Here are some of my photos from Amsterdam.The full set can be found on Flickr.

The city centre is full of waterways.

The red light district in the day.

Buildings come right to the edge of the canals.

Amsterdam Central train station.

Cycling is very popular in Amsterdam - mainly because it is mostly flat.

Bikes were locked up everywhere there was space.

Amsterdam is famous for its red light district and its openness to sex.

This seedy looking alleyway was part of the tourist experience.

Shops in the red light district.

Club Cockring.

In the UK we have the lake district - in Amsterdam the cleverly cropped rape district.

I wasn't sure what type of massage this was.

Public transport was excellent.

Even the monuments are shaped in interesting ways.

Interesting architecture.

The full set can be found on Flickr.

Here are some of my photos from Bonfire night at Weston Park. (Click to enlarge)

I found this little nasty in my garden!

On Sunday disaster struck, my hard drive corrupted and OS X wouldn't boot. I feared the worst but had been backing up for the past two years using OS X Time Machine. Could it be as simple as restoring from backup to a new drive?

My first job was to install a new hard drive, this is easier said then done in the all in one iMac. Fortunately this video from camodesto went through step by step, first removing the glass front, then the aluminium case and then the screen. Finally you can replace the hard drive, I opted for an upgrade to a 1TB drive.

After booting from the Snow Leopard DVD I created a partition on the new hard drive then restored from Time Machine. The process took around seven hours to copy my 300gig of data from the External drive.

When I rebooted my Mac had been restored to 5pm on Sunday, 90mins before it had died. All my files were restored, even my Firefox tabs were saved.

With the changes Facebook have made over the last week its more important than ever to write targetted updates to reach your friends. The members home page is changing from its Twitter style display everything feed to a news feed that shows more relevant and popular posts.

A range of metrics are being used to determine popular posts including number of comments, number of 'likes' and how much you interact with a given member. Its almost Facebook trying to become more like Digg for your friends (you could become your own MrBabyMan). The idea hopefully is to get away from a news feed full of farmville updates and desperate crys for attention.

This does mean that when writing status updates for them to be noticed they need to be well constructed and targetted to your friends. Could this mean people post less status updates? It's unlikely however your more likely to see relevant posts.

The ImAFish Facebook page has been a huge success though it is more important than ever to add content that its fans will want to read.

For the past four months I have been developing a new service called Shopinsky. I've been excited to talk about the site (and may have let slip a day early by joining the Facebook group) however had to wait until launch before I could blog about it.

The idea is simple, each town in the country has a Shopinsky Page, businesses can join Shopinsky to be part of their local town. They can post messages via the website or sms that are distributed on the site, to the local Twitter account, a RSS feed and a daily mailing list.

For businesses Shopinsky offers a great way to connect to local consumers through social networking services. Building up a following on sites such as Twitter or your own blog is a lot of work, the idea with Shopinsky is that audience is already there for you, all you have to do is send your updates/offers.

For shoppers the site offers a great way to find out about local businesses, offers and freebies. We have made it as easy as possible to interact with Shopinsky and understand that people want content delivered to them rather than having to search for it. Therefore people can bookmark their towns page, subscribe to the RSS feed in their news reader, follow the local town on Twitter or subscribe to a daily email. 

Shopinsky is also great for tourists who want to find out what is on offer before visiting a town, they can easily see local restaurants, shops and services all from the towns page.

The site is based on Drupal 6x and heavily uses CCK, Imagecache, Views and a number of custom made modules. Where possible I've tried to keep to the Drupal api's and systems. For example messaging uses the Drupal comments system, categories uses Drupal Taxonomy and profiles are built from content types and custom fields.

By using Drupal as the starting blocks we have managed to save months (if not years) of development and adding new functionality is a much easier process.

Find out more on www.shopinsky.co.uk

Here are some photos from my recent trip to Liverpool.

The Albert dock, restored as a tourist attraction in the 80s.

The albert dock is on the bank of the mersey.

Boat trip around the dock.

Construction work in Liverpool with (what I think) is the Royal Liver building in the background.

Liverpool Cathedral in the distance.

The Liverpool One shopping center.

The address reads: Everton Two, Liverpool One

Full set of pictures on Flickr.