aysgarth falls. We could only have dreamt at that time that two short years later we would be getting married there.

The weekend did not get off to the best start as on the Friday morning James and Lynne (Best man and Bridesmaid) had a burglary, and then on the way up to North Yorkshire the top box on my car opened and scattered clothes over the A1, in the rush to get packed I had forgotten to lock it, however, it was good to get rid of anything that was going to go wrong before the wedding rather than on the day!

We had found two very special cottages for the evening before, one for the Girls and one for the Boys. I am sure the Cheryl will agree that we were both given a special evening, bottles of Champagne and some great food, followed by games and an early night (no really, an early night).

The day its self went perfectly, Cheryl’s drive over buttertubs pass in a vintage Rover went without a hitch, and everyone got there safely, the ceremony was all we wished for and the wedding breakfast food was a delight. A great day was had by all.

Eva was of course the star of the show in her little party dress, she was as good as gold and stole everyone’s hearts. 

Here are a few photographs selected from the many that we had taken.

We have sent out individual thank yous to everyone who was there and made our day so fabulous, but I would like to thank and recommend some of our suppliers who did such a great job for us.

Simonstone Hall - If you ever get a chance to visit do so you will not be disappointed

Weddings Alive Wedding Photographs – Ruth Mitchell - See above, just fantastic memories of the day

Periwinkle florist – Fantastic flowers (Tel: 01969 606005,  Market Place, Askrigg, Leyburn, North Yorkshire DL8 3HL)

A Touch of Class Balloons – Hawes - Great addition and complement to the flowers and decorations we made

Ivory Bridal Collection  - stunning dress and a dedicated personal service

Thank you to all for making our special day perfect

I have been buying several domain names in the recent weeks, and in an attempt to become smarter in my domain name purchasing I have been concentrating on the search volume for the keywords or terms contained in that domain name.

After referral by one of the chaps I work with I have been following Acorn Domains forum and I have to say that the time spent has been extremely fruitful in terms of what I have learned.

I have always bought domain names, usually to suit a niche I have identified in my affiliate marketing, however, up to now I have never really put a great deal of thought into the domain names other than finding one that suits and is available.

As such I have bought some terrible domain names, and some not so bad ones, however I am trying to become smarter in the domain purchases, but researching the keywords using Googles adwords. The idea being that if your domain contains keywords which have a high search volume then Google will rank you higher because the search term matches your domain and a high volume of searches means that your slice of the clicks pie will be larger, in theory…

The problem with this is that many of the good co.uk and org.uk domains have been taken already so it was with interest that I followed a thread on Acorn Domains which talked about me.uk domains. I had always thought that the rules regarding the ownership of those domains was that they must only be used for personal websites, however it appears that is not strictly the case.  As long as they are owned by an individual rather than a company.

The discussion also looked at if a me.uk domain would rank in Google, the conclusion was that we probably have not seen any raking highly, however, high search volume with a keyword or phrase can only be a good thing, it may not rank as highly as the co.uk or org.uk versions, but there is still potentially a slice of the pie to be had.

As a little experiment I have bought walkingboots.me.uk and created a quick site using my Amazon import plugin for Wordpress and added some unique content (of which I will add some more when I get a little bit of time). I will now do some link building and monitor is page rank and position in Google, and most essentially how much it earns.

As with all my domains, the only thing I set out to do initially is cover the cost of the registration, the cost of hosting is covered by other projects so as long as it does than then I have not lost out, but I am interested to see how difficult the me.uk will be to market in comparison to the a co.uk or org.uk domain.

I have bought a few others and stuck some sites on them so I have a few that I am look at. I will report back in a few months to tell you how it progresses.

I would also like to emphasize, if you are looking at getting into domaining or even like me are an affiliate marketer who buys a lot of domains for their use and nor re-sale, Acorn Domains is a very useful resource, get yourself signed up.

Over the last 9 months I have been developing two plug-ins for Wordpress plug ins. These plugins have been universally praised and far more successful than I had ever imagined they could have been. This has been one of the reasons why I took a break from blogging to dedicate the extra time required to developing these plugins.

As you will be aware I do affiliate marketing in my ’spare’ time, one of the main issues with affiliate marketing and really the holy grail of affiliate marketing is the ability to rapidly create sites for your to be able to market other peoples products.

Until recently, I have been hand coding sites, and making custom designs for each, this took a great deal of time, time which I did not have, and time which I tended to get bogged down with making my affiliate projects stall before they were really launched.

I decided that there must be a solution so I employed my programming skills into developing a solution for wordpress whcih I could then use as a framework for all my affiliate sites.

The first plugin that I created was the Datafeed import plugin. Initially it was very basic, the ability to have oneaffiliate  datafeed and one template, the plugin then created a post in wordpress for each row in the affiliate datafeed.  Perfect, it allowed me to rapidly create sites in a matter of minutes rather than days.

I could also use other Wordpress plugins such as the All in one SEO plugin and use the Wordpress themes to make the sites suitable for the products which they contained. They were also fully search-able, menus and categories automatically created, functionality given by Wordpress.

I then gave the plugin to another affiliate marketer friend who also found that it was a very useful tool so I decided to put the plugin out on to the open market or people to buy.

Since then I have made the plugin far more advanced, it can handle many datafeeds, each with their own templates, custom fields, advanced filters and automatic updates.

I have created a website for the datafeed import plugin where you can find more details

I then wanted to be able to easily import Amazon products as they are always very high converting affiliate products, so I have created a similar plugin that allows you to import and create posts from Amazon products based on a search term. This works very well and again as with the datafeed plugin I am working on more and more advanced versions of the plugin, the next of which is due to be released in the coming weeks.

Again I have created a website for the Amazon Import Plugin so if you are interested have a look.

Windows 7 Home Premium

I recently bought myself a top spec PC, it came installed with Windows Vista, however, I had bought within the free upgrade to Windows 7 period so I sent off for the free copy. It took some time for it to arrive, and then some time for me to get round to doing the upgrade as I wanted to do a clean install rather than an upgrade.

The install went well, it did take some time to install, comparable with windows XP and Vista I would guess, and a neat feature of it downloading updates during the install process is good, however, if you come to use your install disk in a year or two I am guessing that those downloads would take some time.

Having got it installed I must say I am very impressed, being a Mac user and OSX fan the interface is very familiar to me! Not that I am saying it is copied but some of the functionality is out of the same chapter in the ‘How to design a Operating System GUI’ book.

Am am using Home Premium edition so it comes with the Media Centre, of which I was already a fan from XP and vista days, but the Homegroup facility and the ability to easily share media between users is a great advantage, more of which later.

The ability to pin items to your task bar, and the fact that the icons take up much less room now is a great advantage, I now have a Mac’esk single click to open an application rather than the 2 or even three click method of using the start menu.

At first I thought that the new snipping tool was a bit gimmicky, however, I have had cause to use it on several occasions, especially while blogging, the ability to take a quick grab of a screen and save it as an image is perfect.

My wife’s laptop has been playing up for some time so I have invested in a newer (secondhand) one for her and again installed Windows 7 onto it, upgraded our Media Centre PC from Vista to windows 7 and upgraded my laptop from XP pro to Windows 7.

All those installs went without a hitch, apart from a minor problem with the media centre PC which I need to look at where it will only use one of the Digital TV Receivers.

I have been buying the install disks and licences from Amazon where Home Premium full costs £94.99 and the upgrade costs £64.75, although from memory I only paid £80 ish for the full version so these prices must vary.

We are now able to record TV on the media centre and each watch it on any one of the other computers. My Wife can be watching Dancing on Ice while I watch top gear on my laptop with headphones on.

My view is that this is where Windows should have been several years ago, it is Windows as it should be. I am not sure that it has achieved the heights of the latest Mac OS but it is certainly slicker than Windows has ever been.

Photography is a hobby for me, I would not necessarily say that I was a particularly good photographer, but I can take a relatively good photograph.

I have been selling those photographs online for the last 3 or 4 years and have brought in some good pocket money from doing so. At times I have logged into my seller accounts and been greeted by $1000, some of which is affiliate earnings, but it is always a pleasant surprise.

How and where do I sell photographs?

The how is very easy, just sign up to one or all of the stock photography sites below and follow their instructions on how to upload images. The text that you write for them, the tags and labels is very important as it is these that are going to get your photographs found by searches. Generally they have an approval process and many of your images will be denied, o not be disheartened by this, they will be denied for many reasons, quality, subject and simply that the site already has too many of that type of image.

As for the where, these are some of the sites that I use with a few comments as to what I think of each of them.

SmugMug Pro – Not really a commercial stock photography gallery but allows you to have your own space, share and sell your photographs

Big Stock Photo – A very simple to use stock photography gallery, this is where I sell most of my photographs

Fotilia - I find this site not as easy to use, however it is well worth persevering with as you will get the results.

DreamsTime - A good site, easy to use and seems to be the quickest to upload photographs to.

IStockPhoto - One of the best sites, the user has a control panel on which they can manage all their account.

What photographs sell?

The photograph has to have some commercial value to sell, an photograph of your local bridge is not going to sell unless it is an iconic land mark and thus symbolic of bridges anywhere, a holiday snap of someone eating an ice cream won’t sell unless it is a posed photograph which says ‘holiday’, with model quality poses and thought of the background.

What you have to do is think about who is going to buy your photograph and what they will use it for, also remember there are millions of other images on the stock photography sites so yours will have to either be exceptionally good or it needs to be of a niche subject that is not covered so widely.

The ones of mine that sell well are a picture of ‘Salt end’ oil refinery at night, this does not specifically show the place its self and the images are taken in such a way that they are iconic for any heavy industrial plant. I have a picture of a Bay leaf with water droplets on it which does very well, this could be used for cooking or gardening applications.

I also have some photographs taken at Hull Fair, again these do not specifically identify Hull fair, but they show fair ground rides and can be used for any type of fun park entertainment.

The best advice is to go onto the sites listed above and see the featured sections and have a browse through the images to see the types and quality of images required to be successful.

Selling photographs as an Affiliate?

Affiliate marketing is something that I do anyway, I also do affiliate selling of stock photography and referral of other photographers. If I promote a stock photography site and refer a photographer who then uploads and starts selling their photographs, I earn a percentage of the sale price of each of those photographs. This is a great way of topping up your income. Once you become a photographer with a good portfolio uploaded to the stock photography sites then apply for their affiliate program and start referring other photographers.

I make 75% of my money from this affiliate method rather than selling my own images. This maybe because of several reasons, firstly I am an affiliate marketer anyway and two I have not dedicated the time to my photography and building up a bigger portfolio of images. Either way, even if you do not earn that sort of percentage from affiliate sales it is still a worthwhile exercise to sign up to the affiliate program and start referring members, you never know you may get lucky and refer a brilliant photographer who sells thousands of images.

I recently blogged a recipe for Posh Beans on Toast, I first cooked it for the in-laws and did not have time to take a photograph, however, I did it again the other nigh for Cheryl and myself and thought I would take a couple of photographs to show what it turns out like. This time I served it with some crispy Bacon on the top, you could even add a fried Quail egg to give something a little extra.

Posh Beans On Toast

We have been having problems with out boiler for some time now, the problems have come to a head with us only have a partly working boiler which does nothing very well at all, giving us lukewarm water and a heating system that continually requires top-ups of water to keep it going.

Although we have long term plans for the kitchen we have put those on hold for the moment due to money grabbing builders who seem to think we are made of money and want a gold lined extension building! We were going to replace the boiler when we did the kitchen but with things as they are we have had to re-think. I will post more about what our plans are regarding the kitchen in the near future.

Currently the boiler is on the kitchen wall, and as we are struggling for space in the kitchen it makes sense to try and fine another location for it. The downstairs toilet seems to be the obvious solution.

The downstairs toilet is very dated and showing its age, however, for not much cost I will be able to replace it and update it, however, in order to get the boiler in as well I will be blocking up the window, which we never use anyway keeping the blind down all the time. This being so it will be a larger job than it should be, something that I will have to do over several weekends. I intend to get the window bricked up next weekend, this will mean having the window out, maybe even the toilet and sink out to give me access.

I will also be taking down the ceiling, firstly because it is artexed and I hate artex and also because I am hoping that I can grab an inch or so to allow extra room for the boiler.

The first problem I have is finding a compact cloakroom suite, maybe even corner basin and corner toilet.