FiddyP

Some of you may know that I run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop in Lancaster, UK with my partner and her brother. My role is strictly ‘front-of-house’, customer service, chief geekster and go-and-get-stuff-from-Preston’er (among other things like doing the weekly books and tracking the cost of goods sold etc)

I can’t for the life of me go in the kitchen where it’s all fire and wok but, I can do all the other great things like come up with great marketing ideas, develop online solutions for advertising, answer the phone and understand the myriad of different accents you get when you run a delivery orientated business in a two University town.

Pretty Vs Useful

One of the things that was inevitable for me to do was, The Website.

Now, I class myself as a developer not a designer. The difference? (continue reading…)

I’ve managed to get some major bookends done for some projects I have on the go and I’m really looking forward to being able to code for fun again now that I have stabbed the various work monkeys on my back!

However, I can’t get my blogger commentluv sorted until js-kit get their script fully updated. Sometimes it works on js-kit and sometimes it don’t. Sorry to all you google bloggers out there using commentluv but until js-kit have settled into their final script, every change I make is only temporary. Please be patient until they have a final stable comments script and then I can make commentluv work on their system consistently.

***Update***
Apparently there was a minor bug in the blogger Commentluv script that didn’t close the </a> tag in the comment which prevented the comments from synchronizing. That has been fixed.

If you are having issues with commentluv not showing then please visit your js-kit settings page and enable the expand “leave a comment” so your page shows the form instead of the user having to click the link to show it.

Another company to update their comment system is Typepad. Their new comment system that allows you to track comments is unfortunately, incompatible with the typepad version of Commentluv. This is due to them not loading the comment form until after the rest of the page has loaded which means commentluv can’t see it when it loads.

I’ll have to figure out some way of pausing the script load until after the comment form appears.

Another monkey on my back was an old project that got canned because a company I was being outsourced from didn’t pay their bills! Luckily, the restaurant owner managed to contact me and I was able (after much hassle) to transfer their site to my own server and update the database to work properly.

Mazza Indian Restaurant & Lounge is located in Kettering, Northamptonshire and is a very fine Indian restaurant indeed! The décor is awesome, food is incredible and the service is quick. (not to mention they have a fantastic website)

Click to visit Mazza Indian Restaurant in Kettering

I have updated the Newtown Santa Run 2009 site with some added oomph! and added a new domain name so it is up to date.
The Newtown Santa Run is going for the world record in 2009 and will be taking applications all year from people all over the planet to participate in the world record breaking attempt in Powys, Wales.

Visit the Newtown Santa Run 2009 website today and find out how to become part of history.

I have been tinkering with the idea of a professional redesign for some time now, I am capable of doing one myself but I’m too lazybusy! I think it would take me a lot longer than would be healthy anyway! so I am committed to spending up to 400 USD for a new design of FiddyP… You can help even if you’re not a designer yourself and get a $25 gift certificate to spend where you like!

I’ve seen quite a few designs that I like the look of so I thought I would share some with you and get some feedback!

My definite wants are:

• 3 columns
• 2.0 colours but not clinical
• unique sidebars that can be widget enabled
• incorporate my own 50p logo somewhere
• easy to read text
• a full 1024 wide theme, maybe with the main content resizable for bigger screens
• space for a promotion box or featured product
• all the files required for a 2.3 wordpress theme folder like 404.php and sitemap etc

This is the style of boxes that I like

Here’s a mocked up from an existing template in photoshop, the double span box on the top part of the sidebar should be repeated below the two widget enabled sidebars and a big footer to show other things like blogroll, archives etc. It looks like this:

A cross between the two would be perfect! What do you think? is my budget enough?

Here’s how you can help..

If you know a theme designer that does this type of thing, ask them to take a look at these two pictures and the needs of the site and give me a quote, either by commenting here or using the contact me page.

Get them to mention that you sent them here and if I go with that person, you get a 25USD gift certificate for an online store like Amazon or even one local to you.

It’s almost like a contest because you can get paid for participating even if it’s not you that does the designing! You’ll also get a chance to help out someone you know if they are a designer. I get a new site, they get paid and so do you. win win win

just some testing of AJAX here to see if I can grab a last post from an author url while the user is still on the page..it’s a prelude to me adding some AJAX functionality to commentluv, below is a test version of the comment form once the comment authors site has been entered and they go to the next form field, the ajax should call a php file to find the title of the authors last post and put it in the pink box.

now all I have to do is find a way to make an event listener for the actual comment form author url field without adjusting the comments.php file….