Well I really managed to do it again didnt I, forgetting to add bits to the old blog. I cant believe its been 2 months since I last wrote.
I started this blog to give customers an incite into what I was up to with the various web sites and I had also read that it was a good marketing tool to help promote the web sites, so I guess Im failing miserable with these so far!
Last time I wrote I mentioned a lack of snow here in Cambridge, well as it turns out blogs are more powerful than I ever imagined, the very next day the best covering of snow Ive seen here in the UK for quite some time, it must have been at least an inch thick!!!.
Now Im thinking that if blogs are really this powerfully perhaps its about time I started complaining about my lack of wining lottery tickets! although I guess really not buying a lottery ticket in the first place doesnt help the matter.
Big apologies to all of you how make use of Dollars2Pounds.com (and the other exchange rates sites), the federal reserve who I get the currency feed from kindly changed the data format in the xml file at the beginning of April, how nice!, they didnt even bother to update the URI or anything to keep backwards compatibility, just a new format.
Well after some major stupidity on my behalf (requesting the rates for the next day) I finally managed to update the xml parsing routines to work with the new file format. Its times like that I wish I was using asp.net or PHP5, but for now my servers running PHP4, one day soon Ill be getting a Windows Server 2003 server and getting ASP.NET running for my sites, C#/.NET is a very nice language to write in and really improves developer performance however with the way things are Ill be needing 40hour days and a time machine to even get started with that.
In good news I managed to get some updates to the way each site gets the exchange rates, the way they worked was left over from the days on shared hosting accounts when I couldnt get all the sites to access a single database to store the rates in, thats now fixed and sites like Pounds2Euro.com should be somewhat faster now.
Also, if you use the Bango numbers to access either Dollars2Pounds.com or BookSwap.ws please not that these are no longer supported.
Hello and welcome to my blog, I decided that it was about time for me to tell the world what I'm up to in a central location as well as my occasional ramblings on the community areas of the various web sites that I run.
So let me introduce myself, I'm Steve (OK, really Stephen, but Every one calls me Steve), I'm the director of Analysis UK Ltd, a UK based company. At this time it is very much a MicroISV, with myself as the only employee (and even then I'm part time).
Under the Analysis UK umbrella you will find a number of software based products, these include
BookSwap.ws, DVDSwap.ws, and Dollars2Pounds.com not to mention a few other related sites.
Analysis UK was initially formed by myself to provide Analytical software and hardware, however as happens I got a little side tracked with the other projects and decided it was better to focus on them.
In-between developing BookSwap.ws and the other site, I am also selling books (on Amazon.co.uk market place and eBay.co.uk as well as on BookSwap.ws) so that I can understand how a book seller operates and improve my sites based on this, also trying to hold down a 9-5 job as a software engineer developing applications for the life science industry.