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Rolled acquired by Juno Media
I’ve just announced over on Sausage Roll that Rolled has been acquired by Juno Media.
It’s an opportunity to join an established company in the area with a good solid set of existing clients and revenue. Carers Federation and The Coffee Fairy are the two favourites that I’ve worked on so far, being the social entrepreneurs that they are.
There’s also a big opportunity to change the company from the inside into taking on board blogs, RSS feeds, open source, “web 2.0″, web apps, social entrepreneurialism and all those other “modern” things we’ve been doing at Rolled in the past. Myself and Dave (owner/director of Juno Media) have sat down and formulated a plan of attack for this and have already started applying it to new clients.
It also means you should see me at conferences from now on, which I was unable to do at Rolled due to lack of excess funds. We’ve already started by attending the fantastic SHINE unConference on the 9th of May.
Of course, a regular wage and lack of business-induced stress is also a big plus. With weekends off and work ending at 5:30pm everyday - it’s going to be completely different from the twelve hour work days and seven day workweeks I worked at Rolled as Managing Director.
Here’s to, yet again, a new stage in my life.
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New profile: Kongregate
I stumbled upon Kongregate today and after looking around at the place I’ve decided to try it out. If you’re gaming on there or just have a profile you visit once every five months, add me to your friends list: http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/jhuskisson.
I think the achievements being built into the Flash games combined with upcoming card game based on challenges that happen now and again ultimately sold me on this site. Combined with a fantastic catalogue of games it’s unique, it’s taking an existing tired old idea that has been done over and over again and advancing on that using a complete integration of the games on the site with social profiles. It’s a great idea with an excellent execution and I hope to be seeing further advancements in the future to build what they’ve already got.
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JHuskisson 2.5
It’s not exactly a version 2.5 but we may as well stick with whatever Wordpress version I’m using instead of counting the exact amount of times I’ve changed around this site. It just makes things easier. (Update: WP 2.5.1 released four seconds after making the site live, good timing).
I had David over at Rolled put together this design about a month ago based on one of Nofie Iman’s free Wordpress themes that I ran into when looking for a temporary refresh. The design will change over time, and it is planned that it will be added to as time progresses but for the moment this is the clean slate that I am to start again with.
Some interesting numbers that I’ve noticed whilst paying attention to the site properly over the past week or so. I’ve just hit 1,100 comments on posts from users and over 28,000 have been blocked via Akismet in comparison. I’ve also seen my subscribers number hit above 150, and hope to see this rise further the more I post up.
Things are moving forward on a significant amount of things in the background that I’ll be posting up about, but in short it mostly means I should be able to post much more freely in the future without worrying too much. I hope to be able to talk about the changes from freelancing to small business, how I coped with it and how I should have done it differently so that people doing the same may benefit.
I’m going to release this design as a free Wordpress theme in a few weeks, along with a Wordpress plug-in or two that I’ve put together. I also have some Code Igniter helpers/libraries and Expression Engine modules/plug-ins that I hope to be documenting online. So lots of releases all round.
For now, enjoy poking around the new layout and feel free to follow me to Twitter or any other social networking app you may be using. I’ve taken the time to list a few of my profiles I have around the net on my contact page.
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Clients: things you need for a site launch
The following is a general list of questions that can be updated towards what client’s need to do to help people launch their site on time and without any problems.
Decisions need to be made well in advance when it comes to launching a site, and this article covers just some of the most important things to consider when it comes to getting your new site online. These aren’t things to leave until the last possible minute, and should all be dealt with well in advance to launch.
Content
Are you going to re-write it? Are you going to use the same stuff with some problems? Are you wanting us to arrange a content writer for you?
Audio
Have you got all your audio files ready in the correct format to be put into the CMS? Are they on the online web service you’re going to be using to host them ready?
Video
Do you know how to get video off your CD’s and DVD’s stored? Or anywhere else for that matter? Do you know what format they need to be in? What codec to use? Do you know how to convert this format into the one you need everything to be in?
Images
Are you going to be using a web service such as Flickr? Or the CMS provided? What size do they need to be in? Do they need resizing? Or are you going to use the originals? Do they need watermarking?
Training
When will you be trained? What on? For how long? Who needs to be there? Do the people doing the training really need to be coming back several times? Or can you get all done at once? Will it cost you less if this is the case?
Contacts
If there’s more than one source for the requirements going into a project, then there needs to be a sharing of all these sources between the companies involved.
These can include, but are not limited to: accounting, hosting contacts, IT contacts, domain name registrars, designers, developers and directors.
The timeline
Make sure your timeline includes strictly set deadlines that aren’t slipped. When will you have your contacts ready? When will you have a training deadline set? Your images ready? Videos? Audio? Content for this section? That section? The other section?
Make sure they are realistic and not rushed, when deadlines are rushed they are often missed. If the staff are managing other things at the same time then they need the time to do that, not be forced to make decisions about other things too.
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WoW :o
I officially became a fully fledged geek the other day when I signed up and started playing World of Warcraft. The reason I’m making this post is that I know a lot of Final Fantasy Online players (though I don’t play), but I don’t know anyone on World of Warcraft.
If anyone wants to get in touch, my character’s name is Twodder (what else would it be?) and I’m on the Darkspear European server. I’m already up to Darkshore, heading into Ashenvale.
Feel free to post anti-WoW comments if necessary.
Update: Gave up after a month, it required far too much time.
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Robotic customer service
I rang up PayPal a few days ago over a dispute, and TV licensing today over a renewal. Both times I was met with a robotic system that plays a pre-recorded voice asking a question, then it requires me to say answers and then it would interpret these and ask another question until everything has been answered.
I find it odd that a company would opt for a computer system over a person, and was happy to realise that you could say ‘agent’ any time after the first three questions on PayPal’s customer service line and speak to a real person.
People complain about customer service being based in India, but it’s nothing compared with no human interaction at all.
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Rolled looking for EE contractor and Front End Developers
View the official post at Sausage Roll for more information:
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http://sausage.rolled.at/job-openings/wanted-front-end-developer-and-expression-engine-contractor -
Thoughtless error of the day
This appeared upon me entering my rolled.at e-mail address in on a site, despite me also entering my UK address and UK post code, and UK phone numbers.
Darn that Austrian domain name for uncovering my true foreign identity.
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Music Lessons
Seth Godin just posted a rare video of himself doing a full presentation. This presentation is on the music business and takes place at Columbia Records.
The video messes up around eight minutes in, but is a fantastic listen in the background. If you haven’t read or don’t own a book by Seth Godin and are serious about business, I suggest you go about buying Purple Cow and giving it a read.
Update: Seth has taken the video down due to it stopping itself eight minutes in, but has placed up a PDF transcript of the talk online which is well worth a read.
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Renting books
Consider the situation: Student’s receive reading lists of fifty books to read for an assignment. Their local University library has five of each book, and there’s two hundred plus students on the course. Worse than this, but these books are needed by the people on the second year of the course too. So ultimately we have even less an amount of books for these student’s to borrow for their assignments.
Why not have a de-centralised rental system that competes directly with these libraries? Even if you go to your university library, city library and local library - there’s still not enough to go through everyone. Put it online and deliver books straight to those student’s homes for a fee, it doesn’t even have to be directly to a student’s home: just deliver it to the university and have them pick it up there.
It could easily be per book, per month or per student term. Better yet, don’t aim directly at student’s and just have a student plan that student’s can actually afford.
I’m not talking eBooks, but the real thing you hold in your hand and can scan copies of for references. You’re solving the national university problem based around the lack of books, and you’re going to have casual readers that want a book or two a month as well. The market would be completely begging for this solution.
The option to buy could be implemented if needed and you could even let people send in their own books to increase your library, giving them credit or money for doing so. Especially when we’re talking old educational books some students don’t need to own after leaving university.
Get it done Amazon.
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