Category: Recommended

We Catch Fire with our #CalendarCompetition, and Laird James Morris’s new album …

Mixing two moments of greatness today at Dunans:

jamesmorris

1. On tour today around Dunans with me was West Coast Alt. Rock singer songwriter, Laird James Morris, his mother, his father, and his very excellent bro. Not only did Mum buy the boys our fab new wool scarves and a tie each, I received a signed copy of James’s latest album Catch Fire (photo as above).

votes2. We have received over 120 entries for our Calendar competition or 1400 votes!!!! Great stuff, and the winner of the draw will receive a free copy of the finalised Calendar.

Vote here.

#onlinestartup: Essential tools and skills for a successful online business startup

As I was working on my Q2 VAT return I was wondering what I would post about today – I was using excel, textedit, MySQL, phpmyadmin and cpanel to create the documents I needed to send off to our accountancy firm and thought, well, what are the essential components of a successful online business?

One of the things that immediately struck me was that aside from a wide skillset, which is the IP we work from, everything we use is either open source / free or priced at a marginal cost to the business. In other words, for anyone to set up an online business, all they need are the skills and the time, the rest is readily available if they have connectivity and a computer or even a tablet.

My second thought was that actually we do have some software which we have had to purchase, mostly the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign … ) but there are open source alternatives freely available.

I’ve listed everything below. Some of it is generic, some is specific – like the hosting solutions we use – how we knit it all together to create a market-leading business like Dunans Castle Limited, is another matter 😉

Foundation for online presence:

  • Open Source software – Linux / Apache / MySQL* / PHP*
  • Domain registrars: Bluehost.com (Top Level Domains) and 123-reg (UK domains)
  • Hosting solution: Mediatemple (US) and UnitedHosting (UK)

Maintaining online presence:

  • WordPress* including:
  • Cpanel* (maintaining the server)
  • phpmyadmin*
    • for website health
    • for customer metrics
    • for essential metadata

Communications & Marketing:

Spreadsheet / Word Processor

  • Excel for detailed cashflow analysis
  • Google spreadsheets for shared information
  • Word for compatibility
  • TextEdit or Textmate for csv, text & sql manipulation

Shared Information

  • Dropbox – for shared proprietory documents eg. .ai, .psd, .pdf, .jpg
  • Google Drive – for shared non-proprietory docs eg. simple spreadsheets and collaborative how-tos
  • Google Calendar for scheduling

Proprietory Software

  • Illustrator
  • Photoshop
  • Microsoft Office

* skills or competencies which can take several years to acquire.

 

 

#EssentialReading: If you think expert consensus is evenly balanced on Global Warming, read this …

… because too many vested interests would have you believe scientific opinion is on a knife-edge:

97% of experts agree … from the Guardian

 

The effect of Scottish Independence on England: @DeborahOrr nails it!

Scottish independence would change England more than Scotland

Had to share this article in Saturday’s Guardian, which was in turn inspired by J. K. Rowling’s recent donation to the Better Together campaign. A really interesting take on what is going on – and right in line with Angus Reid’s Modest Proposal which speaks to, in my mind anyway, the UK’s present democratic deficit.

A Modest Proposal
from the poem, Call for a Constitution

if I as a writer of poetry
were called upon to give a form of words
to model the nation’s behaviour
it would be this: ownership obliges
everyone to respect and to care for
the sacred; to respect and to care for
freedom of conscience; and to recognise
the gift of every individual
to respect it, care for it, nourish it;
to respect and to care for communities;
and to care for the land, and wherever
the land has been abused to restore it
so that it can support all forms of life:
five principles, five fingers on the hand.

NB. Just realised appropos the above, today’s the day when the Scottish Gov’t published its consultation on a constitution. Not as poetic, but I really liked the idea of popular sovereignty – we’re all our own rulers. Heady stuff – a lot to be admired, a lot to be discussed …

The Chatelet Apprentice from @GallicBooks – great murder mystery set in 18th-Century Paris

chateletThe last book in translation I read, or rather listened to, was the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – which was blisteringly good. Jean-François Parot’s novel is a different beast altogether, despite the fact that it too features a novice detective set an impossible task by a wealthy and influential superior. The plot is well-conceived, albeit slightly undermined by an opacity in the language – at times description, dialogue and characterisations seemed at odds with the plot. Like translations I have read of Russian novels, The Master and Margarita and Petty Demon to name two, the reader always feels that somehow in English they are being short-changed, that the fullness of the author’s original intent has been lost. If only I kept thinking I could read this in the original, these elisions might not have been present. 

Having said that, murders in Paris which straddle the Royal Court and demi-monde together will always hold a level of fascination, as will protagonists who conform to contemporaneous mores which conflict with those of the present day, and yet still maintain a level of sympathy with the reader.

Here’s the link to Amazon.

Should also mention that in a previous career I designed Gallic Books website, hence the initial impulse to pick Parot’s book up.

Sunny Day by RogerTaylor just reminded me how much I’ve missed Freddie Mercury

Sunny Day

Super, super song which just deserves the full Queen treatment. I know from years and years of listening to them that on every album Queen did Roger always brought two or three earth-shaking tracks to the table – often worldclass – like I’m in Love with My Car, Tenement Funster, A Kind of Magic and of course Radio Gaga. Sunny Day is a great, great song. Roger’s voice is so soulful, but I found myself really hankering after Freddie’s voice & Brian’s guitar, those harmonies, and the ineffable gorgeousness of one of the world’s great rock bands …

Right, off to listen to a classic, Sheer Heart Attack

Video: Barty Basset Hound Sleeping Very, Very Loudly!

Barty Bassett Sleeping Loudly.

Click on the link to hear Barty sleeping soundly and so loudly that we were unable to hear the TV.

#onmyplaylist: @KateTempest debut album Everybody Down = greatness

Kate Tempest – Everybody Down

While I was working on spreadsheets I was looking for something that would keep me engaged. Saw this reviewed as 4 star, didn’t read the review, but saw Kate’s photo and thought to myself, well, there’s a face that I kind of recognise (can you guess who I was thinking of?). I’ll listen I thought. This is a hardcore album for those who prefer their music unfluffy, vexed and mostly verbal. Great rap. Acute observation. From South London. Reminds me of my time in North London & the Bush & Goldhawk Rd. “Chicken” especially is genius – makes the link between her beginnings as a performance poet and the music. Standout is ‘The Beigeness’ though.

 

Bella Bathurst in the Guardian today: Smacks of petulance, not a respect for democracy

Today in the Guardian, Bella Bathurst concludes:

“In all the different Scotlands, one image always recurs: that of a marriage. Just for the sake of it, let’s pretend that there’s this couple, Albion and Caledonia. They’ve been married for a long time – more than 300 years – and it’s been a productive but troubled relationship. Albion is happy with things as they are, but Caledonia wants to leave. Albion flirts with other countries and Caledonia feels bullied. When Caledonia threatens to walk out, Albion reminds her of all the things she’ll lose: the house, furniture, money, security, music, pictures. Which only makes Caledonia more determined to go. Her blood is up, she’s made plans, she’s sure she’ll get by somehow. All of us – English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, whether we have a vote in the referendum or not – get to be counsellors on this. So what chance would you give them?”

I had to read this three times to believe that this national newspaper would characterise the vote in Scotland on Independence like this. Smacks of petulance, not a respect for democracy.

Making email newsletters more elastic and more cost effective: @elasticemail

elasticemailSo Scottishlaird.com has over 11,000 subscribers divided into three separate lists, and frankly we were growing tired of an ever-inflating monthly charge from our old supplier – a rather overgrown simian. Now, don’t get me wrong the service was excellent, the templates great and creating an html email a breeze to put together and design, but the cost was ridiculous.

So yesterday, in email dialogue with Julie from ACT around the mailing list for that charity, the contractor recommended Elastic Email. So me having the technicals, I gave the system a once over.  So impressed was I, that I have converted our entire list to Elastic Email and dumped Mailchimp back down to the free account.

Why keep the free gorilla account? The wonderful integration between it and my e-commerce software – we’ll be using it to collect subscribers and then transfer them over to EE. Security-wise we’re fine, given that both companies are at the top of their game, but it is a bind to have to migrate users over ….

The only word of caution I’d give, is that EE isn’t quite as user-friendly as MC – but then I *think* that’s what you’d be paying extra for with when you go ape!

(… and all of this rather explains why there has been a hiatus on the email newsletter front with Scottish Laird – sorry!)

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