After many months of development, I am glad to say that www.asht.info has finally launched.

Who are ASHT?

The Anglo Sikh Heritage Trail is a project of the Maharajah Duleep Singh Centenary Trust. The Trust was first established in 1993, the centenary year of the death of Maharajah Duleep Singh, with the primary objective of highlighting and promoting Anglo Sikh heritage. Since then it has engaged in a series of initiatives, including the Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms exhibition in collaboration with the V&A, the annual Portrait of Courage lecture at the Imperial War Museum and the Jawans to Generals exhibition in collaboration with English Heritage. Other projects have included the commissioning of a bronze statue of Maharajah Duleep Singh at Thetford; the first major piece of Sikh art outside India, as well as two highly successful festivals of Anglo Sikh heritage.

The site has a user friendly CMS, newsletter system as well as various ways for the community to contribute. The site was built using PHP/Codeigniter framework with a MySQL database. Client side development resulted in clean CSS/HTML markup as well as the creation of database driven flash elements. Site wide search makes use of Google’s Custom Search.

Visit ASHT

In my quest for the best web development IDE, i have come across many different editors. Dreamweaver, Various PHP IDE’s as well as small notepad replacements. For one reason or another, all have failed to live up to my expectations.

I don’t ask for much, i aint all that fussy. All i want is an editor that has syntax colouring, code hints, ftp and support for mainstream languages. Well i think the search is over, for the last 6 weeks i have used with near perfection an editor that has all and more.

Aptana is an editor that is built on Eclipse. It has an array of simple features that you would actually use in day to day development. Not to mention support for additional plugins (as Eclipse, e.g. CFEclipse). It has also fixed a lot of the bugs that has plagued Eclipse for a while now, such as the way it would mangle code during an undo operation.

Definitely worth a look… Aptana home page

As we began making our way round, it became clear that the other three needed a leader figure to help them round. The fear etched across their faces began to dissipate once they saw the fearless antics of myself as i bounded around each obstacle with Jackie Chan like agility. With constant encouragement and leading by example, my fearless attitude began to rub off on them the further we progressed.

Finally, the end of the course was met with an all round appreciation of my bravado and relentless support in order to help them achieve what appeared impossible, and to complete the course.

(what for it…. hehe)

Below are some pictures and vids from the day.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

www.nikkor2d2.com

What is it about being on a bike? If I was walking, I would be seen. Why when on a bike, no one can see you? The number of times I have had “altercations” with drivers.

This has yet to deter me, neither will the weather. I will continue to do my bit for the environment, as well as my wallet and persist with biking.

My route is not too bad, around 60% is cycle paths. Which is a must in Leicester as it is fair to say driving in Leicester is like an episode of Whacky Races.

I have a helmet, and I feel that I am the only one with a helmet. Have yet to see anyone else with a helmet.

Saying all that, there is a “warm” feeling when you hold up traffic momentarily. But less said about that the better. ;)

Dear Fiaz Khan,

I hate automated messages as much as anybody, however there is a
situation that concerns thousands of bloggers. I’m contacting you
regarding information related to your Technorati profile
(http://technorati.com/people/technorati/bohboh)
and the blog you’ve claimed on Technorati
http://www.nextbigleap.com/blog

According to our data, that blog is running a version of Wordpress that
may be suffering from a security vulnerability. See
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/02/wordpress-233/
The version we have on record is WordPress 2.1.2

Blogs are being compromised via this vulnerability on widespread scale.
The most common symptom of a compromised blog is the presence of links
to spam web sites inserted in the blog that are obscured by style
attributes that render the text invisible but are still seen by crawlers
such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links
by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox,
looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”

The impact of these spam links that may be unwittingly placed on your
blog are reduced rankings or being flagged as spam. We’re
discontinuing processing updates from blogs that exhibit symptoms
of being compromised. If your blog has been upgraded already and this
message no longer applies to you, please accept my apologies.

For WordPress support, I recommend checking the forums at
http://wordpress.org/support/
I will be monitoring this topic in the Technorati Support forum to
be of additional help:
http://support.technorati.com/discussions/topic/3295

Thank You!
-Ian Kallen
Technorati / Architect

Somehow, spam had ended up in a hidden div at the end of one of my posts. I have yet to discover how. This came to light when i was notified by a RSS subscriber of a large list of spammy links

If anyone knows how this snook in then let me know. One site mentions site registrants gaining access to posts. Registration is disabled here so suspect there is another door in.

If anyone has any answers then let me know.

Thanks to Ben at subduedmedia.co.uk for letting me know.

I have finally managed it, countless form filling and negotiation and I have now in my hand the keys to the new office.

It’s kind of exciting since I have never rented my own offices. I wasn’t looking forward to working all alone but fortunately that may no longer be the case with a recent addition to the team. More on that later.

In summary… new office, new member of staff, healthy project book and the site being considered as one of the best in 2007… I think 2008 is off to a great start.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Well would you adam and eve it, the bods at cssmania placed my site alongside 9 others as one of the top 10 sites of 2007.

Sweeeeeeeeet!

Due to the usual bout of way too much work and general goings-on I haven’t had the energy to write anything.

Here is an update on all things me. You may have already noticed that I am looking to expand. Glad to say that I have forged working relationships with local (and not so local) development bods, designers, copywriters and people who a ting or two about marketing/seo.

What a relief.

In addition to this, I have “almost” acquired an office. Jeez, getting offices is like bloomin difficult. It was easier getting a mortgage! So hopefully within the next few weeks I will be moving into new digs which will be cool, if not a bit weird, and a bit sad. Used to having no morning journey to make and having lunch made for me by my good wife.

As for projects, within the past 3 weeks have managed to launch 2 and a half sites. (the usual round of tweaks, amendments and can you justs).

www.nen.gov.uk (in their own words)

“The NEN is the UK collaborative network for education, providing schools with a safe, secure and reliable learning environment and direct access to a growing range of online services and content.” My role was as PHP/Database developer working on behalf of Gooii Limited providing them with a CMS and integrating supplied CSS templates.

More about the other sites later.