For consistency across our hosting clients, I wanted to point the nameservers for the client’s domain name to our systems, and then alter the MX records for email at our end. There is a guide on 123Reg.co.uk for setting your MX records up using their nameservers, but not any guides if you want to use your own nameservers, so after quite a bit of digging I found them (in this thread on cPanel’s forums).

So, I wrote this quick tip up to prevent the hour of swearing and head-scratching I’ve just endured:

Of course, there are a couple of caveats to using your own nameservers and pointing MX back to 123Reg this way:

• 123Reg could change their MX records and screw your emails up, but I think this is pretty unlikely!
• It’s a good idea to know what you’re doing. 123Reg.co.uk has a (basic) guide to MX records

Three UK’s reference in my bank statements, as it turns out, appears as H3G appended by a customer reference number or similar, which stands for “Hutchison 3G”. In retrospect, fairly obvious when I think about it!

Hopefully this post will help someone wasting 20 minutes of their life looking like I did!

I think the cynical side of me (“a champagne bar? In Gateshead?” ) is now a convert: the incoming platinum mall changes – slightly more upmarket shops – and the open air feel to it really work; it’s much more relaxed in feeling than the sometimes raucous Ebony champagne bar in Durham, which can only really be described as a ‘zoo’ on a Saturday night. The staff, I was told, are all based on their ability to bring someone more than pouring champagne: one guy in particular was really quick with card tricks!

Part of my interest (aside from the free champagne, obviously) was in getting the champagne bar’s details on to our student directory websites; as such, 360 Champagne Bar is now online in our Newcastle Uni Students website. Of course, if you want a more sensible review, Graham has duly obliged, with his usual retail twist. (Note to self: link to Graham’s blog).

Photo courtesy of Soult’s Retail View, because I was too lazy to remember to take any whilst I was there.

The book is aimed at web designers with little knowledge of JavaScript; you won’t learn to write your own jQuery plug-in from the book, but the following topics are covered (taken from Packt’s page about the jQuery for Designers book):

1. Designer, Meet jQuery
2. Enhancing Links
3. Making a Better FAQ Page
4. Building Custom Scrollbars
5. Creating Custom Tooltips
6. Building an Interactive Navigation Menu
7. Navigating Asynchronously
8. Showing Content in Lightboxes
9. Creating Slideshows
10. Featuring Content in Carousels and Sliders
11. Creating an Interactive Data Grid
12. Improving Forms

The good

jQuery for Designers Beginner’s Guide is in Packt’s ‘cookbook’ format, with each ‘recipe’ being fairly self-contained. For designers who aren’t familiar with JavaScript, never mind jQuery, the book provides an excellent, gentle introduction to what JavaScript is, how it interacts with CSS and HTML, and what you can do with it.

There are some more involved recipes towards the end of the book including building asynchronous navigation alongside the usual suspects for any jQuery book (i.e., slideshows and carousels). Recipes are well explained throughout, with plenty of screenshots to help orientate the reader as to how much progress they should have made since the last step, and any common pitfalls seem to be mentioned with a remedy.

The not-so-good

There are a few recipes that replicate things you could achieve with good old CSS these days. For example, one recipe (Adding Icons To Links in chapter 2), guides the reader through using jQuery to add a class to links to certain file types. So, if a link in the page was to a PDF, this jQuery snippet adds a class of pdf to the link. In theory, fine, but in practice, you can do that with CSS (related guide on dev.opera.com):


a[href$='.pdf'] {
background-image: url("images/icon_pdf.png")
}


That’s fine as a case study to demonstrate the relevant principles in jQuery, but could be misleading to less experienced web designers; a note to point out that it could also be achieved through CSS would have been a nice touch!

jQuery for Designers Beginner’s Guide:  overall

As a guide to jQuery for designers, jQuery for Designers Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction, with plenty of recipes for common tasks a web designer might need jQuery to do to enhance a website.

Other reviews of the jQuery Beginner’s Guide

• Review at Ramoonus.nl by Ramon van Belze
• Reviews at Amazon.co.uk

Disclosure

I was gifted jQuery for Designers Beginner’s Guide book in exchange for the review.

And now the answer is available in one easy to read website: isnewcastleupontyneinscotland.co.uk.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have an article (and, more importantly, my photo) published in the current .net magazine, issue 231. Entitled Escaping Photoshop, it’s a call to action for web designers to look beyond Photoshop and broaden the range of tools available to them. Or something like that. Out now in all good newsagents. And WH Smith’s.

tl;dr: give Inkscape a go.

Dear WH Smith,

We had a good relationship for years. Over a decade of unintelligible scrawlings at school have been penned with blue ink cartridge from you. Newspapers and books have provided entertainment on cold nights waiting for trains, buses and helicopters (OK, I lied about the helicopters). And when Woolworths closed, you were there, filling that vital pick ‘n’ mix hole.

You’ve changed. You’ve become needy. You try and sell me cheap chocolate. With every purchase, you thrust vouchers for things I don’t want in to my hands. If I’m buying a newspaper, I don’t want to have to find a bin to dump your futile attempt to cross-sell to me. This is particularly annoying in your branches at train stations, where there are no longer bins.

Simply, you need to change, and this is an intervention. Stop trying to fob your vouchers, promotions and cheap confectionery off on us, and concentrate instead on giving us what we want: books, stationery, newspapers, pick ‘n’ mix and odds-and-ends that nowhere else sells quite the way you used to.

You used to be cool, WH Smith. Sort it out.

Sincerely,

Your customers

I’ve been working on a few Magento projects recently (portfolio pieces to come, eventually!), as well as, and we’ve just started a Drupal Commerce project over at Peacock Carter, which seems to be going really smoothly so far. I’ve also launched a microsite for a fresh concrete and cement testing machine (my life’s glamour knows no bounds) recently.

I have managed to blog on the RCC site, though; feast your eyes on these excitingly-titled pieces:

• 5 tips to improve your MediaWiki site’s SEO
• How to get rid of Magento’s “Service Temporarily Unavailable” error
• And finally, a review of the new Drupal 7 Multisites Configuration book from Packt, by Matt Butcher

I’m also featured in this month’s .net magazine (issue 231), with an opinion piece on Photoshop vs Inkscape.

We already run a directory website for Durham Students, so this was an expansion in a direction we’re already happy with. It also allows us to play around with new ideas on a relatively young project, which we can then assess and take the better ideas to use on the original project. That, and it justifies a few visits to pubs around town, too.

In particular, I recently helped 2 clients improve the search engine friendliness of their MediaWiki websites, and provided customised user guides on a handful of open source software; the resulting services are thus SEO for MediaWiki and a range of user guides that can be (the MediaWiki user guide is one of the more popular at the moment).

Previous customised guides I’ve written included a custom Inkscape user guide developed as part of a workflow for an automotive manufacturer based in the US who wanted to digitise their – largely cardboard-based – library of component templates with Inkscape.