It must have been an amazing project to work on and I’d love to know how it was all done! I think I’m going to pick apart the scripts later!

You can view the whole thing here – The Wilderness Downtown.

Use these files when starting a new project – they are designed to reduce the visual design in any browser to its most basic state.  This will help ease the usual cross browser issues and utter contempt you should hold for Internet Explorer and it’s non-standard html/css rendering!

The geotargeting tool is only a small part of the overall Google Adwords API interface system I’ve been building. As discussed previously on this blog it can be used to add real time parameters to live PPC ads, and now PPC bid projections for individual keywords using Google’s Bid Landscape.

With the improving online technology, broadband speeds, and web development, companies can produce in-depth great looking online catalogues at a smaller cost.  Products, prices and information can be updated at a click of a button without the need to reprint and resend an entirely new issue.  This gives consumers an accurate snapshot of the business at any one time.

Using online marketing channels you can target specific consumer profiles, marketing your products and services to the correct people in the right area. This helps drive up efficiency, decreasing CPC and keeping down marketing spend.

Online offers your business a way to engage with your customers in new and exciting ways from online reviews, to Facebook Fan Pages, even enabling a form of customer service via a Twitter service.  All this (managed well) can act as a great channel to promote your products and services to people who already have an active interest in your business.

I agree that the catalogue is a nice way to present your business, but with tighter marketing budgets and the increasing power of online it’s more viable for a business look to the web than look at the printed page.  Plus, think of all the trees you’d save!

During my university degree between 1997 and 2000 I remember receiving vast amounts of email forwards. Close to around 50 a day I recall! Granted all of my friends and family were just starting to use email and were discovering the beauty of being able to stay in contact without having to handwrite letters, and the delight of forwarding on stories of guys who wrap nettles around their ‘you know whats’, but this email forwarding kept going well into my working career.

So I’m thinking that this drop in receiving vapid emails can be due to one of two reasons. One, I don’t have that many friends who feel I deserve to be part of their “amusing” email chain! Or two, the rise in social networking and the social sharing ability that skips your email inbox going straight to your social network of choice?  For example users can share videos via YouTube posting them straight to their Facebook status feed for friends to view. Twitter gives users the ability to share interesting content with other users and friends with links that direct them straight to the content.

Taking out the ‘third party’ email inbox has increased our ability to share and access information quickly and is now helping keep our inboxes free of blonde jokes and ‘forward or die’ emails. I like it!

For an entire year I had a completely inconsistant broadband connection, at it’s peak it reached a speed of 3Mbps – but I only ever saw this peak for about a total 3 weeks of the entire year!  Most of the time because of the inconsistant connection I had my service restricted to around 14kbps! Sometimes it was even as low as 4kbps! I could walk the data to the exchange quicker than my broadband line could deliver data!  My broadband internet connection was actually worse than my old dial up modem in the 90′s!

Trying to solve this issue over the whole year I frequently ran into the brick wall of incompetence which is BT’s customer service.  First of all they spelled my name wrong so they were unable to take money from my bank account because the surnames were different.  I phoned them multiple times asking them to correct it, but after a month or so it always reverted back to the original incorrect spelling. To this day I still receive letters to both surname spellings!

I spent countless hours on the phone to their Indian call center – where you’re lucky if you can understand a word they say, or even luckier if the ‘help’ they always seem to offer of turning your router on and off and replacing your filter works – which it never did.  The end result of these infuriating communications would be that they would log a fault and another department would call me.

A week or so later I would get a call from an Scottish call center who I would beg to arrange a time for an engineer to be sent out.  Now they seem to not want to send engineers out on weekends so they expect you to take a day off work during the week to wait for them to turn up.  This was ridiculous as I had a reoccurring fault that the engineers failed to understand or fix so I would have to spend more time off work waiting for BT engineers than off work on holiday! Still the problem persisted and the Scottish call center guys would get shirty and offer me no further assistance because I didn’t want to take any time off work – BT don’t realise some people need to work to pay rent, bills and to live.

After a year of complete ineptitude I finally gave up on BT and signed up to 3 mobile broadband which has worked brilliantly since day one and has never had a fault.

Leaving BT was another joke and brought to light even further customer service disgrace. The first time I phoned their customer services the agent said I couldn’t cancel my contract without paying them a cancellation fee because I didn’t have a technical fault note against my account (which I did).  I hung up and phoned the same number straight back and got a different person.  I said exactly the same thing that I wanted to cancel my account with BT because their service was terrible and a faulty joke. 2 minutes later my account was canceled and a letter sent through the post confirming this!  Why did my two calls have two completely different outcomes?!?

I opened my mail this month, I received two letters from BT – one saying they owe my £35 from canceling my contract, and another dated two days later saying I owe them £75!?!  Needless to say I’ve canceled all my direct debits with BT and will never EVER deal with them again.

Throughout my time with BT they’ve tried to provide a customer service through social media networks like Facebook and Twitter – these are completely useless and are only a front for BT to try show customers that they actually care.  I never once had a single problem with my broadband service solved by any of these services.  They are just a hollow front of a company trying to jump on social media but provide no real support or service.

All in all I now hate BT from the bottom of my heart.  I would recommend to anyone thinking of signing up to service with them to immediately rethink and go with someone else – 02 won awards for their service and I wish I’d gone with them from the very beginning.

BT is a slow paced company with cripplingly bad systems coupled with disgustingly bad customer service and an inept Indian call centre.  They have caused me endless problems and have actually lost me business because of their terrible service.  BT Fail!!!

Update – Just received a tweet from @BTCare, the ‘Care’ part is laughable.

“@mikerecommend email your a/c# to btcare@bt.com enter your twitter id in the subject field, tweet when sent & I’ll get back to you”

I’ve received these tweets in various forms over the year from BT’Care’ – no matter what you respond with nothing ever happens so I don’t bother anymore as it’s a complete waste of time.

Found this link earlier when did a Twitter search for ‘BT Broadband’ and in the results (which were mostly if not all negative) I found this link to an audio clip of comedian Marcus Brigstocke and his issues with BT Broadband – very funny (and true)! click here.

Here’s a link to the HTML5 slideshow.  It requires an HTML5 compatible browser such as Chrome or Safari (at the moment) to run all of the examples.

Also, there’s a code playground and tutorials available on the main site here.  It’s all brilliant stuff and I can’t wait to start using some of the examples in real life projects.

I can state now that I’m definitely going to purchase an iPad in the near future.  I’m still undecided about which model to get, but I’m edging towards the 32GB 3G version.  I know 32GB isn’t a huge amount of storage by todays standards but most of my media will be kept on my Linux server and Mac that will act as data hubs for the iPad.  I only need to store media on the iPad that I’ll be consuming within a short time period.  Then it’ll be back to the hub to refresh the content with new stuff.

Onto the haters.  I have no idea why I’ve heard so many people slate the iPad before they’ve even tried to use it.  I’ve heard comments that it’ll be rubbish for work, or you won’t be able to do what you do (design and build websites) on it.  These people don’t have the faintest clue what they are talking about!

The iPad was not designed to replace the desktop, it was not designed to replace a work station or work laptop.  They’ve given it some business type applications, but these essentially will not be used for primary construction of documents and such.  What Apple have done is to explode and invigorate a dormant tablet market with a brilliant product.

They’ve created a product that’s a great media consumption device.  It’s about accessing information quicker than ever before and being able to traverse the information in a intuitive and sexy way! Whether you’re on the move or lounging on your sofa, all you have to do it pick up the iPad and begin.  It’s an e-reader, internet browser, music player, portable tv screen, social communications device, quick play gaming device, and much much more.

It will never replace your computer, but it wasn’t designed to.  It will hopefully however make a large dent in the netbook market.  These terrible underpowered, poor screened, cheap feeling computers that have seen a large market growth in recent years.  Many people also have complained that these computers are nothing like their desktops or standard laptops. Surprise, these too are not designed to replace your work stations. Perhaps these are the same people who moan about the iPad not being able to function like their computers?

You’ll start to see within the next year other companies quickly trying to pedal out their own versions of tablet devices.  No doubt in the rush to capitalised on this refreshed market they will output shoddy imitations where they haven’t spent enough time balancing the software to hardware relationship which Apple does so well.  Just look at all the shoddy iPhone wanna-bes that have been coming out over the last couple of years.

The previous v200909 will still work so there’s no need to update any code yet. However, the updated API contains a few new useful functions.  You can read more here on the Google API blog.

Here’s the full list of what’s new in version v201003 beta:

• ReportService beta: generate reports about the performance of your AdWords campaigns
• Bid simulator: see estimated clicks, cost and impressions corresponding to various Max. CPC bids
• Ad Sitelinks extensions: include up to four additional links in your ads to deeper content on your site
• Phone extensions: add a phone number to your text ads that appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers such as iPhone and Android ads
• Sync for location extensions: synchronize your AdWords location extensions with Google Places (formerly Local Business Center) listings
• MediaService: upload images and icons for location extensions
• Position preference: specify in what position range you’d like your ads to appear
• Target CPA: bid based on the average amount you’d like pay for a conversion
• Carrier and device targeting: target ads to specific mobile carriers and devices
• Category targeting: show placement targeted ads on a set of placements with the same theme
• 1-per-click and many-per-click conversions: get both types of conversion metrics
• A minimum size for bulk mutate jobs

My solution was to come up with a custom built framework with a small footprint and that’s agile enough that I could use it easily for a wide range of projects, from Facebook applications to full blown database driven websites.  So I’ve come up with PphpF or PinkPHPFramework!

It’s based on MCV architecture and PHP object orientated programming which makes each project manageable, extendable, and flexible.  I’ve successfully used it for my Dynamic Adwords tool, an in-house advertising billing and contact application, and two Facebook applications.  It continues to evolve as I start on new projects and find the need to extend the framework adding more useful functions to help me.

The beauty of this framework is that it’s getting more and more useful as the projects go on.  Eventually I should have a product that’s pretty awesome!

The next step of the development of this framework is to finalise the syntax, build an install script, and create a version 1.0 within an SVN repo.  I plan to document the framework and keep progress updates running on this site.