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August 25, 2003 The children are back to school next week and flags will be displayed throughout the land. My eldest daughter Alexandra has decided to go to University to study law. She will be moving back home soon which means we'll have to reorganise where everyone sleeps. I'm really glad that she has decided to get a good education - it gives people so many more options and life chances. This week I have completed two major projects. First of all mickwood.com Newsletter Services is completed. I decided to set this up when I recieved a really nasty email from someone who had been maliciously subscribed to the mickwood.com Monthly Newsletter. The new system prevents this from happening - news subscribers have to confirm their email address before the subscription process is completed. mickwood.com clients can also use the Newsletter Services to administer their own monthly newsletters. This service will be free for the first 12 months and thereafter a fee based on subscriber numbers will be charged. Newsletters can be html or text-based - one of the great features of the new service is that newsletter archives are automatically generated. Missionary Ventures Europe are the first to take advantage of this new service. Why don't you sign up and find out all the latest MVE News? The second major project completed this week is the online Domain Name Registration / Web Hosting Shopping Cart. Prospective and existing clients can now search for and register new domain names, transfer their existing names to mickwood.com, and purchase new Web hosting accounts. The system is integrated with PayPal, the global leader in online payments offerings clients a Secure, Accessible, Fast, Easy (SAFE), and reliable environment for making online payments. My aim is to make life easier for mickwood.com clients and I'm continually on the look-out for new features. If you have any thoughts about new features or services let me know by emailing mick@mickwood.com. More next time - remember that Jesus loves YOU! Mick # August 16, 2003 The holiday in Wales was wonderful. The sun was very hot with temperatures in the 90's on most days. I managed to find an Internet Cafe which meant I could check my emails every day. As I hoped there were no client problems at all. So now it's back to business and things are going well. I've upgraded all the hosting plans and scrapped the Diamond Plan altogether. Each account now has double the disk space and all accounts now have ASP and MySql as standard. The installation charges for bulletin boards, guestbooks, etc have been scrapped because they are now included in each clients Personal Control Panel. It's now as easy as clicking a button to get a fully-featured bulletin board! I've also upgraded the Flash Animation software. The compression rates are fantastic. For example, the Outlook Express animation was originally 2.95MB. The new software has brought that down to just 1.14MB without any noticable reduction in quality. The file sizes of the other animations have also been substantially reduced. More next time - best wishes - Mick # August 3, 2003 I haven't really got into the habit of updating my journal - life is so hectic which is good in many ways but the journal often gets forgotten. Must try and update more often! Anyway, the day of the graduation ceremony was fantastic. As you know Diana (my wife, who prefers to be called Di) and I have five children and only a small car. Di suggested that we should get a 7-seater minibus / taxi to take the whole family to the ceremony. Of course I agreed and didn't think any more about it. On the morning of the ceremony a white stretch limousine turned up at my door! I was totally shocked. What a brilliant surprise and a wonderful memory. I'm still thinking about how I can get Di back. Below you can see the family posing in front of the limo and the kids enjoying a celebratory drink in the limo - Lauren is on the telephone.   Two weeks ago we also celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, Di celebrated her birthday last week and it's my birthday next week. The celebrations are coming thick and fast and my wallet is crying for mercy. The August 2003 edition of the mickwood.com newsletter has been published. Readers who subscribe to the newsletter will be able to take advantage of some special 'subscriber only' offers. You need to sign up to see what you are missing !? As many of you know I am particularly interested in making the Web accessible for the disabled. This month's newletter has been produced using the accessible TEN standard. My hope is that those of you who are not disabled will not be put off by all the headers and plus signs, etc. The format really does make a difference to disabled readers, especially the visually disabled. What else is new? I've finally got the hang of the new flash animation software. I have also written a couple of new articles . One is on the subject of Domain Names Registration cons and another deals with Cybersquatting and the importance of registering multiple domain names. One of the most common questions I get asked is 'how do I set up Outlook Express so that I can read my e-mail?' To help clients accomplish this task I have created a flash animation which specifically guides people through the process. The animation is quite large (2.95MB) but, even so, will still download in about 12 minutes on a slow Internet connection. It's time to sign off. We are going away on a family holiday to Wales tomorrow and I need to help Di to pack! Best wishes - Mick # |
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