This really is a time of change for me. The new Landlord Law site is chugging away nicely so I have time for new ventures.

Zollch Ltd

The most exciting of these is the new company I have set up with my long term web designer Gill Bishop. We have called the company Zollch Ltd – a nonsense word with no known associations which we can use for more or less anything.

Your Law Store

We have started by setting up an online ecommerce store to sell my ebooks and kits for landlords, tenants and advisors. Not everyone wants to join a membership site, and it is nice to be able to produce different products.

The estore is called Your Law Store and we started it off by launching my ebook on assured shorthold tenancies and section 21.

Product launches

Product launches are a new thing for me – a few months ago I had a mad extravagant moment and signed up for Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Forumula course. I have been reading about this for a couple of years now, so as I was set to sell products, it seemed a good idea.

I think probably it is one of the best business investments I have ever made.

Within a few weeks of doing the course I was able to supplement my income by a ‘quick launch’ over Easter which netted me some £2,300. The section 21 ebook launch in early June also went really well, particularly bearing in mind that I had already sold over 100 of the ebooks earlier in the year during its ‘beta launch’.

But Zollch is not going to be just for ecommerce.

Consultancy?

Another thing we have considered is consultancy. If solicitors firms are thinking of offering online services, Gill and I have both been there and done it for the past ten years. So we could offer a pretty nice advisory service for anyone who wanted it.

Between us, we cover most things. I (as a practising solicitor of over 20 years) can analyse their practice to see what options are available to them and offer advice and support, while Gill can deal with the more technical side of things such as constructing websites. I could even help with a product launch now, to raise the finance to pay for the project!

Whether any firms would be interested in such a service remains to be seen (we have had one enquiry), but it is available if needed. Although in the meantime we have plenty to do with Your Law Store. Indeed so much that it is difficult sometimes to know what to do first.

Its a wonderful world

But there are such marvellous opportunities today to create your own products – for example I can now, using reasonably priced software and online services, create promotional videos and publish them online. Ten years, or even two years ago I could never have done that!

These are exciting times.

Well, further to my previous post, Landlord Law has now gone live.  Its basically, good but there have been a few problems.

Landlord Law! Where is it?

The first thing was the massive delay in seeing it.  We switched the namesevers over early on Wednesday, and lots of  people started logging in and using the new site.  However I didn’t see it until Thursday morning!  I got an email from one member on Friday saying that he was still seeing the old site!

Still as it is now a week since we switched, I would hope that everyone now is being directed to the right place.

Most of the site is working perfectly, and fully bears out my web designer’s choice of Drupal.  People have also been very complementary about the fabulous design (all down to Gill) and many also say the navigation is easier.

There are just two problems.  I suppose it is only to be expected with an import of data between two totally different systems, but there have been problems with the members access.

The members access problem

Some members can get in fine.  However many appear to be blocked.  Others, although their details are there, have lost their membership status.  These are all quite easily dealt with by me, but it takes time.  I have to check their membership records on the old site and then make sure that what they have on the new site corresponds.  And I have to unblock their membership when it has been blocked.

Sometimes when I do this, the member gets a once only login link email sent out by the site, and sometimes they don’t.  I haven’t quite worked out what triggers this yet.

A couple of days after launch I sent out a newsflash telling everyone we were now live, and asking them to check their login.

Pandemonium!

Loads of people emailed in saying that they were locked out and I had a very busy time sorting them.  I am still getting quite a few every day and I expect this to go on for some time.  Still at least once I have sorted things out ’round the back’ they are able to log in all right and use the site.  Well most of it.

The document generator problem

The document generator has quite frankly been a nightmare.  As I discussed in my last post.  However what I did not tell you there, was that we had to launch before it was completely finished.

When you generate a document (by filling in fields which I have set up and then clicking the button at the bottom) you get taken to a My Documents area.  This is where you download it.  There you see a list of all the documents you have generated with the most recent at the top.  There are then three buttons, view (just to look at it), pdf (to load it as a pdf) and delete.

There was supposed to be a fourth button.  This was edit, and it was supposed to take you back to the form filling bit, if you found you had made a mistake, so you could do it again.

However shortly before launch I found that this was not working.  I didn’t want to hold up launch any longer (as it was already about five months overdue) so we decided to go ahead without it.  HOPEFULLY the software designer Joop will be getting this done asap after Christmas.

However obviously people do make mistakes, and want to go back and change things. Not having the edit button, I suppose they are using the back button.  Just guessing but I strongly suspect that this is the reason why so many people are emailing me saying that they are getting locked out of their My Documents area and are unable to load their documents.

So I am having to calm them down about that and, if they really can’t get it to work, send them one of the pdfs from the old site.

Site offline!

Then this morning, I went to check a link and found it was not loading.  Horrors! Then I checked a few more links, and found that the WHOLE SITE was not loading.  EEurgh!

My first panic thought was that it was something with the software, and that the whole site would be lost just after launch, and we would have to go back to the old one, while we rebuilt it.  However no, thankfully that was not the problem.  It was a server error.

But this is where the value of using a posh server company like UK Fast comes in.  They have engineers there 24/7 and within about half an hour of my reporting the incident to them they had sorted it.  AND later they sent me an incident report saying exactly what had happened.  Which I never got from my old hosting company.

Still I rather hope it never happens again,

Heigh ho!  But apart from these things (and the member and doc generator problems will no doubt be sorted in time) it is a great site and I am really pleased with it.

Have you had a look at it yet?  You will find it >> here.

Php for lawyers?

Today and yesterday I did something which few solicitors of my generation have done, or will ever do.

I attended a computer training course on php (for beginners, naturally).

“What on earth” I hear you ask “is php?”

What is php?

Php which originally stood for Personal Home Page, when it was developed in 1994 by a Danish/Greenlandic programmer called Rasmus Lerdorf , is now short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. And therefore has the dubious honour of being an acronym where the acronym itself is part of its own definition.

Its main home on the internet is php.net where it is defined as

a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Wikipedia has longer definition:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application.

So now you know.

Basically it can be used to make websites ‘dynamic’. So, for example, if you click a link on a page and the content of the page changes as a result, that will often be because of the php code working away in the background, and then sending the right html code to your computer browser to make the page change its appearance.

It is also the code used in most open source software, to pull different bits together from a database (where they are all stored separately in lots of different tables), to produce a page.

For example WordPress, perhaps the most popular blog software around (its used for this blog for example), is built using php, also Drupal which is the software being used for my new Landlord Law web-site (still unfinished at the time of writing). Others include Moodle, Joomla and Media Wiki (the software used to drive Wikipedia).

The course experience

Attending a computer programming course was an interesting experience.

The other two students were of course men (apparently a lady at a computer training course is a rarety), and were considerably better at programming than me. But then they had both done a lot of programming previously, whereas I have not.

We had all brought our laptops along, and the course started off by having php installed on them. We then started learning what php can do, copying the code and seeing it work, and doing increasingly difficult exercises. These involved working out the code to make something specific happen.

It was interesting to see the difference between myself and my co-students. For most of the time, I found it virtually impossible to work the code out (as in, write it from scratch based on what I had been told). If I copied it very slowly however, I could dimly understand what it was doing and why. Which for me, I considered a result.

However on the morning of the second day, I had a flash of brilliance. We were doing some code which changed one set of words to another. As it was about words and not numbers, I found I could both follow what it was about, and adapt / develop a bit of code to make it work. Yippee!

However our next exercise was about making some sort of numerical calculator, and I was lost. My eyes glazed over and I could feel all intelligence drain from me.

I can do logical things with words (which is why I am a good lawyer) but not with numbers. Or not without a lot more difficulty. Which is different, as our teacher Michael Gruenberger said, from most of the people on his courses, who are generally better at the number stuff. Including the others on my course who were noticeably slower with the word exercise, but much better at everything else.

So what did I think of it?

The php course was a really good thing to do. I now have a much better grasp of what is possible, and what sort of things php will do. So the next thing is to get some books (already on order from Amazon) and work through them carefully (when I get the time).

This, I know, will help me get ideas for new ways of delivery of legal services online (for landlords and tenants). And it is just possible that some of them (the easy ones) I may even be able to develop myself! Watch this space …

In case you were wondering, the course was run by Cambridge IT Courses who provide computer training courses in Norwich, East Anglia and the Midlands.

The Headway blog theme

For some time, the design of this blog has been rather boring, essentially just dark blue and white. It was running the fabulous Headway theme but only version one.

The reason for this is that I had had problems upgrading.  Indeed I had tried to upgrade one day only to have the ‘visual editor’ (which is the way you change things on the new Headways) die on me.  Leaving me no option but to go back to version one and re-do everything.  The original version 1 does not have the visual editor which is why I was forced to stay with it.

However a friend told me that the most recent version is pretty stable with most of the problems ironed out, so I thought I would give it another go.  It worked a treat.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this blog was to put a dark blue background between the main posts area and the sidebar.  This can only be done (if using Headway) via the visual editor.

That done, I had great fun trying out all the different combination’s of colours and style options.  Some of them looked pretty weird.  However I liked having the title in a paler blue band right across the screen, and then somehow putting the home and about links up the top seemed to work.

There were a few problems to resolve however.  My thumbnail for excerpts plugin did not work any more, and my excerpts were thumbnailless. Horrors! However a quick hop over to the Headway forum brought forth the information that WP 3 has the facility to put thumbnails in the excepts now itself.

An examination of the post edit page did indeed reveal a new thumbnail item at the bottom left.  However I then had to go through the whole of the blog allocating thumbnails, which was a bit of a pain.  But done now.

Then there were the next post / previous post links.  I had put these in manually, into the single post editor page, but this page was now gone!  However again the HW forum reminded me of the Headway easy hooks feature which allows you to put things into tricky places on the blog.

A bit of messing around plus a change of the code I had been using, and, bingo! The thing was done.  I think it is important to be able to move from one post to the next on a blog.

So there you are.  A new design.  It should do me for a while anyway.  What do you think of it?

Laptop meets liquid

I had a business trip to the west country last week and did something really stupid on the way back.  I accidentally knocked over a bottle of water and my computer got wet.

It killed it dead of course.

It was difficult to come to terms with to start with, I kept trying to start it up, but nothing happened.  But surely if I tried one more time ….

We are lucky in Norwich in that we have an Apple store, so on Friday, the day after I got back, I made an appointment with the ‘Genius Bar‘.  But the nice Apple man couldn’t get it to start either.  “We had better get it examined” he told me, getting me to sign a piece of paper, “We’ll contact you as soon as we have finished”.

Living without the laptop

Life was very odd, without my Macbook.  Strange and lonely.  I have the office PC of course, but the Macbook is where I do most of my writing, read blogs, visit forums, surf the internet, and twitter.  It was a bit like having lost an arm.

The family were not sympathetic.  “You can talk to us now” said my teenage son gleefully, despite the fact that he spends most of his time staring into his Dell Studio laptop and frequently fails to answer us when we speak to him.

My husband has never liked the laptop (“that white thing”) taking my attention away from him, and invariably glares at me when the startup Bongg goes off.  No sympathy there then.

Repair or replace?

The estimate for the repair bill came through, as £701.  Yikes!  Apparently practically every part in the machine needed to be replaced.

“How much would a replacement laptop cost?” I asked.  The answer was £849 plus £79 to transfer to the data over.  So for an extra £200 odd I could have a new machine.  One with twice the RAM, a bigger hard drive, improved performance …

Happily the damage was covered by insurance subject to a £100 excess, so effectively I could have a new machine with all my data  transferred over for just over £300.  And I would not have to wait for the parts to arrive and my machine to be repaired.  It was not the time I would have chosen for a computer upgrade, but there was no question which option I would choose.  The only worry was whether my data had survived the water damage.

So Wednesday I went in and paid them, and yesterday and I collected my new machine.  Its great!

The old and the new

The nice Apple people were able to recover the data and it had all been copied over and set up for me.  So on opening the machine up it was just like having my old laptop back.  All the software I had downloaded from the internet was there, all my bookmarks, the saved passwords for web-sites.  Even the tabs on Firefox were still open.  Just like before.

But the machine is so much better.  The screen is much brighter, its like its been through the wash (which is saying something as the old screen was pretty nice).  It seems to work faster.  And the computer itself is nicer.

One thing in particular I like is that there is a shiny texture on the top but a more matt texture on the bottom, so when I am carrying it, it is much easier to set it down the right way up.  With the old machine I was always having to turn it over before opening.  Very clever.

Also the £79 I paid for the data transfer entitles me to get some training at the Apple Store.  Its called Apple One to One.  I can see that being very useful.

So not really a disaster at all, now its all over.  But I am making sure that this machine is kept well away from any liquid!

Sole practitioner collaboration

Last year I joined a group of sole practitioners, called the Independent Law Network.  They have been meeting up together for a couple of years now.  I was invited by Mark Foley (perhaps the nearest thing the group has to a leader), and they were very welcoming.

They are a lovely group of people and it was so nice to be able to talk to other sole practitioners about some of the problems that we all experience. No-one really understands what a sole practitioner has to cope with, like another sole practitioner.

Social media for soles

However I think I was a bit of a shock to them.  I bounded in, and started talking about blogs, twitter, Linkedin and all these strange social media things they had largely been able to ignore up to then.  Needless to say I proposed a group blog, which rather sportingly they agreed to try.  It is now online, the Independent Law Network blog, and we are starting to promote it.

The group also do a printed newsletter which we all send out to our clients as a way of cross referring our services.  The blog uses the same design, so the two are both recognisable as  an ILN production.

Building a blog

It has been fun making a blog for a group of bloggers. We all have our own page with a contact form (I used Contact form 7), and have a category in our name so I can do a link to each persons blogs from their page.

Photos have been a bit of a problem, some of us already had nice professional pictures, others have had to get family and friends to take them. We are considering a group booking at a professional photographers.

Anyway the blog is now out in the public domain.  It will be interesting to see how it progresses.  Whether the group will want to continue writing for it after a few months. Whether it will bring in any extra work.  Or whether anything else will come of it.  You never can tell what will happen on the internet.

Is group blogging the way forward for soles?

However I suspect that this sort of thing is going to be essential for sole practitioners, especially those who have a more traditional practice.  The public often prefer the more personal approach which a small firm can provide, but it is often difficult to find them.  This sort of initiative will help make sole practitioners more visible.

Do you do any networking with local colleagues?  Does anyone else do a collaborative blog with other professionals?  Do you have any suggestions, comments?

If a picture paints a thousand words, you will want to keep them in your excerpts!

An excerpt, in case you did not know, is a reduced version of a post which goes below the initial post on the home page. So you get one post in full and then a lot of excepts. Shortened versions with a link to take you to the posts own ‘page’.

Excepts are good for several reasons:

• They help your SEO. Apparently Google does not like repeated content, so if your posts are in full both on the home page and on their own page, you will be penalised
• It makes it easier for people to scroll down and find what they are looking for.  This is particuarly useful if you tend to write long posts
• It encourages people to visit the post ‘page’.  As this is where the comments box is they are then more likley to post a comment

Headway, the theme I use, creates excerpts automatically, which is nice.  If you don’t use a theme such as Headway though, you may need to find a plugin which will make the excerpts for you.  I had this problem with my Green Blogging blog, and I found and now use Excerpt Editor there.

By defualt, WordPress strips out all the code in excerpts and just presents the text.  However, this is a bit boring, and also annoying if you have gone to some trouble to find the right pictures.

Excerpt Editor kept my images in my Green Blogging blog, but the Headway service did not.  I was particularly keen to keep the pictures in my Lodger Landlord blog.  The pictures in many cases define the post, and would be useful for people scanning the list of excerpts looking for a particular post.  But how to do it?  Time to look for another plugin.

I found one eventually.  There are several that I suspect would do the job, but the one I used (and am using here at the time of writing) is Thumbnail for Excerpts.  I chose this one as I liked the fact that it said it would make my life easier!

And it works.  As you can see.  Bingo!  The only problem that if you do not have an image on the post, it show a rather ugly holding white image.  This is not a problem with the Lodger Landlord site where I have always had one image per post, but it means I cannot use it on my Landlord Law Blog.  This was set up about 4 years ago and for at least a year and a half at the start there are no images at all.  But that is not a problem really as I have a lot of other images scattered around to make the site look nice.

I have had to put in quite a few images on this blog though.

What do you think?  Do you use excepts on your blog? Do you think keeping the pictures is a good idea?  What plugins do you use?

Update: during this past week (October 2010) I have upgraded this blog to Headway version 166.  For some reason that I don’t understand the Thumbnail for Excerpts plugin stopped working.  The Headway forum told me that thumbnails are now part of WP version 3, and indeed a closer look at the edit post page found a thumbnails section at the bottom right.

This works differently from the plugin and I have to allocate a picture to each post to be its thumbnail.  After which I have to delete the picture from the post text box or it appears twice.  So I am currently going back through the blog allocating a thumbnail for each post.  Its a bit time consuming but its nice to see some of the old posts again.

I don’t know about you, but I find I am using the internet all the time. I am constantly looking things up, checking facts and the law before I write something, or seeing what new blog posts have been written by others. And I want to get there quickly with no tedious looking up.

So I was delighted to find out about the Conduit free tool bar service.

My first thought was, as always ;), for my Landlord Law members. Some of them have complained that the navigation on the Landlord Law site is a bit opaque (others have complimented me on its simplicity so you can’t please them all). “Here” I thought “is a way to give them an alternative method of finding things “. So I constructed a nice toolbar with links to all the main Landlord Law pages. You can read about it here.

Naturally I downloaded and used the Landlord Law toolbar myself, and very useful if was too. But I began to get frustrated by it. Because I had designed it for landlords, whereas I am a solicitor. I wanted access to sites I use professionally such as the UK Statute Law Database and the CPR. I wanted a link to The Times law page and the housing section of the Communities and Local Government web-site. I wanted the Nearly Legal Blog and BAILLI. And after a while I decided that I was jolly well going to have them.

A quick email to the nice Conduit people reassured me that I could have more than one toolbar.  So I did the Housing Lawyers toolbar. You can read about it here.

It is *really* useful. I work on two computers (the office PC and the Macbook) and use two different internet browsers on each. The toolbar means that my links are in the same place on all of them, which makes life a lot easier.  Plus, if I find a new site I want, I add it to the toolbar and, bingo!  It is on all my web-browsers without me having to do anything.

If you are a housing lawyer you are welcome to use it too. You can download the toolbar from here. My Conduit stats say that there are six active users, so presumably someone other than me is using it – I hope they are finding it useful.

But if you are not a housing lawyer (and lets face it, not many people are) – why not get your own? The Conduit people promote it as a way of getting money, as you can earn if lots of people use your toolbar, but frankly all I am interested in is having an easy life. Anyone can sign up and get a nice toolbar for all their regular web sites. You can fit an awful lot on it, as you can do drop down lists, which means that different types of site can be grouped together. I have a drop down list, for example, for all the housing blogs I follow,  and another for all the sites where I can read case law.

Why not give it a go?  Let me know how you get on!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (in case you didn’t know).  Bloggers, as well as having to write readable copy, are also supposed to optimise it for the search engines.  Personally I have never really bothered that much with SEO, trying instead to write interesting articles of the sort which hopefully the search engines would want to promote.  But  not any more!

One of the advantages of following various ‘big bloggers’ (see my post here) is that you get information about new services that are being launched.  Recently I received an email telling me about a new service from copyblogger Brian Clarke.  Its called Scribe.

Scribe is a wordpress plugin (affiliate link), which analyses your blog post, via a content optimization service which you are able to access via an ‘API key’ you get when you sign up. As a user it is like magic.

You type your post.  Then you fill in the SEO information boxes you have at the bottom of your post if you are using the Thesis or Headway themes, or if you have the free All in One SEO plugin (you have to have one of these or you can’t use Scribe). Then you click the analyse button, which appears in the Scribe box at the top right of your screen once you have done this.

The Scribe system then digests your content, and thinks about it (presumably connecting with the Scribe service) while a little spinning circle spins. Then up pops a box telling you what percentage SEO success you will have and what you need to do to improve it.

As you will realise from this post, I have invested in Scribe. I have a number of blogs, and as my business depends to a large degree on the internet, it is important that I am visible. Also, there is an ‘early bird’ offer from Scribe if you sign up before 19 February.

Hopefully my posts will now become a lot more visible on the internet. We shall see.

Note – I have just analysed this post and it has scored 99%!

To get exposure for your blog, it is really important nowadays to promote it via social media.  One of the best ways of doing this is to get other people to promote it for you!  You do this by giving them handy little buttons and links.  My theme, the Headway theme provides social media buttons to go in the sidebar, but it is also nice to have some links for people to click when they finish reading your post.

When my web designer did my Landlord Law Blog for me, she sourced the add to any button which has links to practically every social media site you could possibly think of.  However after a while I started to get annoyed at the way it kept popping up and getting in my way when I was using the site.  Then I read about Nicholas Cardot’s plugin – Nicholas writes a very good blog called Site Sketch 101 and you can read about his plugin here.

I did try his plugin for a while, but it did not suit the style of my sites, so I decided to go looking for a few more.  One recommended by a Site Sketch 101 reader was the sexybookmarks plugin, and I am using this (at the time of writing) for my Landlord Law Blog.

However there are others.  One that I quite like is I love social bookmarking, and this is the one I am using here  (at the time of writing this – I may change it later).  The social media buttons appear if you hover hour mouse over the text at the end of the post.  You can customise how they appear and the buttons that show.

So far as twitter is concerned (very important for promoting blog posts), many sites have the little green tweetmeme buttons at the top of their posts.  I had this too for a while.  However after reading the Site Sketch  15 best wordpress plugins post I decided to start using backtype tweetcount.  This has two advantages (1) readers do not have to authorise the program to access their twitter account and (2) you can change the colour of the box to match your site style.  I have made it orange on the Landlord Law blog and the ‘house blue’ colour here.

Have you used any of these?  Which do you prefer?  Can you click one of them please before you go on your way!!