Web Development by Alistair Robinson

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E-commerce for Small Business in The UK: A Starting Point For Web Developers


May 22nd, 2010 7 Comments

NOTE: see the comments for updates about how this went in the end.
I think I’ve unearthed a conspiracy. In the wonderful world of the world-wide web (that’s WWWWW for short), with so much information available, and so many companies selling online, surely there must be a collection of standard procedures for implementing an online shop, and reliable sources of information covering them? Apparently not. How else to explain this except an evil conspiracy? In particular, an evil conspiracy against web designers and developers.
This post is drawn from an e-mail that I sent to a tech savvy client, a small business owner. The email summarized their options for e-commerce, in the specific context of the UK, and it was the result … read on »

Wordpress Woes and Upcoming Redesign


February 26th, 2010 No Comments

Update (March 15th): Since writing this the redesign and hosting move have both happened, and things seem to be running quite smoothly. And this time I installed Akismet rather than WP Spam Free to deal with the spam.
After my last post, in which I briefly sang the praises of Wordpress, I became increasingly troubled by the horribly slow page load times of this blog, so I spent an hour or two last night trying to speed things up. It’s a while since I installed WP Super Cache, and all this time I’ve been thinking that my troubles were over. I even tried pretending that the occasions when it took 10 seconds to load a page were just freak occurrences, only … read on »

Web Development and Chopping Garlic


December 2nd, 2009 1 Comment

For this post it was a toss-up between:
1. My observations on Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (boiling down to my realization that I’m a tangle of complexes, but also that I’m actually doing alright and won’t be running to an analyst any time soon)
2. A vague and geeky ramble over the broken, scarred and unstable terrain of web development.
Since moving this blog over to my website, I’m conscious I may be losing those who enjoyed such posts as Sweaty Rectangle and My 25-year-old Earworm, but the geeky ramble won out this time. Bear with me though: I am large, I contain multitudes.
Though I’ve been doing web development off and on for ten years, I’ve never been as enthusiastic about it … read on »

The Black Sheep Blog and More Ted Hughes


November 13th, 2009 1 Comment

I am the black sheep of my flock,
I stand alone at field’s edge.
Out here my waking hours I spend,
Chewing a hole in the hedge.
I am the outcast of this flock.
When you are gathered together,
I spend my days tied up by a rope,
Seeking an end to my tether.
Black sheep, baa baa baa
etc.
I’m reminded of these lines, from Julian Cope’s “Black Sheep Song,” because my blog has been the black sheep of the family around here, sitting around within my site but with a completely different style and lacking a common navigation which might let people know they were actually on the alistairrobinson.co.uk site.
Well now it has returned to the flock: I turned my alistairrobinson.co.uk style into a Wordpress theme, so now … read on »


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