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My latest project is going to be a community website for the town and borough of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. I managed to recently acquire http://tunbridgewells.com (the domain being probably the most important thing for a geographical based website – It will allow for better listing in search engines.)

I was thrilled to be able to get hold of this domain (others I was looking at included eastbourne.co.uk & .com, rye.co.uk & .com and eastgrinstead.co.uk & .com) as the town has a population of over 60,000, and the borough, over 100,000, and a lot of people from the surrounding towns and villages visit Tunbridge Wells, so the website has huge potential.

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I just found this free theme from woothemes.com (bueno) and it’s great! At least, it’ll do until I get bored of it.. (no offence WooThemes!)

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I nearly finished making the theme for this site, but now I’m bored of it (it really doesn’t take long), so it’s either time to spend ages making a new one…or I could just find a readymade one.

So what have I been doing recently?

Well over the summer, I spent some time contacting a lot of people about the possibility of buying some domain names (geographical names, near to where I live), and I managed to acquire tunbridgewells.com, so I have started to develop this website with assistance from http://tom-lawrence.co.uk. The main website structure is in place, so now it is a case of building up some content and getting listed highly in Google. The aim is to be the number one ranked website for the search term ‘Tunbridge Wells’.

Apart from that, I’ve just been working (last week was exceptionally stressful). I’m not one to start celebrating Christmas at the end of October or anything silly like that, but I am looking forward to the break.

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Considering I only found it Thursday night/Friday morning, Balloons! is on the border between ‘a little longer’ and ‘all of the time’, but I’m pretty sure I’ll go on using it for a long while yet.

Balloons! (or Balloons! Lite if you want to try it for free) lets you write a message (twitter style – 140 characters), take a picture, attach them to a balloon and launch it up into the sky. Other people can then catch your balloon and add their own messages and pictures to it.

With the paid version, you can track your balloons, and see what other people add to them (although currently, you can’t track balloons you add to, although Dave Verwer told me that you will be able to favourite, and therefore track balloons in the next release) and it’s great to see how far your balloons drift!

If you can’t think of anything that warrants its very own balloon, you can always just catch other balloons and add to them.

Currently, the subject of a lot of balloons is…well, balloons, but when more people start using it and the app matures a little, it will be awesome(er).

Current app store price: £1.79 (Free ‘Lite’ version)

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They posted on their blog today that the beanies will be in stores globally from the 1st December, however, there will also be some on the aerial7 webite (aerial7.com) from the 15th November. They will cost $59.99, and when I saw this, I thought that the ‘living in the UK tax’ would put the price up to around £50, but no! They are only £36.24. Well, I say only..

There are 6 different designs, and for those who are interested, there is even a microphone for the iPhone so you can use it as a handsfree kit.

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When I heard that the iPhone would be coming to other networks in the UK, I started to get a bit fidgety. The 2 year O2 contract I signed up to in June was beginning to look a bit silly, however, I’ve read a few things today that have made me glad that I’m with O2 instead of Orange.

The first thing.. Orange’s terms and conditions:

“Not to be used for other activities (eg using your handset as a modem, non-Orange internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing, non-Orange internet based video). Should such use be detected notice may be given and Network protection controls applied to all services which Orange does not believe constitutes mobile browsing.”

Not to be used for other activities… you mean… most of the applications available for the iPhone would be redundant on Orange. Good to know. Now, admittedly, once Twitter went mad about this, Orange quickly changed the T&C’s. So now you can use the iPhone for whatever you want…as long as you don’t go over your data limit (OBVIOUSLY!)

Eh? An iPhone with a data limit? That sort of defeats the point.

Orange will give you 750MB of data for 3G (and I assume Edge and GPRS) and another 750MB for when using a BT Openzone hotspot. Ok, you’d have to download a lot to go over the 750MB limits, but for the price that Orange are charging per month, you would expect something more in line with O2, and after more abuse from Twitter, Orange are reviewing their data allowances.

So why am I glad I’m with O2? Well I pay the same amount per month as I did before June, for roughly the same contract from Orange (except I had absolutely no data allowance, and no iPhone), but even if I was paying more, O2 seem to understand that the iPhone is used for calls and texts for about the same time, or even, less time than games, web browsing, email, iPlayer etc. That said, I’m still hoping for a price was in about 18 months time.

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All current adaptors are uni-directional…and would only allow for video signal out of the port.

This means that currently, only a few Macs will be able to use the giant screen as a monitor. Definitely not a games console or Blu-ray player. Fingers crossed that someone will develop something quickly. If not, Belkin have something planned for january.. :’-(

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I have just finished creating a search results page, and a 404 page. I’m particularly happy with the 404 page. Obviously, for the search results page to be of any use, I will have to put a search bar somewhere..

Things I still need to do include links for RSS feeds, a contact page/link, some form of social networking integration, clean up the code. I also need to make the sidebar a little more appealing..

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Coincidentally, last tuesday was also the day that Apple announced its new lineup of iMacs.

*sigh*

They replaced the 20″ and 24″ models with a 21.5″ (1920 x 1080 pixels = full 1080p HD) and a massive 27″ model (both are 16:9 as opposed to the usual 16:10. This means a better film viewing experience). The 21.5″ models come with a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor (upgradeable to a 3.33GHz Core 2 Duo).

The cheaper 27″ model has the same 3.06GHz and 3.33GHz options (The spec seems to be the same as the 2nd 21.5″ model. Therefore, £150 for 78% more screen.. a no brainer), but the top 27″ model comes with a 2.66GHz Quad Core, Intel i5, and is upgradeable to a 2.8GHz Quad Core, Intel i7 “Nehalem” processor for £160.

Image from Apple website (Copyright to Apple, Inc.)

So now I begin the (what will soon be a regular) biennial event in which I work out how much money I can sell my current iMac for, work the how much extra I need, then start selling everything that isn’t bolted down.

I did have to stop and think ‘is it worth it?’ – I mean, I have a 24″ iMac (2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme, 3GB RAM, 500GB HDD) that is slightly less than 2 years old. That’s still pretty good. So why do I need to upgrade? Well that’s a stupid question. Obviously, I don’t need to upgrade. My problem is that I am quite materialistic, and can become quite obsessive. Not a great combination when it comes to such high end prices..

Currently, I use my iMac for video editing, image editing (Photoshop for stills, and After Effects for animations) and quite a lot of rendering. A 2.8GHz i7, or even, a 2.66GHz i5 would be quite a big step up in terms of the performance for Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Studio etc., (not to mention Grand Central Dispatch in Snow Leopard being able to utilise cores more efficiently). Also, the graphics card in the current iMac is an ATI Radeon HD2600 (256MB), so a jump to an ATI Radeon HD4850 (512MB) would offer greater performance. The 4GB of RAM and 1TB hard drive would also be a nice jump up from what I have now.

Up until this point, (although I would have liked one), I didn’t really think that getting one would be worthwhile, but then I found out about one brilliant new feature..

As with older models, there is a port on the back to connect an extra monitor, however, on the new 27″ (not on the 21.5″), there is a port that will enable you to connect another device to the iMac, and use the amazing 27″ screen as a monitor for something else. This could be a Bluray player, DVD player, games console or lots of other things, as long as there is a Mini DisplayPort adaptor, you can connect it. This is great news! I just happened to be looking to buy a new big monitor for a variety of devices. This will probably be less of a selling point for others, but for me, that’s what sold it.

( 26/10/09 – EDIT: Currently, it would seem that devices like DVD & Blu-ray players, games consoles etc. won’t work. Belkin are developing some form of box to deal with the problem.. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. )

So there we go. After more consideration, I came to the conclusion that the cost to upgrade (on top of what I can sell the current one for) is quite reasonable, and after a weekend in which I received an Adsense cheque from Google, my old Powermac was snapped up on eBay, and I discovered that an old Paypal account had a lot more left in it than I remembered, it looks like damage to the wallet will be minimal.

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