Friday, November 16, 2007

Friday - crunch time

So today's Friday and saga of Stacey's rejected  resignation is about to climax, I don't know about you but I'm excited ;)

Who thinks she'll cave in and accept their silly offer? And what'll that wizard be I wonder ;)

Tune in tomorrow for an update!

I don't think she'll cave in, I think she'll stick at it...

Friday - crunch time

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Tags: Expanding Your Business

 Thursday, November 15, 2007

Amy Winehouse - the Birmingham gig

Ever since Amy Winehouse hit the UK music scene Stacey, her father and I have been wanting to see her live because there's no doubt she'll be entertaining so when the opportunity to go see her just down the road from here came up there was no turning it down!

If you're like me and don't have enough time to follow the latest celebrity gossip headlines you'll not know that her husband has been jailed, I'm not entirely sure why still but I think it's got something to do with her beating someone up and then him trying to pay them off to drop the court case. Anyhow I digress.

I spent the entire week looking forward to the gig as we don't get to see many gigs (the last was a superb gig by Jack Johnson in the NEC) though despite my celebrity news ignorance even I knew the gig would be controversial as the first time I saw her on Jools Holland's show she was wasted out of her mind swaying on the stage and the second time she was just as wasted at Glastonbury but I wasn't expecting what we got.

After turning up 40minutes or so late for her performance she was clearly in pain. She started rushing through her set, from past sets I've seen her perform she tends to introduce her band before starting but that didn't happen and even her songs seemed to be rushed. Within two songs I had a feeling was wrong.

After 4 or 5 songs she stormed off stage without any explanation and we were left wondering whether that was it or not -a few people got up and left but after a while she came back on stage and started again but she was in tears though most of it. I can't say her words were overly legible and at times it sounded like a bag of cats.

It was one of those historic gigs that was awkward to be at but I'm glad I was even if it was just to see what everyone was going to talk about the next day. I really hope she sorts herself out (or as much as possible!) but I really disagree with her management who IMNSHO were out of order getting her up on stage.

If you ever get the chance to go see Amy Winehouse I really would because the band alone is worth seeing and her two dancers come backup singers are great. If you want to see photos of her gig you can check out my photo album of the gig here.

Amy Winehouse - the Birmingham gig

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Tags: General | Random

 Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Day 2 - Did she or didn't she?

Ok, so the attempt at drama failed! Believe it or not Stacey had the guts to do it, she handed in her resignation so it's only a matter of months/weeks before she's working with me full time right? Well we're not sure...

Turns out that when she handed in her letter of resignation her boss refused to accept it (being the diligent worker that she is I can completely understand that!) and instead he told her that he was going to put it in his drawer and not mention it to anyone to give her time to re-think and discuss it on Friday.

So the question is, will Stacey give in and chose the route of more money and/or less working hours over working with me? Well the suspense is killing me -probably more than you but I doubt she'll stay as she's already made up her mind and has started to get excited.

As far as the risk element goes -which is what I think would put her off- she's realised:

1. There's enough work for her to do here
2. If there isn't she can get another job
3. She's chartered which means companies are screaming out for her skills so she can do agency work...

All good in my books but we'll have to wait until Friday to find out!

I can only imagine how the conversation went:

Stacey: "Please accept my resignation, here's a letter explaining why"

Boss: "No, sorry, I won't. Nope, no way, you can't"

Stacey: "Well I am, it's not you, it's me"

Boss: "Tell you what, lets hide this letter and pretend it wasn't written, I won't tell if you don't"

Stacey: "I'm still leaving"

Boss: "Tell me what you want that'll make you stay -more money? Fewer hours? Less work..."

Stacey: "Nothing, I'm leaving"

Boss: "Well, have a think, lets not rush into anything"

Stacey: "I've been thinking about it for months, I'm leaving"

Boss: "Lets discuss it on Friday, have a think about what you want/need and I'll sort it"

Stacey: "Fine whatever makes it easier for you. I'm still leaving"

Day 2 - Did she or didn't she?

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Tags: Business | Expanding Your Business | The Site Doctor

 Tuesday, November 13, 2007

TOP SECRET - Today's the day!

Ok so today's quite an exciting -and pretty scary day. After a few months of speculating, Stacey has finally decided to hand in her notice and come and work with me full time. It's scary because although I know it'll make her much happier and drive the business forward but it also means that the business will now be the bread winner (main household earner) so there's no more time for messing around!

I think it'll be quite an interesting time both for us and for others worried about doing the same sort of thing so I'm going to try and keep a fairly up-to-date diary of the events, trials and tribulations here.

The main concern from Stacey's point of view is that as it's a web development business she can't add anything to it which I personally think is tosh as there is a lot of non-specialised work involved in running a business which she will be able to do and there are many paid aspects of our work that she can get involved with as well.

Anyway, here goes, lets just hope she remembers to hand in her notice ;)

TOP SECRET - Today's the day!

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Tags: Business | Business Start-up Advice | Expanding Your Business | The Site Doctor

 Monday, November 12, 2007

A show of hands -why are you in business?

As part of the company's branding overhaul, I'm currently reviewing The Site Doctor's business plan to make sure it still fits in with where I want the business to go and what I would like to achieve and Stacey (our latest and greatest employee yet) asked the simple question "Why are you doing it?".

It's a good question and one I wanted a witty but honest response from but I couldn't think much further than "To make money" and "To improve our lifestyle" -both of which are perfectly valid I know but I would have liked something like "To make the world a better place through a variety of events aimed at improving people's outlook on live", complete tosh of course but hey.

So why am I in business? Why did I setup The Site Doctor -other than because I felt it was my calling and a quicker way to a better life? It's certainly not the money otherwise I would have given up a long time ago and it's certainly not the social status being a web developer brings so why do I do it? Personally part of it for me I think is to prove people wrong, this isn't the main motivator and I realise may not be the best reason but a part of me wants to be able to show all those people that told me I was mad when I first started talking about it they were wrong and they're the silly ones for suggesting otherwise...

Are you in business yourself? I'd love to hear why you do it, why you get and work hard -often for little initial reward. What drives you?

A show of hands -why are you in business?

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Tags: Business | Business Start-up Advice | The Site Doctor

 Friday, November 09, 2007

Growing your business - Simon Farnsworth from Floors-2-Go

Recently, I've had the opportunity to go to a couple of interesting talks on business courtesy of CIMA and every time I've jumped at the opportunity as you never know what nugget of information you may pick up.

Last week I went to a talk by Simon Farnsworth on how to grow a business -something I'm very interested in at the moment. Simon Farnsworth was the CEO of Floors-2-Go and helped the company grow from a small family run business (which I found out was started in the West Midlands) to a PLC and then finally to a management buy out in 2006.

The talk itself was interesting buy not quite what I was expecting (which seems to be the theme of many of these talks at the moment) as it focused mainly on his career since leaving school rather than how to grow a business but it was non-the-less interesting.

One thing that he said amazed him was the fact that many of the businesses he has got involved with didn't even have cash flow forecasts before he started. He said this to a room of chartered accountants, most of whom were aghast (as to was he) to hear this however I for one have rarely had an up-to-date cash flow forecast and in fact it's only been within the past 6 months that I even bothered working on one. Why do I not have a cash flow forecast I hear you ask? Well that's simple; time.

A cash flow forecast is something that as a sole trader you don't really worry about if you've got a good head for figures you should have a pretty clear idea of what's in, coming in, and going out so the sums are easy. Ok as you grow your business and have other employees working with you the going out part may be a little less under your control but you should still have a good idea of what's going on so the time required to keep an up-to-date cash flow forecast is better spent else where i.e. making sure the "coming in" part is growing as large as possible ;)

I can understand why an accountant finds it incredible that an SME doesn't have a cash flow forecast as it is something that's very useful and more importantly allows you to see how much money you can draw from the business. Perhaps it's something you should look at doing once a week or month alongside saving your tax ;)

One thing I felt sorry for Simon about though was how he talked about the business. Since the management buy out he has been removed from the position of CEO and told us about how he had been made to remove nearly the complete board of directors because when you remove a company from being a PLC you have to replace all the non-exec board members (another thing I didn't know). Simon has clearly put his life and sole into the business only to be thrown to the wayside without even so much as a thank you.

There were a number of amusing ditties however from the talk including how Floors-2-Go managed to acquire the renowned orange Ferrari that I've seen around a few times (these were taken at the cinema):

Or how he had an ASBO against him for littering the streets with all the Floors-2-Go balloons and leaflets.

Simon Farnsworth is now CEO of Amber Windows which I couldn't place at the time but I realised there is a big bill board just up the road from here with it on. He seems a nice chap and I hope he can move on from Floors-2-Go but I get the feeling that'll take some time.

Growing your business - Simon Farnsworth from Floors-2-Go

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Tags: Business | CIMA | The Site Doctor

 Saturday, November 03, 2007

Umbraco and Ghost/Cached/Deleted pages appearing in menu

I'm currently investigating a new Open Source ASP.Net CMS system called Umbraco. It looks very promising as it can be fully accessible and has full support for XHTML among many other interesting features. I met with a couple of the guys that are developing the system in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they've got big plans so keep an eye on it.

Anyway yesterday while setting up the new The Site Doctor site on Umbraco I ran into an issue where by I had "broken" the menu. Basically I had deleted the template from the system which should have deleted all copies of the pages that use that template but instead a cache remained somewhere. I ran through a number of steps to re-create the cache but nothing worked.

If you run into the same issue as I did, follow these steps:

1. Find out the ID of the page in question (easiest way is just to add the ID to the output of the menu XSLT)
2. Search the database for the ID using the T-SQL I posted in "How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database"
3. Download and install a Unicode and UTF-8 search program such as Text Workbench and search for the ID (I only found it in /data/Umbraco.config)
4. Reset the applications cache -the easiest way to do this is to simply re-upload the web.config file

That should sort it :)

Umbraco and Ghost/Cached/Deleted pages appearing in menu

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Tags: ASP.Net | Software | Umbraco

 Friday, November 02, 2007

How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database

Today I had an issue with Umbraco and a copy of a deleted page appearing in the menu, I'll post how I fix it if I ever do find the answer but while trying to track the issue down I came across a really useful piece of T-SQL from Narayana Vyas Kondreddi (Vyas) that searches each table in a database and then each field in the table. I had to expand it to include integers etc but all credit to him! For reference here's a copy of the code:

Search all tables and fields in a SQL Server Database

CREATE PROC SearchAllTables
(
    @SearchStr nvarchar(100)
)
AS

begin...end

BEGIN
    -- Copyright © 2002 Narayana Vyas Kondreddi. All rights reserved.
    -- Purpose: To search all columns of all tables for a given search string
    -- Written by: Narayana Vyas Kondreddi
    -- Site: http://vyaskn.tripod.com
    -- Tested on: SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000
    -- Date modified: 28th July 2002 22:50 GMT
    CREATE TABLE #Results (ColumnName nvarchar(370), ColumnValue nvarchar(3630))

    SET NOCOUNT ON

    DECLARE @TableName nvarchar(256), @ColumnName nvarchar(128), @SearchStr2 nvarchar(110)
    SET  @TableName = ''
    SET @SearchStr2 = QUOTENAME('%' + @SearchStr + '%','''')

    WHILE @TableName IS NOT NULL

    begin...end

    BEGIN
        SET @ColumnName = ''
        SET @TableName = 
        (
            SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME))
            FROM     INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
            WHERE         TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'
                AND    QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) > @TableName
                AND    OBJECTPROPERTY(
                        OBJECT_ID(
                            QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME)
                             ), 'IsMSShipped'
                               ) = 0
        )

        WHILE (@TableName IS NOT NULL) AND (@ColumnName IS NOT NULL)

        begin...end    

        BEGIN
            SET @ColumnName =
            (
                SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME))
                FROM     INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
                WHERE         TABLE_SCHEMA    = PARSENAME(@TableName, 2)
                    AND    TABLE_NAME    = PARSENAME(@TableName, 1)
                    AND    DATA_TYPE IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar', 'int', 'decimal')
                    AND    QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME) > @ColumnName
            )
    
            IF @ColumnName IS NOT NULL

            begin...end

            BEGIN
                INSERT INTO #Results
                EXEC
                (

                    'SELECT ''' + @TableName + '.' + @ColumnName + ''', LEFT(' + @ColumnName + , 3630) + @TableName + ' (NOLOCK) ' +

                    'SELECT ''' + @TableName + '.' + @ColumnName + ''', LEFT(' + @ColumnName + ', 3630) 
                    FROM ' + @TableName + ' (NOLOCK) ' +

                    ' WHERE ' + @ColumnName + ' LIKE ' + @SearchStr2
                )
            END

        END    

    END

    SELECT ColumnName, ColumnValue FROM #Results
END

How to search every table and field in a SQL Server Database

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Tags: SQL Server