richard cross » Update

Cycle Leader Training

Richard — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:38:14 +0000

Yesterday I attended a Cycle Leader Training course at The Bike Station. Organised by Greener Leith the aim is to start running adult cycling proficiency and Sunday rides in and around Leith to promote and encourage more cycling.

Feels good to be volunteering in something which is healthy, environmentally friendly and local – though as we are yet to take a group out it’s still in it’s early stages. Thanks to our trainer, Ruiraidh and my fellow cycle leaders for making it a good day.

A new day, a new office…

Richard — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:24:05 +0000

This morning I finally took up residence of my desk in a shared office space in the the centre of Edinburgh. After 7 years of working from a home office this feels like a big step, but friendly faces have helped make it a smooth transition. Will be interesting to see what it does to my efficiency / productivity / spend on sandwiches!

Light Sabre Trails

Richard — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:36:22 +0000

An evening in Pete’s garden around the chiminea led to these amazing images, courtesy of Andrew and Conner with a light sabre and sonic screw driver. Stunning. Thanks to all. View the set.

htaccess 301 redirect

Richard — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:36:35 +0000

Having updated the site and changed the structure slightly some pages which used to get good traffic have moved i.e. Free Wifi In Edinburgh. To ensure these pages maintain their search ranking and inbound links continue to work I’ve added ’301 redirects’ to the .htaccess file with help from this very handy 301 redirect tutorial. This means anyone visiting the old page will be seamlessly redirected to the new page.

New photography pages

Richard — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:54:26 +0000

Just finishing off round one of reworking the Photography pages, aside from the new landing page I’ve cleaned up several of the older galleries which have been there in one form or another since 2001. It’s a job I’ve been putting off for a while, but it turned out to not be as fiddly as I thought.

Now the pages are much easier to manage my intention is to add more image ‘collections’ from the archives, plus new images as I shoot them. As ever, watch this space!

The move to WordPress

Richard — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:03:04 +0000

Having run the home page of my site from Blogger for several years I’ve decided to move to using WordPress. It is a fully featured blog and content management system which will allow me to develop ideas I’ve had while working on client sites.

Have made good progress today though it’s still very much ‘work in progress’. WordPress is installed and running in parallel with the other applications, I’ve applied basic template styles to tie it in with the other pages in the site and added some initial plug-ins for search engine optimisation and integration with Flickr.

Your thoughts on the faded background welcome, personally I’m in 2 minds but it should work well as background for images. The problem with your own site is it’s so hard to tell – you are the developer, designer and the client rolled into one!

Over the next few days I’ll be adding other elements and applying the new styles to the Photoblog and Scottish Mountain Gallery. Watch this space!

10 Big Things

Richard — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:16:30 +0000

The 10BigThings forum was held yesterday at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Edinburgh. It preceded the ScotSoft 2008 Gala Dinner with the aim of bringing together software and ICT professionals with cutting-edge ideas, and insights from leading industry figures.

Amongst the ideas discussed were:

The future of Cloud Computing
Developing Software as a Service
Microsoft’s interactive table – Surface
Rich media experience – Silverlight
Three-dimensional photographic environments – Photosynth
The evolution of personal computing devices into fashion items
Social Networks on the balance sheet
Online governance with Emergent Democracy
The professionalism of security as a market opportunity
Perpetual Beta

This was followed by champagne reception and a slap up meal, many thanks to Net Resources for inviting me along as their guest.