The Camera Centre web presence has been updated with a fantastic selection of Rollei digital cameras and associated products.

Rollei’s digital camera products can be easily purchased through the new easy to use interface and one step checkout system in just a couple of mouse clicks.

Currently celebrating their 90 year aniversary. Rollei cameras:

are easy to use and function extremely well ─ these were the main criteria of company founders Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke while designing the legendary twin lens Rolleiflex back in 1929. It rapidly became a widely used tool of professional photographers and the dream of every amateur one.

The high quality standards of Rollei’s founders remain virtually unchanged today.

The “twin lens” feature initiated the constant development of innovative devices. Important milestones in design were the compact Rollei 35 mm camera, the Rolleiflex SL66 with built-in lens bellows, the first electronically controlled medium-format Rolleiflex SLX, and the 35 mm mirror reflex SL 2000F with interchangeable film backs. And Rollei’s twin slide projectors are one-of-a-kind in the world.

Do check out thecameracentre.net’s fantastic new Rollei range!

Noticed how the instructions to install your Comodo SSL certificate flags an error when you flick onto HTTPS? The way to fix this is to employ the following for both the :

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
var comodohost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://” : “http://”);
COT(comodohost + “www.yourdomain.tld/cot.gif”, “SC2″, “none”);
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var comodohost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://” : “http://”);
TrustLogo(comodohost+”www.yourdomain.tld/tl_white.gif”, “SC4″, “none”);</script>

Note the new comodohost variable being used to provide either the HTTPS or HTTP connection.

A portfolio and marketing site for Mike Smith a professional MC, compere and voiceover artist.

Through iterative user centred design and develpment process Mike obtained the site he wanted matching his already established print media.

Visit Unbelieveable Scenes

[...] quick thinking, inventive, practical and enthusiastic. Hundreds of hours of diverse live event experience, and a background in schools theatre and stand up comedy; means I make ‘dead time’ a virtue, I don’t complain when I’m not spoon fed, and I thrive on situations where anything can happen. 90% of my work is repeat, and by recommendation and that’s because I offer an offbeat but professional approach which helps make an event or production, on any scale, memorable and convincing.

Launched on 26th February 2010
PHP, MySQL, SEO

What a job I’ve had trying to get hold of one of these cards! My old Fujitsu Siemens AMILO Pi 1536; which was a replacement for one that broke down, had artefacting pretty much straight from the beginning! I just gave up at that point with Fujitsu Siemens (3 odd months of wrangling to get my replacement) and ended up buying an Alienware, but that in itself is another story.

Anyroad, that old laptop has been sitting around gathering dust for some time and I thought it might be nice to get a new MXM card and install it to ‘upgrade’ the laptop per se. Well, that didn’t quite work out and when I finally found the original ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Video Card 128MB card on eBay, from America, I jumped at the chance to purchase it.

So the graphics card is in and life is breathed into the laptop once again. Yey! A new 320Gb HDD later and a GIGABYTE GN-WI07HT Super AG 108Mbps Aircruiser Mach miniPCI slotted in place and we are good to go.

Had an interesting experience with 123-reg and trying to apportion nameservers to domains always flagging back:

Setting nameservers to ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld
Please wait…
Nameservers for domain.net were not changed to
ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld
Error text: Nameserver ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld doesn’t exists in the registry

A quick scoot around their help centre didn’t flag back any answers for anything as complicated. So resorting to google I figured it was 123-reg hadn’t parsed through my details to all their associated registrars. Not immediately obvious from the error message.

The answer was to phone up 123-reg support and detail they needed to make sure my domain and nameservers were registered with all their associated registrar registries.

3rd time lucky on phone and 5 days later I managed to get ‘Ricky’ who knew exactly what I was talking about straight away and didn’t pawn me off with talk of DNS propogation etc. etc.  He ensured my .uk.net domain and nameservers were registered properly with Central NIC and got back to me very promptly. Thank you Ricky.

So all is well and hopefully this might help anyone else in the same situation.

Fantastic article in the latest ITNow magazine in regards to Social Networking ‘in the business’. Simon Morris of Pentura lays down some great pointers on how best to manage and secure such systems against their use in collaborative and strangely ‘Social Networking’ activities.

Do look back to a post here: Building an online community organisational Intranet where a discussion on ‘Social Networking’ within your own organisational Intranet establishes collaborative activites enabling your business rather as hindering!

Further articles are available at http://www.bcs.org/socialmedia

Having wrangled a little with JQuery to obtain data from SharePoint lists I stumbled across SPAPI; a fantastic library to aid you in development. Do check it out over at darrenjohnstone.net 

The ajax function of JQuery had meant toying around with the SOAP packets one was trying to send to get them to work correctly. Tiresome and really not that productive! Big relief that Darren had actually gone through all the pain to create this library as I could see the mountain in front of me and wasn’t personally that keen!

Combining the SPAPI library with JQuery to deal with the returned web service XML however, has proved to be a very successful marriage. To extend this, the below prototyped function has allowed me to only require one hit to the server per request to play with the returned XML. The UI in how its presented to the user is down to your artistic flair ;)

Do note you are required to update your access to your uploaded SPAPI files and JQuery + you’re going to have to write the CAML query you want and add in your own column names etc. to display per item. It’s there, but not for your particular list ;) Enjoy.

The Camera Centre – Reboot!

Visit www.thecameracentre.net

The Camera Centre website’s last incarnation had been turning over since 2004 and it was time to launch into the 2010 new year with a vibrant and easy to use system not only for members but for administration also. Tieing more succinctly with back-end shop operations the new website cuts out tedious stock filling across multiple systems whilst providing an easy to use interface for not only members but for guest shoppers also.

An easy to use one click shopping basket facility provides users the ability to choose and purchase items without getting bogged down in multiple pages of payment processing. This simple feature provides a substantial reduction in abandoned shopping baskets and invertly an increase in sales; what everyone want’s! With several successful Search Engine Optimisation techniques running throughout the site, The Camera Centre is now even easier to find.

Press Release

Local Shetland retailer The Camera Centre has just launched a new internet store with some international help.

Owner Cecil Hughson and Manager, Ben Mullay knew that to extend their business a fresh online initiative was needed. This was especially important as many of the Camera Centre’s customers are in the outer islands and don’t travel into Lerwick often. There is also a large expat community who like to order photos for delivery to relatives in Shetland.

Working with New Zealand based marketing strategists, First Retail Ltd, Canadian software developers Dakis Decision Systems Inc and Cecil’s son in law John Smith, owner of yadUK, The Camera Centre has developed a product range that includes home-wear, gifts and décor – all created using customer’s own photos.

First Retail’s Director, Chris Wilkinson knew the Camera Centre’s dilemma well. With clients in many island territories including the Channel Islands, The Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Fiji the web has been a key element in helping these businesses engage with their community.

Up until recently, many of the products needed to be sent away for production. New technology has allowed stores in remote areas to create these on-site. The Camera Centre has invested in equipment, systems and training that will ensure work can stay within the Islands. In the future it is hoped the store will also develop export markets to the mainland and beyond.

Timed to launch in the key gift giving period leading up to Christmas, the site has already proven popular. Within hours of going live, orders began to arrive. Most popular lines so far have included photo collages, coasters, placemats and mousemats.

Launched on December 4th 2009
PHP, MySQL, e-commerce, SEO

Lost your /dev/null by accidently shoving a file there as root? Use the following to recreate:

rm /dev/null; mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

From a quick scan of the blogosphere its become pretty apparent I’m not the only one questioning what exactly Microsoft have been up to with Sharepoint?!? Have their software architects been sitting completely siloed and at the last moment bolted together various ‘bits’ to make the overall “Sharepoint” product.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic application, but when you see time and time again how people use it “out-the-box” you baulk! It can most definitely be twisted into something more than a very expensive semi-website-thing or ‘fancy’ collaborative shared drive – that is its power.

Though when dumped out as purely an “out-the-box” solution one really has to explain Sharepoint: “Please suspend your understanding of what a shared drive is and also please suspend how you understand you might navigate through a website – neither of these learned concepts are going to suffice here, sorry!”

Breadcrumbs for one thing. Eh? Breadcrumbs here and breadcrumbs there and they all point to different areas and change strangely depending on what you happen to be viewing at the time. Not that intuitive to the average joe punter especially when the screen jumps between lists and webpages.

At least thats where the SharePoint consultancy comes in I guess?! Maybe Microsoft do know what they’re doing ;)