I have started going into multi media.  There is the Landlord Law Podcasts and the Landlord Law YouTube channel.  Exciting stuff.  And I am planning to do more audios and videos, both promotional and in due course as part of the content of my membership site.

However these mulitmedia files are very big.  I was shocked when I saw how large my audio files were, and found out that they tend to be about a MB a minute.  There is the problem about loading them up to blogs and sites in the first place, and then the strain that they can place on your server.  Particuarly if lots of people  want to use them at the same.

The answer to this it seems is Amazon.  I always thought of Amazon as primarily an online bookshop, even though they have branched out into all sorts of other things, even shoes and garden furniture.  I have been a fan of Amazon for many years.

However they also provide online storage space, under the name Amazon Web Services.  It seems that it is both very cheap and very secure and reliable.   If you are not a died in the wool techie its all a bit confusing, but I now feel reasonably confident with their simple storage solution Amazon S3.

You have to sign up, although if you have an ordinary Amazon account you use the same login etc.  When in the S3 area you have to set up buckets to store things in.  Then in the buckets you can put more folders to sort things and then load up your files.  Bingo!  You can link to them easily on your blog (so long as you remember to tell Amazon that they are public files).

I did this a week or so, loading up my podcast audio files and various other things.  I felt pretty pleased with myself until I realised that there was no way I could track how many people downloaded and listened to or watched my files!

I had a rummage around on Amazon itself and found that you could activate something called logging which would record details.  Yippee! I thought, sorted, and duly activated.  However a couple of days later I found the folders full of all these logs, which I did not know what to do with or understand.  Surely there must be an answer?

There is, and its name is S3Stat.  You sign up with them, set up some keys which let them access your Amazon S3 storage area, and then they get busy and start analyzing them.  So finally I was able to learn that in the 24 hours since I signed up, six people had downloaded my podcast (its now gone up a bit)!

Its a pretty good service at a minuscule price, $5 per month (about £3).  However they also have a ‘Cheap Bastard’ plan which allows you to have the service for free if only you write about them online.

Hence of course this article!  Its a pretty good service.  You might want to check it out.

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.

A new year, a new Landlord Law

It started in January.  I decided to change hosting companies and asked my web designer if my website (that is my membership site Landlord Law) could be moved over to the new company I had chosen which is called UK Fast.

Turned out that they couldn’t, so I decided instead to commission the new site that we had been talking about for the past year or so.  It took a while to get a quote out of them (it always does somehow) but by about March time we had a specification and a quotation. And a date for launch.  It was definitely going to be the end of June.

The quotation was, as it always is, more than I expected.  But the service did really need an upgrade and this was to be a completely new site.  My web designer, Gill, decided that Drupal would be the best solution for my service, as Landlord Law is large and complex and Drupal is good for this.

Death in June

March through to June my web designer was doing research and preliminary setting up.  June we planned for me to take a trip to see her (she lives in the West Country), meet the software designer, and move things forward.  Launch, it seemed, could not be the end of June after all, but would probably be by the end of the summer.

Life has a way of intervening in the best laid plans, and very sadly Gills father died just at the time I was due to travel down there (in fact I was on the train when she rang me), and the trip had to be put back.

Needless to say this put a bit of a stop on the project for a few weeks.  However in mid July the West Country trip took place – a good visit, we got a lot done, although on the way back my laptop got destroyed by a bottle of water.

The content transfer begins

August I was able to start working on the site and begin the long job of transferring the content over.  I hadn’t realised quite how much content I had on Landlord Law!  Not only did I have to copy it over, but also to check it and update it where necessary.

At the same time I had to learn Drupal.  Drupal is a brilliant system, really brilliant, but it is not the easiest in the world to get the hang of.  And my web designer is brilliant at web design and creation, not teaching, so I was often having to work things out for myself.  It is probably very good for me (stimulates the brain cells and all that), and I do puzzle things out in the end, but it is not the easiest way to do things.

Gill also had her problems.  This is her first Drupal site, so a lot of learning for her too.  Everything took about twice as long as we thought it would – if we were lucky!

The dreaded document generator

Then there was the document generator software I had commissioned.  This was to be a new way of generating the tenancy agreements, letters and other forms.  I had met the software designer, Joop (he’s Dutch),  on my trip to see Gill, but at that time we had not, much to my disappointment, been able to actually generate a document.

Time went by, ‘When are we going to have the document generator?’ I would ask Gill, and not really get an answer.  Eventually I got some abbreviated instructions which I found completely impossible to follow, and decided to leave it for a bit.

Then one day I decided that I really needed to get a grip on this stuff, so I spent a WHOLE DAY trying to work it out.  Total failure.  Panic started to set in.  The document generator was crucial to the whole new vision for the site, and we could not really launch without it.

I managed to extract a few more instructions, and eventually one day was able to get it to generate a document.  Da daaHH!   However, it was just producing one simple document, and was not functioning as the all singing all dancing product I had been promised.  I carried on transferring content and hoped.

Then one day I had a lightbulb moment and said to Gill, ‘Why don’t we just use the document generator in a simple way, doing one document at a time,  just to get the site launched, and see about the more complicated stuff later’.  From that moment launch once again became a possibility.

Final stuff

So then we were doing the more complex final stuff.  I had to put the tenancy agreements online to be generated.  October had come and passed and we were now moving into November.  Problems were being fixed, but slowly.

I was spending a huge amount of time on decoration and navigation.  Creating blocks to go in the side bar with navigation links (usually created via another complicated procedure in a module called ‘views’), and also lots of blocks with pictures of people.

Old people, young people, white people, black people, Chinese people, smiling people, worried people (not many of them) and happy looking people waving their credit cards in the air and clearly just about to buy a subscription.  It will be interesting to see if they have any effect.

The other thing to do were the legal service instructions.  There is a hideously complex procedure for getting someone to pay the fee and then be  transferred over to an instruction form, and I still have a couple more to do.  Likewise there are a few tenancy agreements which (slapped wrist) I have not done yet.

But we really needed to LAUNCH.  I  had hoped to do this before December but clearly this was not going to be possible.  Gill was still wrestling with the subscriptions procedures and that is pretty fundamental.

Finally last week she said that she had got the subs nailed, and Joop was free to do the membership transfer, so we were on, for launch on Tuesday.

Launch?

That was today.  The membership details have now been moved, although it took Joop ALL DAY to do it.  I suppose there are rather a lot of them, Landlord Law has been online since November 2001.  We now need to get the nameservers switched so the landlord law url points at UK Fast rather than the Bitenet server where it is now.

I am hoping that will get done tomorrow.

A new year, a new Landlord Law

So it has really taken almost the whole year (give or take a few weeks) to get to almost launch.  A year in which I seem to have worked on and thought about very little else.

But it is a fabulous site, and hopefully when you are reading this, it will be online so you will be able to see it >> here.

It will be good to release it into the wild to see how it does, and I will finally be able to start working on something else.  New developments which I have had in mind for months, new products to enhance the site and encourage signups, exciting new multimedia marketing initiatives, more feedback and contact with my members, and a new way of working.

Did I tell you that it will probably be the first social media online subscription service offered by a solicitors firm in the UK, ever?  And this is only the beginning …

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?

The Legal Web

Are you feeling ignorant about the internet. Worried about wikis? Baffled by blogs? Or intimidated by twitter? You need a bit of professional training and guidance.

Allow me to introduce the answer. This is the new ebook and CPD course from Nick and Delia on Modern Practice Topics for Solicitors.

Nick and Delia have been involved in and writing about the legal internet for years. Must be at least ten, probably more. Both have informative web-sites, Delia runs the best set of legal links on the internet, as does Nick, as Infolaw. Together they produce the fabulous and award winning Internet Newsletter. Every now and again they produce an ebook / CPD product and this is the most recent offering. It is very good.

The ebook is in five parts.

1. New ways to organise firms.  This is largely about virtual firms and to me was the perhaps most interesting part of the series. The first article is an introductory one by Delia, followed by studies of three different ‘virtual’ firms.

I have to say that I was HUGELY impressed with the article on Blacklaws Davis, a mostly legal aid firm based in South London and the internet. Of all the articles in the book, this is the one which stayed with me the most and made me happy to look at the ebook again for this review. What a fantastic system them have! If I were a legal aid solicitor I would be beating a path to their door. I also enjoyed the article by sole practitioner Dick Jennings, and quite agree that SPs can be far more innovative than the (often patronising) larger firms.

2. Social Media for law firms. This is an intelligent look at the usual suspects, blogging, twitter, wikis, facebook and LinkedIn. Well worth reading if you are thinking of using these platforms but don’t know much about them.

3. Referral and Marketing companies. This section did not hold many surprises for me as, actually, I wrote much of it! My articles are on Quality Solicitors (which you can read on this blog >> here), Contact Law (which you can read on this blog >> here) and LawNet (which you can read >>here). Delia did an article on TakeLegalAdvice and Justin Patten did one on legallybetter.com.

4. Your website – accessible, interesting and productive. All law firms with a web-site (and that should mean all law firms) would do well to read this section. The first part looks at making websites accessible for disabled people. The second is about ‘converting browsers to business’ and looks at the AIDA principles of marketing. The third looks at online legal drafting software company DirectLaw, creators of that ‘destructive technology’ Rapidocs. Finally there is an article on client satisfaction surveys.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Another very helpful and interesting look at an important subject which can be a bit (whisper it) boring … It features articles by Nick Holmes, David Gilroy and Susan Hallam. (Although I just use Scribe now.)

So there you are. If you fancy finding out more about all these topics AND getting five hours CPD, you want to hop on over to Nick’s site >> here where you can read more and buy it online.

Have you bought this or any other of Nick and Delia’s ebooks? How did you find them?

A very useful function of social media is to allow you to keep up to date easily.  How?  Well:

You can follow blogs via RSS

If you use the Google homepage method, then on your Google homepage will be blocks for each of the blogs you follow with a list of the most recent three blog posts.  You can run your eye over them every day to see if there is anything you want to click through to and read.  If you follow lots of blogs then you can have separate home pages for each which you naviagte by clicking tabs.  Its fairly straightforward, but you need to register with Google first (worth doing as there are lots of other benefits).  To follow blogs click the orange square with the white curvy lines on it.  I have found it easiest to do using Firefox.

You can sign up to get blog posts by email

Not all blogs offer this, but if they do, and if it is a blog you are particularly interested in, it is worth doing.  You will then get sent an email of all their posts, which you can read quickly and easily in your email in box.  if you decide you don’t want them any more it is generally easy to unsubscribe.  (Note, if you want to get posts of this blog by email, there is a link to do this at the top of the side bar).

You can become fans of facebook pages

You will then see their updates on your facebook wall.  If you use facebook a lot this is a good way to keep up with what they are doing.  Again it is easy to block them or stop being a fan if you get fed up with it.

You can follow people and do searches on twitter

Many lawyers think twitter is stupid solely because of the name.  This is a mistake, twitter is a serious business application now.  You can follow people and organisations you are interested in and keep tabs on what they are doing and thinking.  There is also a very useful search function where you can search on words, to find out what people are saying about them.  Try a search on your firm’s name!

You can sign up for Google alerts

This is another benefit you get from registering with Google.  You  give Google the relevant words and every day they will send you an email summarising search results.  Use this for key words in your professional work niche, and also for your own name and the name of your business to find out what people are saying about you.  I have found out loads of interesting things from Google alerts.

You can keep any eye on updates on your LinkedIn home page

The LinkedIn home page is similar to the facebook wall, and you can often pick up what people are doing and writing about by scanning this once a day.

Thats all I can think of just now.  Do you know any other good ways of keeping in touch using social media?

Wordpress navigation

I like to be able to move around my blog easily.  And for a long time I have been really annoyed by the fact that there were no ‘next post’ or ‘previous post’ links at the bottom of my blog posts.

This is present on many sites automatically, but not on mine.  I use the Headway theme, which in many respects very good.  However, when I asked a question about this on their forum, I did not get much help (their forum help is not all it is cracked up to be).  So it was left to me to go rummaging around to see what I could find.

Searches in the plugin’s directory brought forth a few which looked promising, but none of them did what I wanted.  I liked the WP-PageNavi plugin though, so decided to keep that one (and added it to my other blogs). But how to get the previous/next post links? Time to visit the Word Press Codex.

The WP Codex is a great site which has lots and lots of technical information about using, hacking, repairing, doing anything really with a wordpress site. I am slightly hampered of course by not being a developer and not having had any training in php. However I managed to find a page (which you will find here) which gave me some code to make the links.

But where do you put them? On the files. Happily, if you need to do this yourself,  you do not have to download and upload files via ftp or (in my case) cpanel, as you can get at them via your WP administration area. In the appearance section there is a link to a page called Editor. There you will find pages with all that puzzling code. Take a look at the index on the right. The one you want is called Single Post (single.php).

Get the page up and put this code in a suitable place (you may need to mess around a bit):

<?php previous_post('&laquo; &laquo; %', '', 'yes'); ?>
| <?php next_post('% &raquo; &raquo; ', '', 'yes'); ?>

Yes I know it looks peculiar, but you don’t have to understand it, just copy and paste it.  Then go to your page and refresh.  Voila!  You can see it right at the bottom of this page (assuming you are looking at the post page).

“But”  hear you say “there is only one link”.  Thats because you are looking at the most recent post.  There is only one link – your last post.  Go back a few posts and you will see them both.  But yes, that worried me too for a while.

Needless to say I then went off to put in the links on all my other blogs.  I had a bit of a problem however with my Lodger Landlord blog, as that uses the most recent version of Headway.  The one with the visual editor.

The Headway visual editor, I have found, is brilliant, until it suddenly stops working, and you can’t get it going again (and the Headway forum are no help).  Not only, I have found, can you no longer edit much of the appearance of your blog, you also can’t edit single.php.  Because it ain’t there.

So the Lodger Landlord does not have the previous post/next post links.  But all the others do, and I am dead chuffed that I have managed to do a bit of coding all on my own (with a bit of help from the Codex of course).  But even so, I don’t think I’ll give up the day job yet …

Have you had a go at anything like this?  How did you get on?