The MANXNET Thing

I'm trying my best to be understanding under the circumstances, but I've been bleating on about this happening for more than three years now and have spent much of that time trying to get people to switch to some other mail service.

There must come a time when, no matter how much you are attached to the nostalgia and familiarity of a thing, it is time to let go. Even that old car gets sent to scrap when your feet are rubbing on the ground as you drive along. All things must pass.

Rubbish

My fondness for the manx.net email platform is very different from that of anyone else. I earn so much from helping people to keep it working that I'll actually be sorry to see it go. Well, I'll be sorry to see the income from it go, at least.

Frankly, for the last ten years or so, the service from MT for this part of their business has been abysmal. It's not just bad, it's bloody awful. In an ill-advised push to get everyone to use a web-based interface, they have neglected the support for POP3 and IMAP users on home computers and basically disowned them. Indeed, they probably only keep IMAP working for their thousands of mobile-phone users.

The Offer

So, for basically £80 per year, they will allow you to keep your email address and continue to use it with the same service provider - something new called Jumara that appears to have been created specifically to be a new brand. The backbone is provided by ATMAIL who are apparently respected in the field of providing email services to entities like MT. Sadly, they don't seem to be highly rated - https://au.trustpilot.com/review/www.atmail.com.

Some of the reviews hit home hard. Servers randomly down for indeterminate periods sounds eerily familiar.

Perhaps the oddest thing about all of this is that they are starting to sell this new service as a step forward at a point where the POP3 and IMAP servers are actually down for many people. They would apparently have been better to have taken manx.net out the back and quietly despatched it!

The Alternatives?

Well, whatever you do, don't go with their ridiculous offer. There are countless alternatives and options out there. Changing your email isn't as bad as you might think and it can be a good chance to get rid of all that stuff that you're subscribed to but never read.

If you already have a GMAIL, HOTMAIL/LIVE/OUTLOOK, ICLOUD or YAHOO address, then perhaps just keep on using that. If you don't, then these are good options for switching.

Slightly less well-known are providers like PROTON or MAIL.COM. Do a search for "FREE EMAIL PROVIDERS" and take a look at the many options out there.

Finally - and not as complex as you might think - is the creation of your own email accounts on a domain of your choosing. Almost any website hosting company will offer unlimited email addresses and massive amounts of storage when you buy a domain name. They can offer full functionality for a fraction of the cost. I pay less than £40 per year for my david@dkinrade.com address with FREEOLA.

The Bottom Line

Don't get caught by the trap. 

YOU HAVE TIME TO THINK ABOUT THIS

You do not have to stick with manx.net just because it is familiar. They are too expensive and far too unreliable to be worth hanging on to.

Explore the alternatives - this is what searching the internet is for.

Shout if you need help. There are always options and I'm happy to chat. I'll even try and avoid all the jargon and keep it in English!

Quick Update

 

So, this might be a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but there are some updates on my publishing website and it's nice to make sure that people are aware.

I've published (or am waiting for final printed proofs of) two new books on Amazon. The first is the next in my series of small-format photo books and is dedicated to lions. Actually, the whole series hasn't really been pushed out here or on the other site.

The second is my latest novel, a sequel of sorts to Hard-wired for Love, entitled Another Horizon. It's a sexy, technical sci-fi tale about interplanetary love and the quest for the colonisation of distant worlds.

Hop over to ThePridePride for more details.

The Pride Pride Updates

I've just been doing a little work on The Pride Pride website. It is always a work in progress, but I do like to keep things up-to-date when there's the possibility of a new book (or books) in the works.

Hop over using this link or by clicking on the option on the main toolbar above to get all the latest.

Summer Mornings and Productivity

Summer Mornings

I've always tended to need only about six hours of sleep and I'm a fairly broken sleeper - I wake many times in the night and turn over. I do sometimes feel the benefit of getting a good eight hours, but can quite happily get by with less.

This pattern is exacerbated in the summer months. As the days get longer and the light evenings and - particularly - mornings draw out, I find I can't sleep as long as I can in the darker months of winter. If I wake at 5am, like I did this morning, then I struggle to go back to sleep and find myself getting up and wishing to use the time productively.

Often, this finds me sitting at my desk and working on whatever coding project I'm currently thinking about - or watching YouTube!

Productivity

This month's project is to try and make a Facebook Advert Generator, following a suggestion from Richard at DW Cars. It's surprising just how much benefit can be gained from a consistent approach to any online advertising - identity and consistency are vitally important here. You need to engage your audience and then become recognisable with each new view.

What I'm trying to do with this simple app is to help with that consistency by providing a template-based framework within which adverts that are as similar as possible in look and feel can be created very quickly with minimal input or effort.

I find that, working for a couple of hours - maybe between 6 and 8 in the morning - I can get a lot of work done in that short and otherwise wasted period between sleep and going out to work. These days I'm not the sort of coder who can spend ten hours of concentrated effort on a task, so a couple of hours at the most now seems to suit me well.

I'm not going to charge for this once it is done. I'll revisit it when it is complete and include a download link to the app and the manual when it's production ready. That will be a few days away at least - I still have to implement the splash objects and photo effect options yet and then decide how to handle PDF output for exporting to other media.

Another New Website - DWCars.info

Here's another new website - this time a major update for the most popular site in the portfolio that I manage, with more than a million hits to the previous iterations of the site. Like many others at the moment, Richard at DW Cars felt that their website needed a better reach and a more mobile-friendly nature. Once again, I turned to a pre-built template as the basis for the site and then heavily modified it within the framework provided to achieve our aims.

Compared to the site constructed for Hearth, this is a much more involved and complicated undertaking, just the list of software required is a testament to that, as is the amount of time involved in the creation and testing of the combined systems necessary.

Graphics and Video: Serif Drawplus X8, Adobe Photoshop CC, Paint.NET, Adobe Premiere Pro.

Web Code: Microsoft Expression Web, Atom, Windows Notepad.

Web Tools: FileZilla, Opera Browser.

Development: Anywhere Software's B4J, Java 14, InnoSetup Compiler, DB Browser (SQlite), JavaFX SceneBuilder by Gluon.

So, the big difference here is the database application that now sits on Richard's PC and manages the content and updates of the site. All the stock is entered into the database and then the software can build all the pages quickly and cleanly. This ensures that they remain consistent and error free. As an added bonus, the same software can create a datasheet for each vehicle and make that available as a PDF file that can be emailed to a customer or printed out as a handout.

I've always been a fan of offline website management - believe-it-or-not, the coding is simpler than trying to do the same thing online and I find that any changes are quicker and easier to implement and deploy.

I use a RAD environment called B4J. It uses a BASIC language dialect and form layout files to create an application that is ultimately compiled to the JAVA language, but the code is simpler to understand and quicker to implement. This JAVA application is then packaged as a windows program and deployed to the client's computer.

The program provides a front-end to a SQLite database that provides speed and resiliency for the data and allows a single file to store the entire website - something that makes backups a breeze. Adding a new vehicle becomes a simple case of ticking a few boxes and dragging some photos into a window.

Back to Websites

After a long period of inactivity on the website design and publishing front, I'm finally back in the production saddle, with a couple of projects being worked on at the moment.

I'm delighted to be helping www.hearth.co.com to bring their new website together. Based on a very simple and clean-looking template, the site is initially a single page that is device responsive and elegant.

I'm loving working with pre-made bootstrap templates more and more as I slowly get used to the CSS that the main part of the platform uses. As always, the more you do, the easier it becomes. Using a pre-made template as a starting point dramatically reduces the time-to-complete on a project like this. In this case we took considerably less than 20 hours for the whole page, including all the graphics, text and quite a bit of troubleshooting on the hosting side.

It always surprises me when I add up just how much software goes into the creation of even something as relatively simple as this: Photoshop, DrawPlus X8, Paint.NET, Notepad, Expression Web, Atom, Opera and FileZilla all have their part to play in the construction of assets and editing of code.

I use DrawPlus X8 to create graphical assets - buttons, logos, etc. It is a bit long in the tooth now, but I'm very familiar with it and well aware of the limitations. I do have Serif's Affinity suite, but just can't quite be as productive in the newer tools yet.

Photo editing and retouching is split between Adobe Photoshop and Paint.NET. I could probably do almost all of it in the latter package - which is free - but Photoshop has the power to do some really amazing stuff very quickly.

Like some of the other software I prefer, Expression Web is a competent editor, but now very out of date and unsupported. I'm slowly switching over to Atom - a very modern, open-source code editor with some really great features. I still need to have something like notepad handy as well, for quick edits and temporary space.

Finally, My browser of choice is Opera - they are almost all Chromium-based at this point anyway. It has a nice developer console that helps with debugging javascript and css codes. Upload to the final webspace is with FileZilla, a great free FTP client that I've used for many years now.

Don't get me wrong, websites can and do sometimes cost thousands, but with a little care, you can have something that reflects positively on your business for just a few hundred pounds.

Changing Circumstances

 When you've basically done the same thing for more than 20 years, it can be easy to become just stuck in the rut. I have helped at Copycat / Computers4-u for more than two decades - all of this century - but that has now come to an end.

The decision to leave was mine, and I'm not going to go into my reasons, but now I am able to focus more clearly on what I want to do and how I want to do it.

One of the first of those things is to get back into creating websites and enjoying the process. This is something that I have slowly fallen behind in over the last three or four years and I need to bring my skills up to date.

My first attempt is with my own primary site www.davidkinrade.com. I've found a nice template online - there's no shame in cheating a little - and modified it to suit my needs. I've created some new graphics and cut down the content dramatically for a more modern feel. The major changes are in design philosophy. This site is "responsive". In web terms, responsive means that the layout and organisation of the site responds to different screen sizes and devices. It works equally well on a mobile phone screen, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop and across all major platforms.

Expect more like this to follow in the future, as I do appear to have been bitten by the design bug once more.