Three years to the day since ABC1 was launched, two and a half years since I launched the unofficial abc1uk website, the channel has come to an end with Disney pulling the plug and so with that, the unofficial website has had to close too.

It’s been a good couple of years with the site, with it being the first large scale site I’ve had to manage and deal with, and then a year later after teaming up with Myles, we recoded and redesigned the site to make it into the monster it became!

I’ve had online interviews with stars from ABC1 TV Shows, namely Sabrina Lloyd from Sports Night and Sherri Shepherd from Less Than Perfect, the site gained a whole heap of users and members to it’s forums, and it really did become a mini community with Disney having a look around the site on a regular basis!

Sadly though that is now all over, but there are always some people I would like to thank, namely;

Myles Noton, for to whom if it wasn’t for him the site probably wouldn’t have become so big and rich in features, and thus popular.
John Thackery, for providing hosting and tech support, and being there in times of crisis!
Joyce Rubin at Disney, for patiently providing as much information as she could on news about the channel and shows
The interviewees; Sabrina Lloyd and Sherri Shepherd, and their agents, to take the time to answer a few questions
And finally the visitors who took the time to keep visiting and who joined the community, and stayed with us when things sometimes went bad!

After a couple months of designing, coding, and putting the finishing touches too, the website for Rung Heating I’ve been making is finally complete, and more importantly it’s launched!

Based in Sherborne, Dorest; Rung Heating Supplies Ltd are specialist distributors to the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning industries across the country.

The website features company information, client listings, contact information, and the company’s complete products and services, all coded with fully valid XHTML and CSS through Adobe Dreamweaver, a downloadable company breakdown PDF document and photos and images made through Adobe Photoshop.

View site: www.rungheating.co.uk

In a mangled large envelope which looked like the postman had given the package to his dog to play with before posting it to me, my Moo Cards arrived this morning - much to me excitement! Thankfully, the cards are in a hard plastic box which itself is fine, and has kept all the cards all safe and well!

Some turned out better than others, but overall I’m pleased with them.

Hopefully I can put them to good use! First come first served folks!…

This evening I took the liberty of ordering 100, yes, 100 Moo Cards! Now, at this moment in time you must be thinking I’m crazy and what on earth are Moo Cards!?! Well, after being informed by my co-worker Myles, about a blog photographer Thomas Hawk made a while back about him ordering some Moo Cards, I was intriguied!

Moo Cards are mini business type cards, which can feature your own photos on the back of them, in full colour, for only £10 for a pack of 100 (all of which can have a seperate individual photo!)

Well, after pain stakingly choosing ten different photos (so I would have ten of each), and then making them look decent on the back of the cards, I wrote my information in and ordered them! So, in 10 working days apparently I should be the proud owner of 100 Mini Moo Cards, hopefully all looking as good in real life as I think they did on my computer screen! We’ll see…

Recently I’ve been starting to update some areas of the website, so far mostly the blog and gallery.

Parts of the gallery are currently unavaliable following a large scale update, namely the entire America Photos section, as well as some odds and ends, but these hopefully should be restored within the next week at the latest.

The blog itself may also appear to be displayed broken and look different every so often, while I’m trying to update certain areas, but the functionality during these periods should remain fine.

Updates So Far;

Tag Cloud - Replacing the category list on the right hand side is now a Tag Cloud, displaying each category according to size and colour, depending on how many topics are in each. (eg. The more posts in an individual category, the darker and larger it will appear, and visa versa.)

Recent Posts - Again, on the right hand side, an easy to read list of the most recent posts.

So, after further exploring the depths of the inter-web and all it’s glory, I came across a website which basically finds out how much your website (or any website for that matter) is worth.

The site works out the sum by a number of different factors, such as how old is the web address, the rank in search engines such as Google and how many pages of your site it knows about, how many other websites link to yours, daily visitor traffic and even how well your website is coded by checking the validity of the HTML Code and such…

 So, what did it come up with?…

Well, apparently my website, www.lloydengland.com, is worth $509 aka £263.72p and if I wanted too, apparently could sell adverts on my site for $5 (£2.59) each per month! When taking into account that up until now I’ve spent about £50 on my website in total (that includes the .com and hosting up until now) - if I happened to want to sell it to some random person who I happened to find who is also called Lloyd England (or strangely wanted lloydengland.com) I could make a nice little profit!

However, my joint venture abc1 site www.abc1uk.co.uk is on the other hand worth $233 (£120.62), so not as much as my persoal website - but still!

Anyways, the site in question with all these amazing figures is www.dnscoop.com. (Currency conversion - 1 GBP = 1.93010 USD)

Every time I come on here and write a blog post I am faced with a line of ‘drafts’. Blog posts which never quite made it to being published for whatever reason. They’re there, all huddled together in a dusty corner of a server rack - waiting to be posted… waiting to be shown the light of day… but… the chances are slim, and if they were people they would know it! So, lets get that feather duster and lets have a quick glance at the posts which you never did see….

 First, there’s post number 13, or at least what would have been my 13th post, no I’m not that superstitious… that would have been posted but it was just never was. So, June 27th 2005 was the first and last day that my 13th post entitled ‘Pondering’ survived…

Secondly, ‘The What If Machine’, written on 30th November 2005, yet again never saw the light of day… what if it had been posted? (See what I did there in my all amazingness way?) Well… one day a blog along this topic still might occur… might…! So keep your eyes peeled!

The blog post solely titled ‘Post #35′ comes in third… it was never even given a name!

Then follows a string of posts all written while in America last year, none of which were ever privileged enough to be given the publish treatment, one by one called; ‘For the wrong reasons?’, ‘It’s all good folks!’, ‘3000 miles away and it’s only just getting started’, ‘My Last Week’ and finally, ‘Sunday’.

And last but not least, ‘The parcel that never arrives’, written only a few hours ago in fact! What about? Well… parcels of course… what else would it be?

It’s up to you to ponder what they’re all about… hey! What if one was about you? Maybe Post #35 was… but… how would you know? Come on! I’m not that strange honest - they weren’t all written for the wrong reasons, some were truly all good folks… it’s just when the time came it just didn’t happen, maybe somewhere 3000 miles away it’s all just getting started and it may all happen again? From every Sunday to every Last Week - all over again - well - we can dream can’t we? Sometimes that parcel truly does never arrive…

Well it took over a day, but the website’s move to a new host and server is complete at last. After a few problems were over come and sorted, it was just a case of waiting while I uploaded my entire site to the new server in Linux’s crazy compression format and wait for for it to extract all the files to where they were meant to be!

So, if you had come across my amazingly cool and hip maintenance message over the past day you now know why! Hopefully everything should be working as it should - and other than yesterday and today, you shouldn’t even notice any changes! I get a bit less for my buck now, but its pretty decent and will do everything I need (for now!)

At the same time I also renewed my .com address for a further two years as it was due to expire in the next few weeks! So hopefully long live the site!

In other news (kinda), I’ve started to fix the problem with the gallery, it now looks a bit better than it did the other day, but still not 100% - I’ll keep trying to fix it though over the next few days.

Well, it’s been four years and now the time has come to say goodbye to my web host! Elixant, the company which host my website are closing down in March, and for the first time my portfolio’s site’s history - its going to have to move…

So, a little recolecting; I was with the Elixant team from the very start of thier company back in 2002 when I was priviledged enough to be given a free hosting account. Since then they’ve become a paid only hosting company, but in that time they have still given me the same support and service as if I were a paying customer (Even though I recently paid to increase my disk space!). But now due to thier own commitments they have decided to close it down to give them more time for thier studies.

And so this is it, I’m on the hunt for a new hosting provider, one which is Linux and has SQL databases! (And not a 100% requirement, but I do like Cpanel ) So, if anyone knows of any companies which are cheap and decent - tell me please!

I’ve been looking at WebFusion - (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/hosting/fusion-professional-linux/) which is £7.46 a month (thier cheapest with a MySQL database… but with diskspace at 3GB and monthly bandwidth at 25GB… I would never use anywhere near that… so I’m thinking it maybe a waste of money.

My current hosting account gives me;

Linux, 1GB diskspace, (not sure how much bandwidth - but I’ve only used 160MB this month so far so…(even though I’ve known it to rise to around 500MB+ on busy months)), 10 sub domains (even though I only use 1), 10 MySQL databases (30MB), unlimited email, Cpanel!

So, something similar to that would be great Wish me luck hunting!

Hey folks, so the other week - well it must be a couple now but I havn’t blogged in a little bit it seems, I managed to get an interview - exclusive I might add - with Sherri Shepherd for the unofficial site I run about the digital UK channel ABC1; www.abc1uk.co.uk, which some if not most of you already know I do!

Anyways, for those who don’t know, she plays Ramona in the ABC comedy Less Than Perfect over in the states, which in turn is shown in the UK on ABC1. After emailing her agent who seemed enthusiastic, I sent off a bunch of questions. Now, I expected to have to wait a few days - even a few weeks for a reply, but behold the very next day I got her response!

 So, then I got on to the task of publishing it to the site, and after a short while it was online! Amazingly about a week later, someone signed up to the forums, apparently Sherri herself, and replied to the forum thread about the interview! Now, I’m not 100% sure it was her - but - its pretty cool to think about!

You can read it at: http://www.abc1uk.co.uk/interviews/sherrishepherd.php