David Landis of Desktop Gremlins fame pointed me towards the addthis.com service. This free service provides an easy way to add sharing buttons to any website. 

I've added the appropriate code to the website, so from now there will be a row of buttons which let you easily share any of the blog posts and mechanisms on the website.

Help spread the word! Thank you :-)

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Membership, Membership+ or ricomplete CD ROM?

Which should you choose? Here are some benefits of each to help you choose.

• Membership:
• All the members only downloads: Free!
• Every project produced while you remain a members: Free!
• Reduced advertising on the site.
• PDF download of pages for you to print out at home. 
• Everything you don't get for free is half price!
• Only $14.95 / £9.95 a year. What a bargain!

Membership Plus: 

All the benefits of standard membership with the added bonus that everything is free. All the downloads, all the ebooks all the compliations. Everything. For as long as you remain a member. Awesome.

CD ROM. 

Think of it as snapshot of Membership Plus. All the projects and all the instructions in pdf format ready to print out, shipped out to you anywhere on the planet. All the for the same price as membership plus.

More details here. 

...and finally.

To compliment the ricomplete CD I have released my first annual CD containing all the projects from a single year. The first of these is for 2011 and is available here and now! 

This works as a sort of CD equivalent of standard membership.  It will remain the same price as standard membership whilst the ricomplete CD will mirror the price of Membership Plus.

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I've had five  seven (:-D) new members sign up today and I'm delighted to say that that takes me to over a thousand paid subscribers! Woot! Thank you everyone who has signed up. I am so delighted to have you on board and as I have said before I literally couldn't run this website without your support. Thank you all!

In other trumpet blowing news, my YouTube channel has just crossed over 300,000 views. Take a look!

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I'm usually one to ignore any passing bandwagon preferring, instead, to walk, I've not done anything about FaceBook. Up until now.

Facebook evangelist ffdoc has convinced me that I should take the plunge. To that end, I've started posting on my facebook page (wall?) and have provided a shiny new link at the top right of the website. Take a look around.

My other various social media links are here:

Facebook
Twitter
Youtube

I noticed yesterday that I has missed when my YouTube channel passed 200000 views. Cool!

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This website is created using the open source Drupal platform. Drupal works as a content management system. (CMS) All the posts on the website are simply entries in a database. This gives me all sorts of flexibility as to how I display things on the site. I can use the same post to display the teasers on the front page, the items in the shop, even the pdf print-outs of pages, all from a single version of the page.

I've been learning how to best use this power as I've been going along so every so often the data structure that makes a blog post needs a clean up. No more so than now. All this is a way of telling you that my papery output will be slower for a few more days while go through the 700+ posts and prune and trim.

The picture below is a screen grab of a blog post entry screen showing you all the data fields and what they do. And this is after I've removed lots of the dead wood. I guess if I was to start over, I wouldn't start from here. 20/20 hindsght.

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I'd like to add my support to those protesting against the SOPA bill. I have been negatively effected by piracy in the past but this bill is not the way to go. The bill won't stop piracy and will effect people who use the webs on a daily basis.
I've kept the site live as I know that is is used in many schools and colleges. To keep you going though, and as a sign of my support, here is a picture of Jimmy Wales.
ht MikeEye

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See the Membership page for more details.

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Carrying on from my tidying up of the blog post headers, I've turned my attention to the rest of the website. I'm planning on tidying up the look and feel as well as the underlying code.

My plan is to remove the notebook on the front of the website and make the website itself into a notebook. I've placed the open notebook on a cutting mat with pencil and scalpel nearby. The buttons have been tidied up a bit and I'll be calming the colour scheme down a bit.

This is the first draft - what do you think? Any requests?

++++++

If you are a member you can download a full size high quality jpeg of the proposed website layout.

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Meta-post alert! I thoughts I'd do a quick post about what I'm working on on the site, on the site.

Sample Headers

Almost everything I add to the website starts as a blog post. I've added a field to the database so that I can specify what overall theme the post is and the website displays it accordingly, projects go in the shop, mechanisms join the growing mechanism pages, tool are displayed together on the tool page. 

I thought I'd expand a little on this idea firstly, by colour coding themes so you can see what is what and secondly by opening it up a bit so that you can, for example, quickly select all the tutorials by clicking a button in a tutorial post.

Here's the new blog header I've come up with so far. The posts are divided into seven colour coded themes, Blog Post, Project, Tutorial, Tools, Techniques, Mechanisms and Inspiration. (I might merge Tools and Techniques into one.) Each post will have a button to link to a page about that theme. On the right hand side are the comment button and the 5-star rating button.

I've written the html and css (web programming side). I'm now finishing off the button graphics and then putting it all into place.

I'll make a start on that as soon as I've made dinner :-) Oh, and this page is filed under 'Blog Post'

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In a move obviously designed as some sort of ironic gesture, my website has been off line for the last two hours.

"Come on, where are you, I'm not waiting any longer."

I'm delighted to say that I'm back on line. To make up for the gap in service, check out the new headline picture and animations at the top of the Surly Jack page.

Sorry folks.

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I'm doing a little work behind the scenes to make the website more accessible to people from outside the UK. Currently I only accept UKP£ in the shop and UKP£ and USD$ for membership. Now that website traffic from the US has overtaken the UK based traffic I thought I should add the ability to buy from the shop in Dollars.

This might take a while to complete but today I've taken the first step. You can now choose which currency you'd prefer. If you are signing up for a new account it'll be part of the signup process, if you already have a username, here's what you need to do to choose.

Click on 'Your Account' at the top right of any page. 

Select the 'Edit' tab

Click on 'Currency'

Click on the drop down and choose your currency - currently either $ or £

Don't forget to click 'Save'

Thanks!

It won't do anything for the moment but will prepare you for the future. I may add other currencies at a future date, the Euro perhaps, or the Greek Drachma.

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