Month of October, 2008

I took these photos whilst the sun was setting last week at about 6:30pm (before the clocks changed). The first one I've run through Photomatix to enhance some of the colours.

Franchise Gator is a UK based website that allows you to look for franchise opportunities within a range of sectors. Their front page is split into clear sections allowing you to browse franchises by industry, location, work style (e.g. working from home or from an office) or by investment.

Franchises start from £5000 making it easy for anyone to start their own business. Each franchise has a clear description of what is involved, background information about the company, costs and contact information. Within the search functionality you can select multiple opportunities, the request list follows you down the page allowing you to see which opportunities you have selected. Once you are happy with your list you can request further information.

Finding the right Franchise, UK is not always a simple process and you might not see what you want straight away; Fortunately Franchise Gator can email you weekly with new and recommended opportunities.

The website has a clean look and care has been taken into making it easy to use. The content accelerators made available such as search and the 'franchise selector' make it very quick and easy to browse the site. Franchise Gator is a member of the IFA (International Franchise Association).

ImAFish is pleased to launch their latest website - 12stix.com. The site details technology fixes and answers for Windows XP, Server 2003, Mac OS X, Drupal 5 & 6, CSS and PHP.

Ben Powell and Pete White are using their day to day experience in I.T. support to post their common and interesting fixes discovered in their jobs. 

Many thanks to Tom Carey for designing the 12 stix logo.

Last week I discussed my latest purchase - the new Acer Aspire One. I first installed Windows XP however found that it ran fairly slowly. Applications such as Firefox were especially bad taking upto 30 seconds to load certain web pages. Firefox would often go into 'jelly' mode where the application would hang for 5-10 seconds at a time.

After a couple of days with XP I reinstalled the default OS, Linspire. This ran a lot quicker than XP however left much to be desired. Even after performing several tweaks and enabling advanced mode I still felt that the Aspire One could do a lot more.

At the weekend I purchased a Three USB mobile broadband package for £5/month (check out the deals forum). This worked fine in Linspire however a number of things including the speed were frustrating me.

I decided to slipstream a copy of Windows XP using nlite, the application allows you to remove any unwanted components of XP, install drivers and service packs. I created a Windows XP ISO with all the drivers I needed, service packs, IE7 and removed all the unwanted parts of the OS.

The Acer Aspire One 110 comes with an 8gig solid state disk (SSD), while this is as fast as a hard drive to read from, writing is considerably slower. When viewing a web page in Firefox it caches all the files on the disk, this slow writing process causes the 5-10 seconds of jelly mode.

The fix for this is to create a RAM Drive, this tricks the OS into thinking part of the ram is a hard drive. You can then set your Firefox profile to cache files here removing the performance issues of writing to the SSD.

Full instructions on how to do this are available on:

http://texhex.blogspot.com/2008/09/mozilla-firefox-in-mode.html

Since reinstalling my slipstreamed version of XP and setting up a RAM Drive the whole laptop is a lot quicker to use and Firefox does not experience any long hang ups.

I'm happy to announce that the Drupal port of Comment Luv is now available for Drupal 6.

It can be downloaded from the Comment Luv page of ImAFish or directly from the Drupal site.

http://www.imafish.co.uk/commentluv

http://drupal.org/project/commentluv

Comment Luv for Drupal 5x has also been updated fixing a number of issues from the initial release.

Many thanks to Lomz for his hard work in updating the module.

When someone posts a comment on your site Comment Luv attempts to find their latest blog post and add the title and link to the bottom of their comment. Comment Luv is great for attracting people to comment on your blogs and a great way to build back links to your site.