Monster Blogs Sorted (by sarah)

I have spent the last few hours sorting out an issue on the Monster blogs(Blue, Red and Yellow). As some of you might have noticed the links were broken and appearing as non-clickable ugly text with all the markdown visable 🙁

We had been trying to chase down the problem for weeks when another blog I set up was showing the same issue - I was in the visual editor.

It turns out there is now a visual as well as HTML editor on WordPress blogs. This has cuased me lots of unnessascery work involving manually going through and removing unwanted tags :'(

I have gone into more detail on the Web-Empire blog as I felt it was information that needed sharing.

Web-Empire (by sarah)

As some of you may know I have being doing my MRes at college part time but I have also been attending business courses and mentor sessions set up for me by the Prince's Trust and as a result have steamed ahead with my business idea.

I am now officially a Web-consultant and designer and thanks to skills I learnt or at least found out about during my undergraduate and my Masters I have discovered I am better (To my horror) than alot of the compertition. If one more person asks me if I use dreamweaver I may just scream!

Ok so I know I am lucky in the fact I have the techno guru at my disposial if I ever get stuck but to be honest it is all alot simpler than I thought it would be.

So here is my Website, the business is called Web-Empire and is a unique blend of art and technology just about right for my skill set I would say. You see I've had a eureka moment in that I feel alot of technical and sciencetific stuff is inaccessible to people mainly due to artificial barriers of what people expect things to be like - I will no doubt do a longer post on this at some point (if I get the time with all those nice new customers I'm hoping to get).

I want to make things accessible and I want people to lose this concept of dichotomy which allows dangerous psuedo science to slip in.

I'm hoping that web-empire will be a nice approachable business which will help its customers 🙂

I hope you all like the web-site feed back is always appreciated. It also has a blog where nice little articles on the world of the web will go, along with book reviews on web, business and art stuff. Not to mention I am constructing a hopefully useful glossary.

Business Day (by sarah)

Ok so after a weekend of server nightmare I spent today in a meeting with my Prince's Trust business mentor hashing through some of my ideas - mainly as due to being in London yesturday I had not finished the work he should have been going through.

Still he seemed impressed when I told him of the graphics packages and things I'd been learning to use and hunting out suitable name for my business.

I was going to spend today building my website and ordering my business cards and stickers but lo! I had no logo yet and without that there apparently isn't alot of point in moving ahead with the other two. And so I thought I would draw my own and so that is what I have spent the whole afternoon doing and it is still not finished and I am having a nightmare trying to work out the finer points of adobe illistrator which I need to know for a college project :/

Still I think today probably has been productive even if it was just becuase of the structure now imposed on my business idea after the meeting.

I'm hoping to use the christmas holiday to build up my web stuff and begin advertising my business properlly. I am also exploring other options other than having to buy new servers and stuff. At the moment I am still being crippled by the lack of capital to move forward and the credit crunch is making things a little bit sticky for me as is colleges insistance that I need to pay a top up fee for going back :(.

And so I suppose I need to get back to that logo :/

Prince’s Trust (by sarah)

Last Friday I went to a meeting with two mentors from the Prince's Trust to talk to them about my business plans. I have been making websites and setting up blogs for people for a while now and I thought I should move forward with this and turn it into a proper business.

So I spent Thursday last week writing out my business plan which was a good thing to do anyway and made me realise how far ahead with things I actually am. The Prince's Trust was something that Flo initially told me about back before the pregnancy and I had been toying with the idea of starting a craft business but I got cuaght up a) being ill and b) blogging about the craft on Salaric Crafts but the blogging led to writing and that led to websites for people I met through writing and wham - here I am.

I think I have a niche and am excited though in some ways I wish it had all started to kick off last year (which it couldn't due to the flood) or that they had waited just a bit longer to get around to contacting me so that I wasn't in the middle of having to write essays on the formation of the moon and the such like.

I don't know if I can't get the financial help from them but even if I can't I want to have the business tutoring as I feel that will be most helpful.

The Prince's Trust help poeple under 30 set up their business's which is cool and hopefully will help me sort our lives out. Unfortunatly I am asking for just over the amount that you get without having to 'Go to Panel' . I need servers and I need to have them in a data centre so I am asking £2000 which is basically the servers etc.... my hardware costs :'( The panel is apparently something that looks like Dragons Den but they say they are friendlier - well they couldn't be less friendly could they!

They got excited about my 'mind map' that I had drawn in Jean's feltips for added colour in a typically me way - I thought it was a flow diagram and thought mind maps where what Carinia was calling the things she was drawing for her PhD stuff. So now I am wondering if mind maps is a sort of catch all for things I term: Brain storming, flow diagrams and spider diagrams.

I probably should investigate this at some point.

One of the things that I am having to do at the moment is heavily prioritize what I spend my time on and sadly this means that for the last two months I have done no art or craft but then this is my ultra busy term.

I have a list of homework from the Prince's Trust as well as from college but I am afraid playing with Jean still comes highest on my agender. She is being quiet mischevious at the moment as well - unfortunalty she has developed sciencetific method for finding out exactly what she can and can't get away with.

The funniest thing she does though is wait for me to get up from the laptop then she climbs into my seat and says, 'Can I do your work now Mummy?' and she sits just like Alaric poised to start a heavey programming session.

Well here I go again....

Red Monster (by sarah)

To join the world of the Blue Monster a new Gurgitation monster is on the loose, courtesy of me and my madness!

Presenting Red Monster's Blog!

http://red.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/