The website of the UK’s most popular radio station has been refreshed. The BBC Radio 2 website had been a little dated for a while now, and I much prefer the new colour scheme. The new logo is less interesting, but works well on the header.

Radio 2 have been changing their image for a while. A new schedule was introduced earlier this year and more TV names (Paul O’Grady, Davina McCall, Kate Thornton) have been presenting on the station. Visiting the website, it’s not where you’d expect to find The Organist Entertains. By appealing to a younger audience they might have grabbed some of the commercial listeners who enjoy the speech from Ken Bruce or Chris Evans, as the playlist feels younger too. At the same time, I don’t know anyone who has deserted the station as a listener. I think the new website reflects this. The internal presenter pages could do with updating now to keep within the new look.

Radio 1 updated their website last year, and it looks very good. Virgin Radio have always had an amazing website, but many in the UK still lag behind. Earlier in the year the BBC local radio stations started getting new look websites, but there appears to be a trend of using a tiny font size for descriptions. In the 100’s of websites I see a week on various forums and CSS gallery sites, there are very few going this way. Infact, try finding a small font on the Virgin Radio website.

I have to say, I think local radio stations are really missing a trick, and I hope the new community stations can find a way around this. With radio, especially BBC locals, there’s hours and hours of useful information and contacts every single day. Whilst you can get this information or a phone number by calling the stations helpline, this is often open from 10am to 4pm and unavailable to many people working.

As I see it, there are two ways around this. Give each show a blog, and at the end of every show simply list what happened, with links, guest names and phone numbers. This is extremely simple to put into place and easy for presenters or producers to manage. The other is to use a CMS and create an archive of information about every show. This might seem overkill but so many station websites are plastered in banners for the local shopping centre and dealership, with very limited information about the shows themselves, apart from a presenter Q & A.

I’ll be writing about this again soon - I think the new community stations could really shine with well designed, accessible and informative websites. Personally, I’d be very happy to volunteer a day a week (or few hours a day) on a community radio website.

I’ve decided to concentrate on all things technology and web related here, and move my personal stuff off to Twitter and Tumblr. The nature of those platforms demands the short posts, which will hopefully help me concentrate on designing and Ruby on Rails - two areas I really want to get into - and spending more time on web and tech related topics here.

My tumblelog is located at jmsbrrg.com. I’ll probably update it at least once a day, and having thought about tumblr (hosted) or gelato (self-hosted), tumblr won for the features and being able to post easily from a mobile. I’m away in Berlin in September and hope to do lots of mobile blogging with photos and audio, and plan to try a few different platforms out.

I think most web developers / designers have worked with at least one eCommerce platform. Up to now, the choice has been fairly good and many, many stores run on Zen Cart or osCommerce. The thing is, a lot seem to look the same, and the majority of individual stores don’t always seem to be treated with the love and care of some others on entry level paid platforms.

Personally, I really like the open source platforms because it brings new and interesting products online and allows owners of small High Street stores to join the online retailers. It works best when the products are unique mind; there must be 100’s of electronics stores online.

I’ve just been reading through the website for Magento - a new open source eCommerce platform. A few things stick out at first glance. The main developers actually develop very good eCommerce sites at the moment, and they talk about online stores not being a cookie-cutter experience.

As for the administration area, the screenshots and features look excellent. I can’t wait to download Beta 1 and start developing an example website with it.

I’ve been thinking of how I can post pictures, videos and short text snippets from my notebook and mobile phone whilst away. I’d like to use this blog to concentrate on comment on the articles and podcasts and anything else exciting, so it’ll all be personal stuff. Looks like tumblr is the answer.

This also links in with the research I’ve been doing for the blogging episodes of the WebKanix podcast. Should you go with a hosted service like Typepad or WordPress.com, or consider hosting Movable Type or WordPress yourself. I have really mixed feelings at the moment.

My project management is hosted on GoPlan, yet I host all my blogs on hosting I control. I put all my photos on Flickr (as opposed to a gallery here), use Google Analytics and am now really excited about having a Tumblelog to hold the personal stuff. The thing is, I’m not sure whether to go with tumblr (and how to link that in with a domain, or leave it on their domain) or whether to go with gelato cms which I can host.

I think the doubt comes from the content and where it is. If something happened to my Flickr account, I have all my photos anyway and can just upload them somewhere else. I have (very basic) log analysis tools for raw data if I can’t access Analytics, and losing GoPlan wouldn’t be the end of the world. But in two years time (if I post once a day) almost 700 entries of text, quotes, links and other posts might be out of my control if I wanted to put it somewhere else.

At the moment I can’t draw a conclusion. I’ll try out tumblr and gelato over the next fortnight and see which I prefer (if tumblr is good enough for Kevin Rose it should be a no brainer, really). As far as blogs go, I think self-hosted is always best. You can reap the benefits from all those inbound links and even if you use Blogger for the actual authoring, you can have it FTP’d automatically to your site.

Just checking a SkypeIn number, it seems callers were getting a busy tone.

To fix this, open up Skype and go to Tools, Options, then choose Privacy on the left hand side. Change the ‘Allow SkypeIn calls from’ setting to be ‘known numbers’, and Save. Go to Tools, Options and Privacy again, change it to ‘anyone’ and save.

Your SkypeIn number should now work.

A post on Mashable after the Skype outage last week - Skype Comes Back, Do You Still Trust It?.

Yes - Around 220 million users are signed up with Skype, and at the moment around 7 million of them are online. For the last few years that I’ve used Skype I’ve never had a problem like the one that occurred over the weekend, and the reason for it is explained here: What Happened on August 16.

When you consider what’s in the package for free, or a reasonable fee, it’s not half bad. Chatting with or calling contacts, setting up conference calls with others on Skype and video calling is free. Extra services mean you can dial landlines (saving a packet, in my experience), enable land-liners to call you on a normal phone number, setup call forwarding and a cool voicemail service for a very low price.

This week alone I’ve setup an account for the podcast, where listeners can call on Skype or a Durham area telephone number and leave a message. On my own account I’ve created a local SkypeIn number for a client so they can speak to me as if I’m next door, even if we’re in different countries. When I’m away - even abroad - I can be reached on the same number without additional expense for either party.

However, an outage like the one on Thursday can be a real inconvenience, but might point to an over-reliance on something that’s essentially free for the majority of users. I have a landline or mobile number for my contacts, and could have called them without any problems. If I was doing it every day I might look at override numbers.

Comparisons made with traditional voice services and analysis of quality are fair enough. A Skype call I made today had the most atrocious quality I’ve ever heard - even when no one was talking it sounded someone like fiddling with a shortwave radio. Worth bearing in mind thought that the big telco’s aren’t without their own problems.

One I have to add to the list, unfortunately - this bug means I can’t change my status back to ‘Available’ after I changed it to ‘Not Available’ when busy over the weekend, after constant restarts and trying fixes.

For the value for money and cool services Skype offers, I’ll definitely be sticking around. The benefits outweigh any problems I’ve experienced in a few years. If there was a way just to buy a highspeed internet service and do away with line rental I’d be at the front of the queue. Primarily because my phone never rings, but also because Skype provides a more flexible and convenient service at a fraction of the price.

Twitter is a free social networking service which works with small messages. You might use it as a very brief blog, or to develop a webapp with considering the cool tie-in with SMS messages.

Getting a message out is pretty easy - you can do it from GTalk or Jabber, log into twitter.com, or the really cool one - send a SMS message to the Twitter number. So many providers give an allocation of free text messages (an Orange pay as you go SIM pack on my desk has 300 free texts a month) that you can update several times a day and not pay for it.

Curiosity got the best of me, so I signed up, made a test update and then placed some code in the sidebar here. I took the JavaScript badge offered on the site and crowbarred it into the existing XHTML code for the sidebar, and updates are shown under the flickr thumbnails on the right.

I’m really excited by this - and it’s got me thinking about all the possibilities. You can subscribe and follow me on Twitter itself, via RSS and if I make an update you get an SMS message. And if that wasn’t enough, you can make yourself appear popular by following an often updated Sky News and getting a lot of text messages.

You can follow me on Twitter, read this excellent introduction, find out if (and why) you should care, or consider the alternatives like Jaiku which looks very cool too.

Update 15:33 - I’ve been thinking about different ways to use Twitter to send SMS notifications on all sorts of sites. Users obviously have to be signed up to Twitter and following you, but these look pretty interesting. WordPress plugin to send a status update when you create or edit a post - Twitter Updater. If you’re using another blog, or maybe want to send any RSS feed (like Podcasts, press releases, updates to an event, etc) you can do so with twitterfeed.

Wow - it feels like I’ve spent months researching and planning the WebKanix podcast. Having thought the equipment and technical side might be tricky, it’s actually turned out to be quite simple.

The WebKanix Podcast will be a weekly podcast on building and maintaining an effective website for a small business. I plan to include a few news items, some questions or comments, maybe an interview and the main portion - the weekly tutorial on building a website from scratch. I won’t be going into too much technical detail, but will give an introduction to the topic, a short tutorial, extended details and finally resources to continue learning.

The first podcast episode will be released in the next few weeks and focus on domains.

In researching I’ve lost count of the number of podcasts I’ve been listening to, and learnt a few things along the way.

• Weekly is the right schedule. Not many podcasts are released monthly or fortnightly. When dealing with information on building or implementing a project monthly is too long between episodes. There are more doing 2 or more podcasts a week, and I’d say this is too often. It’s good to have a life outside of work, and I know I don’t have two or three opportunities a week to listen to the same podcast.
• Twenty to thirty minutes is a good length. I’ve listened to a few podcasts that are 5 or 6 minutes long and after the introduction and closing notes, there’s not much time for content. Twenty to thirty minutes isn’t mind numbing, but gets in enough decent information to take away and use.
• Maintain the same style. I’ve been listening to a podcast and gone back and downloaded a few previous episodes. The first few had no intro at all, the ones in the middle had a long loop sequence with a voiceover by the host, and the most recent a different loop and voiceover. The numbering convention even changed. Getting a decent loop and voiceover is an upfront expense, but many sound good without any at all. Refreshing the sound can be a good idea, but don’t do it more than once in a year, and give a heads up in podcasts which preceed the new sound.
• Be consistent with ID3 tags. These are the tags on MP3’s that give details such as the artist, album, year and comments. One podcast I’ve been listening to for a while comes up as four different artists on my mobile. It’s not really frustrating, but every time I have to go down into an artist and back up until I find the latest one. Even if there’s a guest or co-host, decide on a podcast name or put the co-host under the comments.
• Sound quality is also important. I found a podcast about voice and presentation techniques which looked great from the description, but the audio was so loud and distorted it didn’t sound much better than a shouting caller on a talk radio phone in. I recorded the same sentance again and again until it sounded comparable to other well established podcasts - the simplest tweaks on a mixer desk or software can make a difference.

I don’t want this to be a negative post, or think that I won’t make mistakes on my podcast, but with literally thousands and thousands of podcasts being published these small points can really make a difference in retaining listeners.

Now the Skype issues are solved I’ve set up a SkypeIn number with Skype Voicemail. If you have a question or something that should be covered before the site launches, you can call in now.

I’ve been thinking about blogging platforms a lot lately. There’s many posts around at the moment about choosing the right one, but not all get into much depth.

There’s a good roundup on Mashable of the features between the two most popular self-hosted CMS’s. Movable Type 4 was released this week and everything I’ve seen so far looks great. Having setup this blog with WordPress though, I can’t recommend it enough.

Mashable: MovableType 4 vs. Wordpress 2.2

In preparation for launching WebKanix I wanted to arrange some more reliable hosting. I’ve been reading about MediaTemple for a while and last week listened to the call/podcast over at TechCrunch. If there’s anything I’ve really grown to value from a hosting company it’s good support. The reputation (mt) have for support is excellent, and with folk like Jeffrey Zeldman using (mt) it became a no-brainer. I updated the nameservers on webkanix.com last night and so far so good.

The GridService (gs) seemed like the right one to go for now. Signing up is very easy and an email arrived instantly to explain that my order was pending. I waited a day before calling to enquire and the CSA sent through everything I needed within minutes. The difference implied with the name is that unlike shared hosting where a “bad neighbour” can have an effect on the speed of your website, the website is spread across hundreds of servers in tandem. This hopefully means you won’t go down under the Digg effect and that there’s no single point of failure.

In short, there’s 100GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth, on which you can host 100 sites. I’m thinking about launching a small web application in Ruby and am looking forward to testing it on (mt). Usage is measured in Grid Performance Units (GPU). The way this is displayed is very good, with a graph and large simple numbers explaining the usage. You also get a table of the top scripts and files. In this billing cycle I’ve used none, but I really don’t expect to exceed the allotted 1,000.

Once logging in first impressions are that it’s a little disorienting. Everything is there, but it’s organised very differently to anything like cPanel.

The panel itself looks amazing and it’s great to see an overview of domains and support requests with common tasks on the right hand side. Everything is well designed like this and it’s a pleasant departure from WHM when managing multiple domains. Adding a domain is easy, but managing domains requires a slightly different mindset if you’ve been a long time user of cPanel or Plesk.

Adding an email address is accessed via ‘Manage this Server’, and chosing the domain for the email address is done by using ‘all domains on this site’ or selecting just the domain you wish to use. Managing databases is fairly easy, but there is a single username and password for all of them, and you must specify the server shown in your welcome email rather than ‘localhost’. Once you get used to a different way of managing domains and their services (such as adding a subdomain as a new domain with its own services) it really is easy.

I’ve been impressed with the service so far. Everything has been quick to load and I’ve not seen any downtime. The only frustrating point has been with MX records on my main domain. In the past I’ve been able to setup email accounts on a server, then change the nameservers to point to the new server. Hopefully this gives as few problems with lost emails as possible. Apparantly it doesn’t work like that on (mt) and I can’t enable email until the MX records point to the grid.

Update 17/08/07: I checked this morning and still hadn’t had a response to my support ticket. I tried enabling mail again and it worked, although I’m now just using IMAP and not forwarding to GMail.

Update 19/08/07: MediaTemple did reply to my ticket, but only to say the problem appeared to be fixed and that I should contact them if there’s any further problems. It took 19 hours to have a reply, but I’m happy the issue is fixed and I haven’t encountered this problem when adding other domains since.