Harry has been a little star today, and with the added momentus ocassion that he had his (almost) first solids, I thought that a photo and a little video was necessary.

Yesterday we tried Harry with some rusk mashed with a little milk, but today he has baby rice.  He didn’t seem to mind it really although he didn’t really know what to do with it once in his month.  It went down in the end though and therefore for him to have half a bowl was a success.  He doesn’t seem to know what to do when the spoon is in his mouth and therefore I have to use the top of his month in order to ’scrape’ the food off the spoon.  Its progress though and I am sure that with practice he will get the hang of it.

He also spent lots of time playing on his mat and also in his ring today.  He is really starting grab at things now and really paying attention and reacting to noises and movements etc.  He has been a sheer delight today.

A while ago I decided to purchase an iPod Touch, which to all intents and purpose is an iPhone without being able to phone, text etc.  It has been great, in fact so great that I will at some point in the future be getting an iPhone.  I also use Gmail for all my mail coming into one account.  Finally I have managed to set up the iPod to send mail from accounts other than my Gmail account.

Gmail is truely wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for an email solution, whether that be a business or an individual.  In fact we recommend it to all our customers.  I have one Gmail account which I receive mail into.  The thing that differs slightly here is that I have mail from more than one account.  I have got addresses for Equal Design as well as personal emails and I would rather have mail appear to come from these account than my Gmail account.  Therefore I have set up forwarders that just forward mail from my @equaldesign domain to my Gmail.  Then there is a handy tool in Gmail that allows you to send mail from other accounts, which allows me to send and receive all mail from Gmail and it comes from and goes to my @equaldesign account.

My problem was that although the iPod Touch has a simple interface for setting up a Gmail account what it doesn’t allow you to do is to send mail from other accounts that you have set up in your Gmail interface.  Well this is no longer a problem thanks to the following solution that allows you to send mail from any email account from your Gmail account on your iPhone or iPod touch.

1. From the home screen click on settings and then select Mail, Contacts and Calenders.
2. Add a new mail account and select other as the account type
3. In the address option add the address that you want to send mail from and type a random string in the password box (anything will do!)
4. Now tap save and go to the POP tab
5. Enter ‘g’ under the hostname and username for incoming mail server and enter ’smtp.gmail.com’ under outgoing mail server
6. Enter your Gmail username and password under the Outgoing mailserver settings
7. Tap save and then select ‘No’ to the pop up message
8. Tap save and then save again
9. Under accounts select the mail account that you have just created and delete all the text in the fields under incoming mail server
10. Press the home button and you are done, but make sure that the newly created account is sent to receive mail manually rather than at regular intervals.

That’s it!  When sending emails from your iPhone you should now be able send mail from other account by tapping on the CC/BCC/from box and choosing the account.  This will also appear in your sent items under your Gmail account and all replies will go to that account.

Looking out of the window this evening we saw a balloon passing over the estate.  I couldn’t help think what a wonderful ride they must be having with this cracking weather.

Content Management Systems have taken off massively in the last 2 – 3 years.  I suppose the reason for this is that more and more stuff is being published on the web, but the number of people that have ability to do this is far smaller than the amount of information or number of people that want to publish stuff.

So why does a content management system help?  Well the idea behind a content management system is that the user need know nothing about publishing on the web, in fact all they need to know is how to type in order to publish their information.  Alright, I agree there are one or two things that they need to know such as creating links, adding images etc. but all this is done far easier in a CMS than when coding from scratch.  The content management system allows anyone to manage content and publish it on the web.

So what software can be used in order to produce a content management system.  There are several systems out their but for me I always use WordPress.  Many people would ask why, since WordPress is traditionally a blogging software, and maybe they are right, but until someone can convince me otherwise I am sticking with WordPress.  I use WordPress because:

Its easy to grasp:  you can really learn the basics of writing pages and posts in a matter of days

• Pages:  WordPress was one of the first ‘blogging’ platforms to use pages which allows you to write pages in a parent, child method
• Include a blog: even though you are using WordPress as a CMS, many sites these days will want a ‘News’ section and therefore why not take advantage of what WordPress was built for – blogging which is what a news section basically is
• Custom Fields:  WordPress’ custom fields enable me to display content in a way that other systems don’t.  By using custom field with both pages and posts I can display information other than what I write or display in the content of a post or page.  They provide real flexibility within WordPress.

I will write more about Custom Fields in an up and coming article, so watch this space.

When using WordPress as a content management system it is best to keep your static content as pages.  By this I mean pages that are written about a particular topic and do not need a data stamp and time that they were written.  The page content itself may well change but the actual page itself stays in the same place all the time.  Also when writing pages think about what structure/navigation you are going to want to use.  You will need to take advantage of WordPress’ parent and child pages in order to get WordPress to automatically add pages that you create to your sites navigation.  For example you may have a page of a site called ‘Services’ if you were a Security firm for example.  Your company may well offer several services and therefore you would write pages that are child pages to the services page that outline all the services that you offer.  With the correct coding in your template files you can allow WordPress to list all the child pages of the Services page when you are viewing the Services page.  This makes navigation for your visitors much easier and it also makes publish pages easier as nothing needs to be added apart from the new page in order to get the page to appear on the site.

In terms of getting a News section on the site I would recommend that you create a ‘Home’ page and then set that to display as your WordPress homepage in the settings section.  Then create News page and set that to display as your blog posts in the settings section of the dashboard.  That way you can still use categories etc when writing news as well as tags.

I hope that has given you a little insight into using WordPress as a content management system and please check back for more posts in the coming weeks.  You can view some of the site that I have created using WordPress as a CMS in the Portfolio of Equal Design.

Like most new houses our house has a Utility room, which I suppose are for doing the washing etc.  However our’s was pretty useless.  Why?  Well there was no sink and it wasn’t big enough to do anything in.  Therefore today started the removal of the wall in order to make the kitchen larger.

First job (a few days ago) was to remove the radiator that was in the utility and attached to the wall the seperate the utility from the kitchen.  A simple whole in the ceiling, drain the central heating and then lop off the pipes got the job done.

Next, today was the removal of the wall itself, being careful not to upset the electrics in the wall.  It was literally a hack it down job making sure that the edges were neat and tidy etc.  We are now left with wires dangling out from the ceiling until the spark arrives later in the week.

It really has made a difference in the kitchen though and it looks much much bigger.  The idea being that in the near future we are going to put a kitchen island/table in the middle which we can eat of and no doubt there will have to be a TV in there too (Helen!).

Well it was about 16 months ago now that Daphne first hatched the first batch of chicks in the aviary, and over the last 4 weeks we have had batch number 4.  What is special about this batch is that aswell as Daphne giving birth Christina and Hyacinth have also given birth.

If fact Christina is something of a triumph.  Why?  Well she was a domestic pet when we first got her from a pet shop on the way to Southport.  Therefore as she always lived in the house up until the aviary arrived we are really pleased that she has gone on to produce a stunning chick, which we have named Inga.  The name came from our Swedish friends and it just so happens to be that Inga is yellow and blue, which are the Swedish colours!

Well I have been so busy over the last few weeks that I have had little time to post on here, but thought I would post this just before I retire to sleep myself.

So cute the way he just fell asleep sat on our bed!

Having had my new MacBook Pro for a few weeks now I decided that it was time to seriously start thinking about regular and reliable backups in order to prevent problems if a failure or error on my part should occur.  It has happened to me before and it is not good.  Therefore I invested in a Time Capsule from Apple to wirelessly backup my MacBook and provide wireless access to the Internet.  He is how I set things up.

First of all let me say this.  Finding out how to set up the Time Capsule pre-sale was a little difficult.  You see for some reason the Time Capsule is exactly like a ‘normal’ wireless modem router only it doesn’t have a modem inside.  Therefore by itself it cannot connect directly to the Internet.  In order to connect it to the net you need to have a modem.  Of course I have a modem but it is not a dedicated modem, it comes in the form of a Belkin wireless modem router and I was having great difficulty in finding out from Apple, or anywhere else on the web for that matter whether it would work.

Well I can safely say that it does work.  The setup that I am currently using you can see in the diagram above.  So what I have is my original Belkin Wireless modem router plugged into the phone socket, accessing the Internet from Tiscali.  Then out of the 4 Ethernet ports at the back I have my Ethernet wires going around the house, when I completed my home networking, one of which is plugged into the time capsules Ethernet WAN port, which provides the Time Capsule with the Internet.  In the setup I have to use ‘Bridge Mode’ on the Time Capsule in order to get it working.  Then I setup a wireless network from the Time Capsule following the very simple steps in the Airport Utility that is already on your Mac (Leopard needed although the disc does come with the Time Capsule).

All my devices no connect to the Time Capsule which shares or routes the Internet to each device.  Also the Time Capsules built in 500Gb hard drive shows up as a network drive and so I have using that as my Time Machine drive when backing up all my Mac.  As usual a cracking piece of kit from Apple and very easy to setup.  Highly recommended.

Every since Harry was born I have been looking at him wondering who he will look like when he is older.  Would he look like me or perhaps someone from my wife’s side of the family such as her brother or father.  Today I did some analysis with some good news.

As you can see from the photo above those two babies looks pretty similar to me.  When I am pleased to tell you that the baby of the left is me at 3 months old!  On the right is Harry at 3 and a half months old.  I couldn’t believe it when I looked at the photo of me today at my parents house.  I think Harry has got some of my features when I was little for sure.  Lets hope he keeps them – or maybe not!

This afternoon my wife was feeding Harry in the lounge with the TV on.  It was a usualy bank holiday afternoon film, and this time it was the animated film, Chicken Run.  Harry was engrossed for a good 20 minutes, which is the first time we have really seen him do this.

Over the last week Harry has changed so much.  In fact he is almost becoming a little boy rather than a baby as he has learnt so much.  He is now so alert and always looking round trying to find new things to see and interact with.  We have had so many smiles this week.  In fact it is wonderful as when I go into his room in a morning to get him out of bed I am greeted with the most wonderful smile.

He has also found his voice, as I wrote about earlier and he is constantly talking.  We can;t understand him yet but he clearly knows what he is on about!  This morning at his Grandma’s he found his hands.  He was looking at them in a very odd way and then he learnt that he could move them.  Apparently he was facinated with them for a good 15 minutes.

He is an absolute pleasure and is getting more and more rewarding as the days pass.