Under the covers

It's that time of year again and October 3rd will see over 500 people sleeping out in locations around the country in aid of Byte Night. The largest event will be in London where we'll once again be camping on the Mayor's lawn on the banks of the Thames.

This year, the Byte Night Local concept has spread to Reading, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester where local teams will also be braving the elements.

It's the IT industry coming together to help combat youth homelessness and we're once again proud to be the largest single fundraising event for Action for Children who recently re-branded from NCH.

It's still not too late to join us if you want to take part in a great evening, alternatively, you could just sponsor me to be cold and wet for one night of the year.

Hot on the heels of our gong for "Best Landing Page" at the APA Creative Awards, the Your family site has been nominated for an AOP award in the category of "Best launch".

Great to be recognised at the digital awards, the one everyone wants to win. We're up against some prestigious competition in The Guardian, IPC, Channel 4 and Hearst digital but who knows after last years victory for ZDNet?

Whatever the outcome, it's always a great night out and a chance to catch up with all the gossip in the on-line publishing world.

Haven't had much time for posting on the blog recently but hopefully that will change now that we've signed off the final bugs on our biggest project to date, launching a new parenting advice site for the NSPCC to supplement their “Your Family” magazine. It’s been a labour of love for sure (see my silicon.com column) and over a year in gestation but it’s live and working and looking great.

It’s a really clever mix of “Heat” styling but full of very high quality parenting advice all backed up by a team of experts at NSPCC. It’s a crowded market but the high level of trust endowed by the NSPCC brand should see us carve out a niche in the sector. We’ve got articles, videos, product reviews and loads of suggestions for family days out now that the summer is here.

Needless to say there are a large number of people to say thanks to for making my fist major site build a success. All the editorial and account management team at Redwood who write the content, NSPCC for the opportunity to do the project and the guys at Squiz who built the site on their open source MySource Matrix CMS.

In building the site we’ve invested heavily in the platform and hosting so that now we’re able to provide a fully hosted, enterprise level CMS. This is ideal for smaller publishers who want to get on-line without the expense of software licensing and hardware purchase. Look out for a further announcement about the launch of the “Compound Enterprise Platform” soon.

In the meantime, if your kids won’t eat their tea tonight or go to bed on time without a tantrum, take a look at www.yourfamily.org.uk and see where you’re going wrong...

Being out on the road all the time has it's risks and my worst nightmare came true a couple of weeks ago.

My Sony Vaio laptop has performed flawlessly for more than 15 months despite being lugged around in a normal briefcase every single day and being left on virtually permanently when "docked" in my home office.

For a week or two it had been making a bit of a strange noise which I put down to a noisy fan. Then, one morning I got the "Blue screen of death". Booting in safe mode worked for a while and then another crash, and another, and another until it wouldn't even boot up at all. Seems like that noisy fan had caused the motherboard to overheat.

A call to Sony established that it was going to have to be returned to them by Courier and I'd have a 10-15 day wait for the repair to be completed. 10-15 days! Without the main tool of my job? Disaster!

I arranged for the courier to collect and set off for the local Sony store. I can't do my job without a PC and the salesman couldn't believe his luck when I virtually ran into the store and ordered the most expensive laptop they had in stock.

After a very long and protracted process to uninstall Vista (a 30 page Sony manual provided with the laptop!) and re-build the machine with XP, I was ready to restore my data. I blogged about remote backup services a few months ago and now came the acid test.

Mozy passed it with flying colours. My main project data was restored within 30 minutes and I was up and running. My last backup had been automatically scheduled and had run about 30 minutes before the laptop died so I lost no data at all.

Don't wait for it to happen to you, it's so easy to think it will never happen but hardware goes wrong, especially laptops that are subjected to the worst conditions of any computer. There are lots of backup options out there now and cost very little to subscribe to.

Oh, and even better advice is that when your PC starts making a funny noise, get it investigated sooner rather than later...

One of the things about being on the road is the amount of additional equipment you inevitably end up carrying with you. Laptop power supply, USB cable for my Treo (yes I know I can synch with Bluetooth but the USB charges the phone too which saves another charger), USB keys, modem cables (!) etc.

I'm an avid user of VOIP, I have a Skype In number for my business and use it on a daily basis but have always felt a little self conscious about wearing an earpiece or headset in public as (apologies to all those that do use these) I've always felt I looked like a bit of an idiot.

I also hate with a passion my Vaio "strokepad". It's not as bad as the IBM (Lenovo) "nipple" but for some reason I just can't get on with them. So I've always carried a small Kensington travel mouse with me when travelling.

Now I've killed the proverbial two birds with a mouse. Well a mouse-phone to be precise. For the last few months I've been using the fantastic Sony Vaio Mouse Talk Mouse and Internet Phone. It does exactly what it says on the tin (unlike most Sony product naming) and doubles as a Mouse and VOIP phone.

So now, I still feel like a bit of a fool when I get an incoming call, and I obviously have to use that damned strokepad whilst on the phone, but it certainly turns a few heads when I flip open my mouse and start talking into it!