Due to my traveling around over the last few years, I have had many bases, returning home every now and then.  When I do return home I find myself needed a car, and always settle for a cheap run-around.  I see no point spending a lot of money on a car for a short period of time. 

This got me to thinking about making a website where it is easy to find really cheap cars in the UK.

Used cars in the UK are plentiful and cheap.  I will develop this new website to make it easy for people to find a buy a cheap car in the UK.

I have just completed a webite for Lisa Roberts, to promote Lisa's acupuncture in Exeter services.

Lisa is highly qualified and an excellent practicer of acupuncture.

My friend Dean has been working for a few years for this great company that make log cabins in Cornwall. The company is owned by Brian, who used to run a dairy farm until the foot and mouth problems in the UK. Since then Brian has started the log cabin company, which makes and supplies beautiful bespoke log cabins in the Cornwall & Devon regions. Each cabin is custom designed and built, although some customers have ordered more than one cabin in the same style. The company is currently looking to source cheaper DIY cabins from eastern Europe, which will give the company a new arm.

As well as running North Coast, Brian has also setup a venture selling pre-made log cabins in the UK.  These are lovely cabins that are easy to assemble for those with some DIY knowledge.  These are proving to be popular buildings, and a perfect way to add additional buildings to your property.

Log Cabins South West work with a number of other excellent companies.  They provide specialist services such as the concrete for the cabin foundations, and cranes to assemble the big buildings.  You can see them on the partners page.

I've created a Mac software blog, mainly aimed towards web developers. I'm slowly adding information, tips and reviews about web development primarily, but eventually a broader range of Mac and OS X information will be available.

I've created a new website, Schomo.  I'm not sure what I will use it for, but have a few ideas.  I liked the name.

I have recently been working on a diving community website.  It's a great website featuring forums, member search, diving reviews, and more.

The design is great and the people running the website have great enthusiasm for it.  I think it will be very successful, and I wish them the best of luck.

I was doing some research and thinking of buying a new domain name, for a van review website.  I did a search on Easily.co.uk  and found vanreport.com to be free.  I then searched in GoDaddy.com, the registrar I usually use.  30 mins or so later I went back to GoDaddy.com, only to find that vanreport.com had been taken!  I checked the whois data and it shoes it was registered today using details such as enomservice.com and WhoisByProxy.com, which are anonymous services. 

So it looks like someone is monitoring domain searches at GoDaddy or Easily and buying those domains.  Or it was a conincidence.  This person doesn't think so though. There's also more of it going on here and here.  Here is an article about avoiding the interception.

Anyway, I had another domain name on my short-list which is probably better.  Careful where you go searching for domain names!

Update: As soon as I posted this message I checked the vanreport.com domain and it is already parked with ads. I hate those sites.

Update2: 8th August 2008 - 1 week after this post I checked the domain and it was released and available for purchase. This backs up the claims in some of the links above that people are scanning domain search terms and buying domains that people are likely to buy. I bought the domain in the end, at the normal first-registration fee.

Cuil.com, a new search engine, has been laucnhed.  These former Google and IBM employees have setup a search engine to rival Google.

Cuil aims to intepret more of the content on the page to provide better quality results.

So far the results are not so great.

Try a few searches about topics that you know about.  See if you think the authority sites rank highly.

I read a few articles where people demonstrate that the results are poor.

http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

Have you heard about Google Knol?

Knol is a rival to Wikipedia.

Google seem to be favouring knol pages in their own search results now.

Try searching for "how to backpack" in Google.  The first entry is a brand new knol page.

I think they have gone mad, and so does Aaron Wall.

Cuil have a good chance to beat Google if they list quality small sites delivering good information, rather than assuming that the big sites like IMDB, Amazon and Wikipedia have it all (and knol know I guess).

If you are using the eBay affiliate toolkit and you are getting thick grey borders, then here is a fix.

If your page looks like this

add the following code to your css file

img {display: block;}


This will fix a problem with the script displaying on XHTML Transitional Strict pages. Your script will now look like this

Drupal is quickly becoming one of the biggest content management systems available today. It's extensive range of plugins and templates allows web masters to easily build and distribute powerful web applications.

Choosing a cheap Drupal host is a great choice for web masters who are trying Drupal for the first time, or who need to run a number of low traffic websites. Cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability, but disk space and bandwidth are often more restricted than with more professional hosting packages.

Choosing the best web hosting for your Drupal websites is an important choice to make from the beginning. Needing to change hosts once your web application has been deployed is a complex task. If your website is media rich you will have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old host to the new host. This takes a lot of time. It is easy for something to break during the move to a different web host. If your web application is mission critical then your project will be impacted.

Factors to consider when choosing a web host include:

1. Price - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a good value package. US$5 per month is what you should expect to pay.
2. Disk Space - Is enough space provided to cope with your current website? Will it be enough for the growth of the web site? Expect to get unlimited storage, which in reality equates to 1,000 GB, gigabytes of files.
3. Unlimited domains - how many domain names does the web host allow per account? If you intend to host websites on the account you should get an deal with unlimited domain names.
4. Unlimited databases - if you have lots of domains will need lots of databases. bear in mind that many Drupal websites have multiple database per installation.
5. Traffic limit - If you intend your websites to grow in visitor numbers dramatically you should settle for an deal that allows unlimited bandwith. Costs can be high if you go over your permissible limit.

Drupal's multisite option allows you to run many websites from a single installation. This is particularly good if you intend to run multiple websites from a single hosting package. If you update a module or template in the installation all of the websites running on the installation will pick up the updated code. This makes the maintenance of the installation easier. Even the cheap hosting hosts allow the running of multiple websites from a single package.

All cheap Drupal hosting packages will configure their hosting on shared web servers. These shared servers run multiple accounts on a single computer. Your account will sit alongside other accounts on the server and share the resources. The plus side is that the price is kept low. The bad thing is that other peoples actions on the server can disrupt the performance of your account. As a guide you can comfortably run Drupal websites expecting 1,000 unique visitors per day. If your website receives more than this many readers, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.

Find the best cheap Drupal host for your websites with my top 10. Darren Lambert is a web hosting professional, and web developer who has been using Drupal for five years.