John K Mitchell's blogger

A moan

I have a page at www.forestsoftware.co.uk/designterms.html that contains my design terms and designs - they have been the way they are for over 4 years now

You can imagine my suprise when I did a search for a phrase that is on the page and found that there are 77 other pages out there with exactly the same terms and conditions - even down, in some cases, to the formatting of the terms.

I wouldn't mind too much - I paid for the terms and conditions to be put together back in the late 90's - but I do wish that the people using it would at least attribute it to my site.

Labels: copying, copyright, legal, terms and conditions

I have just finished another website, this time it's a directory listing local solicitors in the UK. At the moment there are not a large number of solicitors listed but the company that I built the site for is offering free basic entries to the directory for any UK based local solicitor (with an enhanced listing option available as well).

The directory is set up to allow visitors to find a local solicitor based on postcode, town or even county. It also includes a newsfeed containing legal news.

Labels: directory, legal, solicitors, uk law, websites

At a recent Governors meeting we discussed the idea that visitors to the school should wear visitors badges so that we had an audit trail of who came into the school, when they arrived and when they left.

After a bit of searching (I am the lead governor for property and Health & Safety - so it falls under my remit) I came across B.I.G. Badges who can provide a "time expiring" visitors badge that has a clever use of colour that apparently starts to show a colour on the badge after it has been in use for a selected period of time - the time can be 1/2 a day, 1 day, 1 week and 1 month so it's ideal if you have people that are on-site for a week and saves having to re-issue badges each day.

Now it's up to the school secretary to contact them and get a quote for the cost of a set of badges that can be hand-written with the visitors name and company.

Labels: badges, health and safety, visitors

It's been a long while since I last posted - things just seem to have got in the way and the time has flown by.

Anyway, I'm back now and planning on spending more time posting to this blog.

I've just been reading about another fine example of government IT systems here in the UK, it seesm that a failing £447m project to provide a national case management system for magistrates courts has been turned round - the next paragraph that I read put this into context, the project is 16 years late (yes 16) and will cost nearly 3 times more than expected. www.computerweekly.com/216642

This system is currently in 83 courts in England and Wales and by the end of 2008 will be rolled out to all the 370 courts.

Makes me wonder what would happen in a commercial environment, I worked on a system that was rolled out to about 300 branches of a company and that took nowhere near that length of time.

Labels: courts, government it

Recently I have read articles and heard reports on the radio about an online "world" called Second Life.

I decided to have a look around and it is quite impressive. When you sign up (and you can do this free) you choose a name and then walk around as an online character. While "in world" you can buy and sell items, buy land (if you have a paid account - costs $9.99 per month plus a monthly fee that depends on how much land you "own"), build items and even rent land or houses to other people on Second Life.

Apparently big businesses are also using this to conduct meetings between staff or advertise their products.

Having heard this I wondered about the possibility of putting an advert up for a company that I'm doing a bit of work for. Have a look at the adverts for serviced offices in the picture below or in Second Life at this Second Life location

Labels: online game, second life, serviced offices

It's Valentines Day today and I was thinking about a website that I visited a couple of days ago called TreatHer.com to buy a gift for my wife.

The site seemed to have lots of fun gifts so I decided to stop browsing and started to look more seriously. There a was a navigation panel on the screen showing the type of person you are looking for (you know the kind of thing... friend, mum!, lover, wife, partner) so I clicked on the wife option only to be taken to a page not found error page.

I tried going back and clicking the link on a different page but got the same result.

Now, generally I give up at this point and go elsewhere, but I thought I'd be good (especially as it was 2 days before Valentines) so rang the number on the contact page. The man at the other end seemed amazed that anyone should take the trouble to ring and thanked me for making the effort. By the time I'd put the phone down he had sent the page to the server and it was working again.

Needless to say, I found a couple of nice tokens to buy on the "missing" page.

I ordered the items and they arrived on Valentines day by special delivery, nicely wrapped in little net bags. Definately a site to add to my favourites.

Labels: gifts, valentines, websites

Typical isn't it?

Over the Christmas period the UK Government issued some new legislation that extends the requirement for companies and LLPs (Limited Liability Partnerships) to include certain information in their electronic documents and on websites.

While companies have been used to including their name, place of registration, company number and registered office address on letterheads and invoices this information is now required on emails and websites.

The legislation came into effect on the 1st January 2007 and there are fines for companies that do not show this information.

This is an example of legislation brought in by the Secretary of State, and very likely not debated in Parliament, that is not commonly known about and not publicised widely, I came across it while looking for information about training for accountants for a lecture on businesses and CPD at the college.

How they expect businesses to update websites and email footers during the period between 21st December 2006 and 1st January 2007 is anybody's guess.

Labels: email, uk law, websites