|
A new pet arrived in the household...
The cat's were none too certain... arched
backs and hissing going on [grin]
Click on this picture and you'll get a wee
movie!
It's Laura's new puppy
which was very friendly and was wanting to play with the cats but they
just were not certain. It ran up to Tiger who fled behind me.
It then went up to Lou Lou who hissed and ran half way up the stairs.
The it tried to play with Bandito and she stood her ground but arched back
and hissing. They all watched the wee puppy from afar not sure what
to make of it :-)
I've been working real hard
getting the site complete and thanks to Steve finding me a way to speed
things up managed to complete the site re-design on all 13,000+ pages.
One problem then came up as | got several messages saying that when
printing pages the right hand side of the page wouldn't print. While there
are ways around that it was obvious it was time to find a "Printer
friendly" option. While looking for an option that wouldn't take
days of work I came across a company in the UK that had written a script
but it also looked like they would write others so I got in touch and
explained our problem and they said they could write one for me.
So.. we went ahead and as a result we now have a "Printer friendly" button
on all our pages (except our index page) which is at the top of our left
border. It actually strips out our top, left and bottom borders from
the site and presents a page without them so you can print it out. Of
course we have gone through some testing but having now got what we think
is the final release it should now work on all pages.
We also had a lot of work
on the new site search engine and as the initial indexing takes some hours
we found we had to repeat it a few times to get it all to work the way we
wanted. Finally we got it and with some help from the company tech support
team we had at last a fully working product. I feel this dtSearch
product offers ways of searching not available with engines such as Google
and has some particular benefits when searching for names. Let me
give you an example...
When looking at one of the
MacIntyre pages you find listed alternative spellings of the name...
MacAntire, MacAntyre,
MacEntyre, MacEntire, MacIntear, MacIntire, Macintire, MacIntire, MacIntre,
MacIntyre, Macintyre, Mackintire, MacYntire, McAntire, McAntyre, McEnteer,
McEnteir, McEntire, McEntyre, Mcentire, McIntear, McInteer, McInter,
McInter, McIntier, McIntire, McIntyer, McIntyre, and McItyre.
Well I used the "Phonic
search" option to search for "MacIntyre" and it found all but one of those
spellings. To do a Phonic search you simply add a # sign to the front of
the name e.g. #macintyre. Now that is something that Google and other
search engines just don't offer but when searching for a name it can be
very useful. Mind you that's not to say it's perfect as looking for
Alderson it found loads of "Alter" and as we have quite a few histories
talking about the church there were a lot of them around. That said it's
just one of the features of our new site search engine and so I'm hoping
that everyone will find it useful.
All of this has taken time
and money to develop and while there are still a few things to tidy up
still we're mostly there. I have to say that implementing the Google
Adsense program has in fact paid for all of what we've done so far. So not
only has it purchased a full T1 line of bandwidth for the site but
provided money over the top to purchase software as well as to commission
scripts to be written for us.
Next week I'll be getting a
car to get me around. Steve has an old BMW 5 which just needs new
brakes on it so we're going to do that and give it a general overhaul and
then he's going to sign it over to my new company and then I get to insure
it so I can drive it around the USA. He's promised to give me a
couple of driving lessons! It's actually a manual drive and I've
been driving automatics for the past 11 years so should be fun with that
and driving on the wrong side of the road!
Deb's daughter Jamie, has got herself a new
house so there has been a lot of moving around collecting all the
necessary stuff from friends and family to help her furnish it. Also with
a new baby boy coming in a few months time lots of baby clothes being
collected. Great to see how family and friends all contribute to help out,
an armchair from here, a bed from there, a microwave from somewhere else
and on it goes. So Deb is making lots of trips to gather all the
diverse items to take them over to her. Deb's Dad got a new TV the other
day so he can play his DVD's he got for Christmas so of course the old TV
went to Jamie :-)
Nice also to have old friends getting in touch. Ken of my old Merry Maids
cleaning company sent in an email saying he was enjoying my journals and
tells me he is going to go full time into the travel industry. He's always
done some travel guide work but now he's also got himself a driving
licence for the bus so he can now drive and guide :-) I wish him and
his family all the best in their new venture :-)
Also hear from Ranald MacIntyre who continues
to beta test all our new features for us and keep me up to date with news.
Also heard from David & Shelia by old next door neighbours.
So am I missing Scotland?
Not really but I think it's because I've just been so busy being here and
doing all the upgrades that I really haven't had the chance to dwell on
it. For example we were working on the site to 4am this morning and
I didn't actually get up until 1pm today and am now working again on the
site. It's now 4pm and when I've finished this page I'm off to make
myself some breakfast :-)
It's been very good working with Steve on a
regular day by day basis as we've been able to come up with some great
ideas for the future of our site and other domains we have purchased.
The idea is to gradually move parts of the Electric Scotland site to other
domains but all with our common header. For example we created the
ScotCards.org domain and now when you click on "Postcards" on Electric
Scotland that is where you are sent. The core history will remain on
Electric Scotland but some domains we intend to do some major work with
like ScotFood, ScotMusic and ScotGames. Others will follow as we get
things running. Of course our site search engine is able to index all our
own domains so that will still be a core feature of the site. We
also moved The Flag in the Wind fully onto its own domain of
www.scotsindependent.org and
that means we can better promote their publication but again we're
retained our common header with them as they are part of the family after
all :-) So.. that's a
bit of an update for you and dare some more interesting things will happen
in the week ahead when my new Electric Scotland USA, LLC will be formed
:-) And finally here
is a wee cartoon that Deb gave me which you might like...
 |
