Beadle’s NOT About
The BBC are reporting the news that Jeremy Beadle, well-known TV prankster and game-show host, has died after a long period of ill-health.
I wanted to make a joke about it along the lines of how it’s all a con – just another Beadle prank to make someone look silly, but I couldn’t find the right words. Like him or loathe him, Beadle was failry unique in British TV at the time of Game For A Laugh, and continued to be so until his untimely passing. We need more like him, and his death will leave a hole that will be difficult for others to fill.
Zen and the art of website construction
You’ll have noticed that there haven’t been many posts recently – this despite me signing up to the Blog365 Challenge – and those that there have been have been moaning about software.
Well, the reason for less posts is that I’m still trying to get a handle on Zen Cart, the shopping cart / database software that we’re currently using to create a new e-commerce website. I’ve already written about the various annoyances that I’ve discovered with it, and I’ve spent quite a large part of this week trying to solve other problems with it.
This is from the Zen Cart website, and was part of the original decision-making process that included it in the shortlist:
Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.
Some “solutions” seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users’ needs, Zen Cart™ puts the merchants and shoppers requirements first. Similarly, other programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart™ can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic web site building and computer skills.
I’d take issue with some of that; while Zen is indeed free – you don’t even have to pay to set up payment providers, which you do have to with some other free shopping carts – but there’s no way it’s user-friendly, nor can it be installed and set-up by anyone with basic skills. I’m no programming or web-design genius but I do know my way about – and I’ve been struggling all week to do the simplest things.
For instance, date formats. Zen is a US-centric application, so naturally the date format is wrong: Month, Day, Year instead of the correct Day, Month, Year. Now, I can change from US dollar to UK pound with a couple of clicks of a mouse, but to change the date format I have to go delving into php files and changing code. After I’ve spent ages trying to find out from various FAQ’s, forums and wikis which code I need to change.
Adding postage methods takes yet more coding; as does changing the default weight label from pounds to grams. Why are these basic things so hard to achieve? If I hadn’t had to spend so long sorting out things like this, then I could probably have finished the site by now. And it would seem that it’s not just me – the Zen Cart forums are full of people asking how to do what should be relatively simple things, and getting answers that involve making code changes rather than just clicking an option or two.
Zen Cart is, from a functionality point of view, a good system – especially when you add in that it’s free – but the developers do seem to have missed a trick with the useability level. If you’re looking for a shopping cart system, be aware that it does not live up to its publicity on that score.
Doing away with those January blues
January is one of those strange times of year; it should be good, because we’re over the Christmas hump and moving forward into a new year with all of the promise that brings; we’re past the shortest day, so nights and mornings are gradually getting lighter; everything is being re-born for a fresh assault on life.
But so often January is a time of depression, bad temper and violence. Rather than being in optimistic mood people seem to be in a slump; they see January as being “back to the grindstone” after the Christmas festivities (even though they’ll have moaned incessantly about Christmas – how much it cost them, how much they hate spending time with their family, how crap the television was, and so on) and the postman is the harbinger of doom when he brings the credit card statement.
I’m not always the most cheerful of people (downright bad-tempered and moody I think would be a kind description from many that know me) and I can be very intolerant, but I do at least try to be happy. It doesn’t always work because I get pissed off very easily if things aren’t working the way they should, but today has been a good day. Yet I encounter people on a daily basis for whom everything is too much trouble, and it’s depressing.
I can’t get a handle on why you would want to spend your whole life being unhappy (I’m not talking about people who are clinically depressed; I’m talking about people who seem to choose to be miserable sods); sure there are many things out there to bring you down, but why let them? If you can do something about it, do. If you can’t, then ignore it. That way you’ll be much happier.
And it’s amazing how much easier your day can be if you approach it in a happy frame of mind. When you’re miserable, the simplest task (like being pleasant to a customer) can become impossible. When you’re happy, it’s easy. And happiness is contagious. Pretty soon, you realise that there wasn’t anything to be miserable about in the first place.
Going Self-Hosted with Wordpress
The Wolfie Guide for Going Self-Hosted with Wordpress is now available as a PDF download, for anyone that might find it useful.
It includes the three articles so far published and will be updated as and when new articles become available.
(If you find any errors, please let me know and I’ll put them right in the next edition).
Those golden days
Pete over at CodeHappy has been getting all nostalgic recently because it’s 25 years since the Commodore 64 was launched on the world. Reading his post got me thinking about my forays into the world of computing.
The first computer I ever used – and then the first computer I ever owned – was the Sinclair ZX81. A massive 1KB of memory, a ridiculously low resolution (was it 32 x 32? Something silly like that), a ‘keyboard’ that you really had to fight with and, of course, Sinclair Basic. And it was wonderful.
Magazines like Sinclair User and Sinclair Programs used to publish listings of code that you could program into your machine and play (they were usually games). You couldn’t save them unless you also had a tape machine connected to the ZX but that didn’t matter – you were a programmer. And back then we all were; if you wanted the machine to do anything you had to program it. If, like Pete, you knew what you were doing you programmed in machine code but the rest of us just used Basic and – by continually not working as it should have done – it taught us to be structured and lean with our code.
You could, if you were one of the monied generation, buy an expansion pack that gave you a whopping 16KB of memory. The two most popular ones came from Sinclair and Panda. The Panda, as well as being slightly cheaper, was slightly curvier (“shaped to the contours of your ZX81″) but that made it no more stable; all the bashing that you had to do on that keyboard often made the expansion pack move and break its connection to the machine – instant re-set and the loss of the last two hours programming.
Then came the launch of the ZX Spectrum, and this was a major advance in computing power. Colour, sound, higher resolution (up into the 100’s now I think) and ‘proper’ rubber keys, with a choice of 16KB and a massive 48KB memory. Gaming started to really become possible with graphical adventure games like Atic Atac, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy appearing from companies like Imagine and Ultimate Play The Game (who hailed from the exotic sounding Ashby de la Zouch).
It was around this time that Pete’s beloved Commodore 64 appeared on the scene and gave all us Sinclair users a bit of a shock; it had a proper keyboard, it had better colour, better resolution and better sound. Not that we were prepared to admit that, though, and so began the sort of war that is played out today between Mac and PC users – but for us it was fought in the school playground and was much more brutal!
Sinclair tried to respond with the Spectrum Plus (almost a real keyboard) and add-ons like the Micro Drive and updates to their awful thermal printer; they even launched the QL, which was supposed to be a business machine but which was always demonstrated with a 3D chess game. None of it worked; Commodore – with the 64 in homes and the PET in schools – had Sinclair beaten hands down. Eventually Sir Clive sold out to Alan Sugar at Amstrad but it wasn’t long after that that the Sinclair name disappeared altogether from the computing world.
But I still fondly remember those heady days of being on the cutting-edge of affordable personal computing with the ZX range (80, 81 and Spectrum), the Commodore’s, TRS-80’s, VIC-20’s and Oracles with their array of languages – Sinclair Basic, Commodore Basic, Cobol, Pascal and Fortran. And properly written programs.
Wolfs Helpers
