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The Lock-In

At least one of the reasons applies equally to both consumers and business and that’s simply that if you move providers, you can’t take your address with you.  That might not sound like much, but remember how many services you sign up with using your email address.  What happens if you forget a password and want to reset it?  Or miss an important reminder/update as the email address not longer exists?  What about all those people who have you in their contacts under that address?

And it’s not just you, there’s everyone else in the family/business who uses addresses for the service.

For businesses it’s even worse, not only would a change in ISP mean you’re uncontactable, it may end up costing you a lot of money in missed business or fines/charges because you didn’t receive important emails.

So what happens?  Well, you end up being unable to move for fear of losing emails, so you can’t switch to take advantage of better deals elsewhere, so it ends up costing you money (and hassle if the service is particularly poor).

Features

Another good reason not to use it is that they often lack features compared to those offered by third parties.  For example, most of the free services allow you to access your email from mobile devices, whereas ISP email can be limited to accesing only via a web browser.

Even if they do let you use it with an email client or your smartphone, it’s usually older protocols so you may end up reading the same email twice or having to go searching for the device you downloaded one on if you want to check it later.  Not to mention things like advanced spam filters to help fight junk mail and rules to help you stay organised.

They’re also limited in size too, in order to restrict how much you store on there as well.  How do you feel about spending a few hours trawling through old emails trying to figure out which ones to keep and which to delete?

Less so these days they, but they can also limit you to a single email address, which isn’t great if you have multiple family members or business users.

Professionalism

Most of the common names are gone from ISP mail, so you’ll probably end up with some weird concoction that includes numbers, parts of both your first and last names and random characters.  That makes it hard for people to remember your address (even you) and can look unprofessional when giving it out to potential employers, suppliers or partners.

For businesses, it marks you out as a small business and undermines consumer confidence (in the same way having only a mobile number listed does).  When a domain name will cost you much less than £10 a year is it really an expense you want to avoid?

The Solutions

For consumers you have two options, the first is to use a free service such as Hotmail, Yahoo or my favourite, Gmail.  These have the benefit of being accessible from any ISP, plus they generally have much better interfaces, a greater number of features and better uptime, if nothing else because this is their primary function.  They also have the benefit of integrating with other services such as calendars, documents and tasks.

The other alternative, and the only one for businesses really, is to register your own domain.  Even an address from one of the free services doesn’t give a great image to customers, suppliers and partners.  A paid email account can be had for as little as 99p a month.  Trust me, it will more than pay for itself (I’d also recommend a website, which at a few pounds a month will also pay for itself in no time).  Registering one is quick and easy, there really is no excuse.  Want some help registering a domain name, I’ve got an article for that.

Evaluating Costs

As we’ve already bought the hardware and they came with licenses for Windows there wouldn’t be any direct saving in the costs of the operating system if we switched to another one (Linux for example). Even on new machines, the cost difference between a machine supplied with Windows and without is about £70 (assuming you can find a vendor who sells machines without it) which equates to about £1 a month over the typical three-year life of hardware. Not exactly massive.

We could potentially (perhaps unadvisedly) save the cost of our anti-virus software. Longer term there are potential cost savings in being able to continue using the existing hardware when Microsoft stops supporting XP in 2013, certainly the existing machines will not support even Windows 7.

Against it I had to weigh the cost of the extra time it would undoubtedly take to support users on a new OS.

Familiarity

Something that fell against any open source software was the fact that most computer users have used Windows and Microsoft’s various other products, notably the Office suite. Although the branches don’t use Office (with the exception of a few copies of Outlook) they do use viewers and, in some cases, OpenOffice.org (or derivatives) to open MS documents.

I’ve definitely found OpenOffice.org (or derivatives) harder to work with and in some cases slower to use (partly due to familiarity, partly because the product is just slow).

Again, any questions would be coming my way, so that would mean more time spent supporting users.

Talking of support, there’s not just the issue of users, but also the administrators having to maintain an unfamiliar system. That has potential security, performance and time implications.

Hardware Support

It’s much less of an issue than it has been, but alternative operating systems mean you have to be aware of hardware support issues. There are still problems with certain hardware not being compatible, much more so for any legacy hardware.

That may mean you have to throw out or spend time making existing hardware compatible, which may actually end up costing you money. You will also have to be careful in the hardware you purchase going forward.

Interoperability

As I mentioned, in our case, we would probably end up with some machines still running the Microsoft platform, which opens you up to problems when supporting hardware, software and exchanging things between the systems.

You may suddenly find you can’t reuse systems or components as they’re not compatible, you end up supporting, administering and maintaining two separate platforms and doing something simple like sending a file to a colleague may become much more of a challenge (the newer MS formats still aren’t well supported by anything non-Microsoft and even if a package states it does support a certain file type I’ve found advanced features often don’t work).

Even if we could control this internally, we’re still working with other businesses who will continue to send us files and information in formats we may not be able to open correctly, or at all. It doesn’t make you look very professional.

Exchange

Microsoft get a lot of stick for their various products, but I haven’t come across an open source alternative to beat Outlook and Exchange. It has a good range of compatibility with devices, a web version, and its very common meeting invites work inside and outside the organization. No real bad points. It’s not a deal breaker necessarily, but it’s very handy.

Compatibility with Windows

This is similar to hardware support, but we use some software and even websites which only work on Windows (ActiveX controls, for example), services which we have little or no control over and which we have to use. That’s before you consider some of our server-side software. So we would need to maintain some sort of access to Windows regardless of what we decided to move to. That takes you back to the whole duplication argument.

In fact, stepping away from Windows means you say goodbye to a whole lot of software and while you may be able to find open source/compatible replacements for some, maybe even most, Windows offers a far greater array and (generally) guaranteed compatibility.

Multimedia support

Another area some open source systems seem to suffer from issues with multimedia support, partly down to licensing of codecs and such, which a paid operating system can afford to include. Again, probably not a deal breaker, but another mark against them.

On the Plus Side

Well, there are potential cost savings on software going forward. OS, Office and other software licenses aren’t cheap. Once XP disappears we’re probably looking at having to replace all of our hardware at the same time, with the sort of outlay no business wants to hit their cashflow.

Likewise costs for Office, anti-virus and various other pieces of software are ongoing so not having to pay for them would mean more capital saved that could be ploughed into training for users and administrators.

The Future

As I mentioned, XP becomes unsupported (as it stands) in 2013. At that point we’d be forced to look at a different OS anyway. To make use of our existing hardware we could switch to a lighter, open source OS, which we could strip down and either run that or use it as a thin client and visualize the desktops if we wish. We haven’t made any decisions on that yet, but we may have to start testing in 2012 to see how each option holds up.

Longer term I wonder if open source desktop software will largely be needed, or most desktop software for that matter, with companies buying hosted services instead, with the exception of a few applications that deal with data that is too large to handle over an internet connection.

Conclusion

Having looked at it, I eventually decided that the costs savings, especially in our hybrid environment, we’re not going to be enough to justify the move, let alone the cost of supporting and administering a new system. Most of our costs are already paid, with the investment made. Going forward it’s issues with user acceptance and interoperability that concern me the most, likewise the possibility of having to support two OS environments.

Those concerns only really multiply with larger businesses. If the quality of some of the open source tools and their interoperability improves then they may become viable. For basic tasks they’re currently okay, but getting users pulling data into Excel from a data warehouse running on SQL Server is currently a lot easier using Microsoft or other closed tools than any open source equivalent I’ve seen. And that’s just an example. Until open source can replicate every function currently provided by existing software and platforms, they’re never going to break through.

We’ve been running our business on Office 365 for several months having signed up not long after it launched (we had completed a trial first). We were previously with Intermedia for hosted Exchange email/calendars and Sharepoint for our intranet site, but they were more expensive and we also felt Office 365 offered a better experience (user administration on Intermedia was very slow and clunky).

I’ll try and keep the run-through similar to the Google Apps review for easy comparison.

Reminder of Requirements

We have a head office and a number of branches. The branches only have one Office user, who only uses email and calendaring with Outlook, which is the only part of Office they have installed.

At head office the use is much greater with everyone using Outlook email and calendars, shared documents on Sharepoint and use of many of the Office applications, using some of their power features.

We were happy with the Exchange/Outlook combination but our existing provider were not looking they they would offer the integrated experience of Office 365, they were more expensive and their support was slow and unresponsive when we talked to them about upgrading our accounts (as Exchange 2010 users were paying less that we were stuck on 2007).

Email and Calendars (Exchange)

We’ve been Outlook/Exchange users for both email and calendar management for some time. At some point it was based on-site, but before I joined the company it was moved to a hosted platform, so there was no really big change for us, just the need to update the relevant server locations. We also had to upgrade from Outlook 2003 on some of our machines as Exchange 2010 (which is what Office 365 runs) only supports 2007 and above.

The users didn’t notice much of a difference and carried on as before. Migration was easy, we just exported each user’s data, created new profiles and imported the data files, this then synced with the server. The only issue was with some users having mailboxes in the several gigabyte range and it therefore took some time to upload.

Everyone was happy with this combination before and continues to be. I’ve noticed the web version (OWA, not to be confused with Office Web Apps) is better, offering greater support for other browsers for one thing.

The only niggle relates to the password expiry notification. By default, passwords expire after 90 days (more below) and when it expires Outlook refuses to connect, but the only notification — tucked away in the status bar — just says it is disconnected, no mention of password expired, which makes it hard for our users to understand there’s a problem, usually they only notice when they haven’t received an email for a day or so.

Documents (Office Web Apps)

Our situation is unusual in that while a number of our users have a full copy of Office, most don’t have any Office applications installed (and a few have only Outlook) which makes sharing files interesting and has previously meant viewers or some OpenOffice.org derivative.

With the option to use cloud-based Office Web Apps on certain accounts I was hoping we would be able to share, work on, review and produce documents more easily across those users who had previous not really had access to Office applications.

My thinking was something akin to SkyDrive, the consumer version of Office Web Apps, which is a logical step from local storage in design and layout and seems to work fairly well.

In Office 365, however, OWA is hidden behind Sharepoint. Now, I’ve never really been a big fan of Sharepoint, so it had a hill to climb, but whereas I was expecting a user documents folder similar to SkyDrive, you don’t get that (something horrible but user specific is tucked away under the My Site link from the dropdown exposed when you click your username top-right but it’s just a bin though).

Otherwise you’re limited to Shared Documents libraries which are clunky, only let you (easily) create Word documents and not any other type, don’t seem to support older XLS formatted spreadsheets (which SkyDrive does) and is very slow to navigate let alone organise.

I would like to see a separate area much like SkyDrive for users to create, edit and manage files and folders and one of the options for files created there will be top copy or share a file with a Shared Library in Sharepoint.

Sharing documents is the typical Sharepoint nightmare. For our users, they have no control except for those tucked away in their own site. So you’d have to setup special folders or document libraries (or sub-sites) to handle the different sharing options. Why not just right-click, select share and then pick the users/groups? Done. Easy, simple, much more control, but no.

Another point of annoyance is printing. In SkyDrive it opens the document as a web page so you can print from within your browser, in Office 365 (i.e. Sharepoint) it converts it to a PDF and forces you to download it. Which means our users click Print, get a warning bar in IE about downloading a file, have to click to clear that, but then nothing happens, so they go back and try again, this time the file downloads and opens in the local PDF reader. It’s a painful process.

Then you come to PDFs. There’s no option to just open them, it just straight downloads them. Apparently this is a security feature in Sharepoint, which you can disable in your own installations (possibly not advisable) but you can’t in Office 365. They’re our documents, we put them there, why are we suddenly afraid of them, just open them so we can view/print them!

Downloading a file, again, a simple process, you can do it, but for some reason the option is tucked away on the Send To sub-menu (and the dropdown menu for each file can take a long time even to display). That’s enough to confuse some of our users (and doesn’t really make much sense). Again, not so on SkyDrive.

For those of us with full versions of Office 2010 installed we have the benefit of integration, the option to open a file in our local copy of each application. Unfortunately, this is very hit and miss, sometimes sitting and thinking for a long time before coming back to say it couldn’t find the file, only for the next time you try it to work perfectly. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when it works and when not.

Talking of local integration, let’s say you don’t have Office installed locally, there’s no option to open a file without using the OWA viewer, so if you have other local apps that could open the file (a viewer, OpenOffice, etc) the only way is to download the file.

So while I was hoping OWA would offer a better way for our users to interact with Office files it has failed and, in some cases, actually made it worse (printing, for example). The short answer seems to be simply port SkyDrive over so at least those people paying for OWA have as good an experience as those who get it for free.

Intranet (Sharepoint)

As I’ve said, I’ve never really been a fan, it’s always been slow, clunky and extremely complicated to administer and nothing seems to have changed in the latest version.

The fact that they refer to it as ‘Team Site’ doesn’t really help either, what does that mean? Just call it Company Intranet.

There’s also the option to use it for your public website in Office 365 and the page load times are excruciatingly slow, so we don’t and will not be doing so anytime soon.

Because of these problems, our intranet isn’t the resource it could be or as heavily used as it should be.

Instant Messaging (Lync)

We never really used an instant messaging client previously, with some of us using Skype from time to time, but it was one of the benefits we saw in the move and some of us now use it, though only really for chat and file transfer, we haven’t begun to use the calling and video conferencing functionality though.

It’s something with a lot of potential, but you need a user base who familiar using such things and comfortable with it and we simply don’t have that.

The only really problem was getting the strange SRV DNS records setup to allow it to work properly, are these strictly necessary or could something else be used?

Administration

As I said, the administration side of Office 365 is better than what we had before, but that’s not to say it’s perfect.

I’ve already mentioned the password expiry is set to 90 days, with no option to change or override this (unless linked to your local AD), a simply option to set the number of days would allow more flexibility and control.

Another thing you can’t change is password strength. The default isn’t bad, but for companies who want to control those sort of rules there are no options.

Another bugbear is the fact that only administrators can reset passwords and they can’t set a password, all they can do is have a random one assigned, so the user has to login and change it. It may be secure, but it also adds overhead to an administrator’s time. We’d like to allow our users to reset their own passwords and certainly to be able to put in a password rather than have one generated for us.

In terms of payments, each license is on a 12-month contract, paid monthly. I’d actually like to see that dropped to a 30-day rolling contract, so you can cancel at any time (or just switch off auto-renew) and just pay to the end of the month (or better still, charged by the day so if you cancel a license on the 2nd you don’t pay for the rest of the month).

Likewise we’d like more flexibility in upgrading and downgrading accounts. At the moment, if you want to change a user’s license, you have to buy the new one, apply it to the user and then contact support to cancel the other accounts. Why not just let me cancel it myself, or let me convert one license into another?  I realise this causes all sort of billing issues, but it’s hardly rocket science to sort out.  The fact that there are some many levels is confusing too, I think they could be simplified.

Outlook and user administration is largely simple and straightforward, except when it comes to shared mailboxes and forwarders which seem to be overly hard to create. In fact, the only way to create a forwarder I could see was the create a distribution group. Why not just allow me to create an email address and tell it who to forward to? Shared mailboxes are even more fun.

From a user perspective, when they login online they’re presented with a largely useless home page. Allowing them to either default straight to Outlook or Team Site or embed gadgets with things like their last 10 emails, the Lync web client, various libraries or links or even personal information would make this a whole lot more useful.

Another problem for users is the random timeouts on accessing services via a web browser. Security again would be the reason, but most of our users don’t want to enter their password each day never mind several times a day to access our intranet or their email.

Conclusion

I’ve focused on the bad points above, but overall our experience has been positive. Outlook and Exchange work very well, uptime has been good and the support team, when required, have been fast, efficient and competent.

My biggest gripes are around Sharepoint and Office Web Apps. The former is as bad as ever and the latter just seems criminally wasted and a pale comparison when you look at the slick design of SkyDrive.

I’m not sure how much our browser choice affects the services, but using XP on the majority of our machines means IE8 only.

Would I recommend it? Well, if you want to switch to hosted Exchange then go for it, if Exchange is all you want then it’s great. If you want to use it as a way to buy full copies of Office monthly instead of a lump sum as with most other licenses, then again, a good idea (assuming you want Exchange). If you’re hoping to rely on it for an intranet or your company website or if you hope Office Web Apps will give your users a simple, cheap way to create, open and edit Office documents, then no, steer clear for now.

As with any other powerline network adapter I’ve used (and I’ve used a few) there was zero setup, plug them in and away they go, the only concern was the speed.

Now, I didn’t expect to get gigabit speeds, nothing in networking gets the speeds they say (for a variety of reasons), but even if they gave me 20% that was 200Mbps. I have been suspecting for some time that they weren’t performing anywhere even near that well and I happened to have a pair of LEA 200Mbps adapters so thought I would give them a comparison test.

The two computers I was using both had gigabit network adapters and, while one was plugged straight into the adapter, one was connected through a gigabit switch. I downloaded and used Lan Speed Test to give me the figures.

I set the file size to 100Mb for all but the last test, where I used 200Mb. The first two tests were carried out on one day, the other two tests the next. Once I finished the tests with one set of adapters I changed them for the others, keeping the sockets, computers and state of the machines the same in both cases. All figures stated in Mbps. I’ve underlined the fastest for each test.

There is a light on the front which shows if the connection isn’t strong enough so it’s only running at 100Mbps, but that wasn’t lit (it shows orange instead of blue, I had all blue). It’s also worth saying I have upgraded them to the latest firmware.

As you can see, against the LEA plugs (and I’ve never heard of LEA, they’re a French company it seems, the fact that they don’t appear in a Google shopping search suggests they’re not stocked by any of the big UK retailers and therefore not anything special) they actually come out slower in a lot of circumstances and hardly much better considering they’re supposed to be five times faster. They also seem to be very inconsistent compared to the LEAs which were closer across the tests and in terms of read and write speeds.

So, my advice, don’t wait your money on gigabit powerline adapters, certainly not the Belkins, as they won’t be any better than even unknown brand 200Mbps plugs.

I like my Acer Aspire Revo R3610, but it’s way too noisy to be left on permanently. I had initially passed on the XS35, I think because of a prejudice against Shuttle liking to use custom parts rather than standard ones, but I came back to it and eventually took the plunge.

Part of the reason for picking the XS35 was it’s fanless. Quite a few systems stated they were silent, but when you got into the specs they still had fans, not a recipe for silence in my experience. The XS35 has no fans. I was going to put an SSD in it and run it with no moving parts at all, but the price/performance of a 2.5″ drive was too good and my experience with the Scorpio Blues is they are silent for all intents and purposes. So the machine runs totally silent, only the (overly) bright LED on the front indicates it’s on.

I’ve been running it for a while and I have to say I’m impressed. It sports a dual-core 1.66GHz D510 Atom processor, but lacks the NVIDIA ION graphics of the Revo (they XS35GT comes with ION), instead running Intel’s GMA 3150, so it’s not quite as capable as the Revo for multimedia or graphics heavy tasks, but otherwise the processor is actually quicker.

I’ve installed Ubuntu on it and it’s been running non-stop without issue. I mainly use it as my development web server, but have recently been playing with Tonido and sharing photo libraries with friends and family that way seems to be working out OK, I have yet to try a few other aspects, such as video, files and music. I could have bought a NAS or some other preconfigured device, but the benefit of buying your own machine is you can put whatever software you want on it and with a full OS you can run any application available.

I’ve got Ubuntu’s VNC server running to give me remote access and it seems capable enough to allow browsing and general tasks that would satisfy most people. A benefit over the Revo is the option to fit a slim-line optical drive, something most mini ITX devices do without, which allows greater flexibility, should you want to use it as media centre, for example.

Noise was one reason for going for a separate machine as an always-on device, another was power usage. The XS35 idles at around 16W according to my inline power monitor, with it reaching 21-22W under heavy load. That’s pretty impressive.

There are both a XS35V2 and an XS35GT V2 available, sporting the D525 Atom processor, bumping the processor to 1.8Ghz. Whichever one you choose should do the job of a small, low-powered, silent, but flexible machine for whatever purpose you want to put it to.

My system broke down as follows:

Prices as of February 2011

Getting Free Books

Once you’ve setup your Kindle you’ll want to get some books to read on it. You can buy books from Amazon (or other ebook stores, assuming they support it) but there are also plenty of free ebooks available and not just those which are out of copyright.

Supported Formats

It’s probably worth saying at this point that ebooks come in a variety of formats. The Kindle will support its own AZW format as well as Topaz (TPZ), plain text (TXT), Mobipocket (MOBI, PRC) and PDF documents. It can also handle HTML files and Word documents if sent via your Kindle email address as it will convert them (more details below) and you can convert from various formats (notably EPUB, the other big ebook format) using additional software (more details below).

The one thing to watch for is buying books in EPUB format (or other formats) as they’re likely to be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) code which will stop you being able to convert it.

Where to Find Free Ebooks

OK, so that said, starting with the big names, Project Gutenberg has long been a provider of free ebooks, largely those out of copyright, and they usually provide them in a range of formats so you should find one you can either download and load directly onto your Kindle (just connect it to your computer via the USB cable and copy the files into the documents folder, or use the software mentioned below).

Google Books is another big player in this market. They list books which you can’t download (but can preview) as well as books that are fully available (switch to advanced search and select ‘Full view only’ to focus on complete books). If the book is listed in their ebookstore then they usually offer then in EPUB and PDF (select the ‘Read on your device’ link) and if not then typically they’re in PDF.

Aside from selling ebooks, Amazon also list free ones as well. If you find the Kindle eBooks section of the site and scroll down to the bottom of the navigation on the left you should find a link to Free eBook Collections, which has details of external sites as well as the Kindle Popular Classics selection.

One of the sites linked to by Amazon is ManyBooks.net which, again, offers a variety of free books, largely out of copyright, in a wide range of formats to download.

Sending Content to your Kindle

Aside from books, Amazon also offers a range of periodicals to subscribe to, various newspapers and magazines, and Kindle Singles is an upcoming section to feature content in the 10-30,000 word range. Longer articles and novellas essentially. Another great way to get content onto your Kindle is to send web pages to it so you can read them on the device at your convenience (when you connect via WiFi it’ll download them automatically).

There are several ways to do this and, once setup, is a really fast way to save content for later. If you use Google’s Chrome web browser, install the Send to Kindle extension, if you’re on another browser then use the Send to Kindle bookmark from Klip.me (who provide the Chrome extension) or similar offerings from Instapaper (although you need a free account) and Readbility.

These basically send things to your Kindle email address, which you can find on the Manage Your Kindle page when you’re logged in to Amazon’s site. You have to manually allow email addresses to send to your Kindle, which is what the setup for these apps requires. This also means you can send other files (Word documents, etc) to your Kindle and they’ll get converted automatically.

This email address can also be used by local software (more info below) to load books onto your Kindle without the need to connect via USB.

Something to be aware of though, is that if you have a 3G Kindle, this service costs money if you download over Whispernet (the 3G service). It’s free for WiFi (so if you have a WiFi-only Kindle, don’t worry). If you have a 3G Kindle, make sure to use the alternative username@free.kindle.com address which doesn’t get charged and only downloads when you’re connected via WiFi.

As I mentioned earlier, you can manually load books onto your Kindle via USB as well (just copy them into the Documents folder).

Software to Manage your Kindle

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, you can do most things with the Kindle using built-in tools, but a great third-party app called Calibre brings many of these together, along with some extra functionality.

Ostensibly it’s an ebook manager, designed to act as a library to manage your books, but it can also convert books into suitable formats, transfer files to and from your Kindle (via USB or email) and subscribe to various news sources which are then downloaded automatically, formatted and loaded onto your device ready for you to peruse. You will even be able to preview and read ebooks on your computer. Among its other features, can also complete book metadata (author, blurb and other details) and download covers.

Once in your library you can search by metadata or browse by tags, author, etc. Useful when your collection gets larger. It can also search book stores to find the best price if you’re looking to buy.

Audio on the Kindle

The Kindle also has speakers built-in and can play back music and audiobooks.

The Kindle technically only supports audiobooks in Audible audio format 4 and Audible Enhanced (AAX) format from Audible (.com or .co.uk), which Amazon owns. It can even deliver these over WiFi or you can copy by USB into the Audible folder. They’ll be listed as any other book on the Home screen, but with a note to indicate they are audible. You could, technically, play back audiobooks in MP3 format in the same way as music, but you lose any chapter support.

To play music, just copy your files (it only supports MP3) into the Music folder, you can start the music by hitting the Menu button when on the Home screen, go to Experimental and select play music. You can control the volume using the plus and minus rocker button on the bottom of the Kindle. You can also attach headphones to listen in private.

While it’ll play music that is in sub-folders, there’s no control over the order, it just plays the first track it finds and keeps on from there. While it’s playing, you can use ALT+spacebar to pause/resume and ALT+F to skip to the next track. You can also stop the music by going back to the Experimental page from the Menu and selecting pause music.

Listening to Normal Content

Although support for audiobooks is limited, you can use the built-in Text-to-Speech functionality to read a book to you. Just open the book (or other piece of content) and press the text key (the one with two A’s next to the Home button). Once on, you can change it from a male to female voice and change the rate it reads to slow it down or speed it up. You can start the reading from a specific spot by moving to the relevant page and then placing the cursor next to the text where you want it to start.

Browse the Web

Possibly not the ideal device for it, but under the Experimental options from the Menu on the Home screen you’ll find a web browser option which will allow you to open and view web pages, you can zoom in on areas and combine it with screen rotation (see below) to help with layout.

Change the Angle

Obviously portrait mode works best for most things, but from the text menu (the key with two A’s next to the Home button) you can select the option to rotate the display to any of the four variations, so if you want to get more words per line but without reducing the text size, that’s an option.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully that gives you some ideas as to what you can do with your Kindle, but that’s not all, so check out the Customise Your Reading page over at Amazon for more tips.

Anyway, it’s done now and you can find the site at consumeandreview.co.uk

I started by grabbing the latest version of WordPress and setting it up on my local development server. Once that was done I re-used much of my code from the book review custom post type I had created, but decided to convert it to a plugin instead (for future portability). I also added taxonomies for author and genre using the register taxonomy function. Previously I had stored author as custom meta data, but as it was something that could be shared by multiple books I figured it was better as a taxonomy and would save me re-typing (plus it allowed some functionality, such as author pages, much more easily). I also decided to change from the simple recommended yes/no system and go with a rating out of five, so that required a small change as well.

Once that was done I exported all my reviews from my old site and imported them using the WordPress Importer plugin.

I started converting the authors in the meta data to terms in the taxonomy manually at first, figuring I would leave most where they were, but then decided to move them all, so grabbed a copy of the Custom Field Taxonomies plugin. In order to get my custom post type (book_review) to be picked up so it would find author as metadata to be converted I had to modify line 124 of the admin.php file to:

foreach ( get_object_taxonomies( array('post','book_review'), 'objects' ) as $tax_name => $tax_obj )

Once that was done I went looking for a theme. I had intended to use someone else’s design to save time, but I couldn’t find any I was happy with, so I designed my own. While working on this I knew I wanted it to be image light but to make use of some bold fonts and sizes. I’m used to working with the limited pallet of web-safe fonts you can use (those installed on all/most computers regardless of type), but they didn’t seem to cut it for this project, so I researched techniques for using any font you wished on a web page that would work for all visitors.

I already knew of popular ones like sIFR and cufon, but I was happy to see that support for the CSS3 @font-face designation was now supported by the latest version of all the main browsers, so I set about learning how to embed fonts for the browsers (slightly different in IE versus everyone else, which is par for the course) and finding some suitable fonts. Google is your friend on this and I was amazed how many great free fonts are out there to improve the look of your site, I can recommend having a look on Font Squirrel, both for fonts and how to use. (update: you can also check out Google web fonts, which I only found after I built it.)

A couple of the fonts I liked didn’t have bold versions or italics, so I had to try quite a few (it ate a lot of time, but was well worth it). I plumped for ChunkFive (site header), Crimson (page text) and Fontin (headers) in the end.

It took a while to get the layout right on all the page templates. It’s not entirely there yet (I think the archives for genre should be on one page — I hate having to click through lots of pages) but I have been tweaking since the weekend and there have been small improvements (to both layout and navigation).

Something I knew I wanted was a review archive listing the books by author which isn’t something WordPress does out of the box and my previous custom code was written to support details in meta data. In the end I wrote a fairly simple database query to pull out all the details I wanted:

function vf_get_reviews_by_author() {
	global $wpdb;

	$sql = "select ter.term_id, ter.name, tertax.taxonomy, posts.ID, posts.post_title, posts.post_content
		from $wpdb->terms AS ter
		left join $wpdb->term_taxonomy tertax
		on tertax.term_id = ter.term_id
		left join $wpdb->term_relationships terrel
		on terrel.term_taxonomy_id = tertax.term_taxonomy_id
		left join $wpdb->posts posts
		on posts.ID = terrel.object_id
		where tertax.taxonomy = 'author'
		and posts.post_status = 'publish'
		order by ter.name,posts.post_title";

	$books_by_author = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);

	return $books_by_author;
}

I then just loop through the results and create a new header when the author name changes. I may try to make this sortable in some way in the future. As the list was fairly long (and only likely to get longer) while leaving a lot of white space to the right, I decided to put them into columns.

To get the columns on the review archive I wrote a second query to get an author count and just keep track of the number of iterations through the loop, then insert the closing tag of the left column and open the right one when the number of loops matches half the total number of authors.

At this point I decided to add in a series taxonomy so, where books were part of a series, you could find related books easily. This was to allow people to find similar books to read and to allow them to see what else is in the same story arc/feature the same character(s). Presenting this data necessitated a slight change to the layout. I also decided the series archive should show all of the books in the series on one page, rather then five at a time (which is what I had set the default to). Easy enough to do with a custom taxonomy template and a modification of the posts_per_page in the query. I also ended up modifying the review archive to add in the series details.

After updating some books with authors, genre and series it became hard to see which ones I had updated and which ones I hadn’t in the admin section, so I added functions to call the manage_[post -type]_posts_custom_column and manage_edit-[post -type]_columns (using book_review for the post type) filters to display some additional columns for book reviews.

I added an about page and a contact form, should anyone want to get in touch (I disabled comments and trackbacks, I didn’t think they were necessary) and I could have used one of my own contact forms, but decided to use the Contact Form 7 plugin instead.

Once I was happy I registered the domain (I had a few ideas for names) and set up hosting, then loaded the themes, plugins and content. A bit of testing and tweaking (and changes, some of which are listed above) and it was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the main browsers now render in such a similar way I didn’t need any tweaks to get it working in IE (as is usual) and the use of embedded fonts means the site looks practically identical on all platforms, which is a nice bonus.

Once it was live I added a sitemap plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) to help SEO, but I had to add the Guar Sitemap sub-plugin to get custom post types included. I also setup the YOURLS plugin, which I use on a few of my sites to to automatically post to my Twitter account with a shortened link. Version 1.4.9 didn’t work with the version of YOURLS I use (1.4), so I had to roll back to 1.4.8, which did.

So far I’m pleased with the result, no doubt that’ll change, but the process gave me a chance to try some new things. I’d like to add in some functionality to offer readers links to similar books, but I’m not sure of the best way yet (I haven’t found a service that offers an easy way to get recommendations for similar items, LibraryThing looks to have promise, but you end up with a lot of fairly vague links, the page for Abhorsen, for example, lists Harry Potter and Eragon as similar, which I wouldn’t class them as). I’m happy for now, though, and it’ll give me a chance to get some reviews on some recently finished books up.

(If you’re interested in reading another post about site building, why not check out this post I wrote regarding List Books.)

I used to prefer Salami’s Movie Organiser for filling in the blanks.  It was easy to use and lightweight.  The problem is it’s no longer in development and, while I’ve tried some of the other meta data tools they’re all a bit over- the-top or come with a cost.  All I wanted was covers and backdrops, I’m not bothered about meta data (funnily enough I know about the movies I put on my HTPC, I bought them).

So, with a couple of days off I knocked up my own little app to retrieve a list of movie or TV folders and then do a look-up on themoviedb.org or thetvdb.com so I could grab the relevant images.

As I found it useful I thought I would release it could benefit anyone else.

Screenshots

Looking up a movie:

Looking up a TV show:

Installation

So far only tested on Windows 7 32- and 64-bit, so no guarantees on anything else.  It requires .Net Framework 3.5 or higher.

Just download the file (link below), unzip and run setup.exe.

Download

You can download it here, just save it, unzip the contents to a folder and run the setup.exe file.

Instructions

These instructions can also be found in the Readme.txt file in the download.

Once you have installed the application:

1. Once the application has loaded, simply click the browse button to select a folder which has folders for each of your movies or TV shows under it.
2. Once you have located it, make sure the correct type is selected (Movies or TV) and then click Process.
3. The box on the left should now display a list of movies/TV shows, simply click on an title and it will automatically search themoviedb.org (if Movies was selected) or thetvdb.com (if TV was selected) websites and return the results. It will also load the current cover and backdrop images from the folder if any are found. Titles with no cover image will have an asterisk appended to the name.
4. Navigate to the main movies/show page if necessary (where multiple results are returned) and locate the image you wish to use as either the cover or backdrop image (note: right-click and select Back if you need to return to a previous page).
5. Once you have found the image, right-click and select the appropriate option and the image will be saved automatically and named appropriately and the previews at the bottom of the app will be updated accordingly. Note that on thetvdb.com the full size images are not linked to/visible from the preview images, you have to click the image to reveal some options and then right-click on the ‘View Full Size’ link that appears and select the appropriate option to download the larger size as the cover/backdrop (not really needed for covers).
6. Simply close the app when done.

Cleaning up your machine is a great, usually free, way to get some extra performance though. Which leads into their second article. Admittedly this covers more than just your computer and is basically just a link to some older articles, but it’s still valid.

Reinstalling your operating system, while a laborious process, does return the machine to original state and you’d be surprised how much faster it runs. Removing any old applications, performing disk de-fragmentation and clean-up also offers some boosts. If your hard drive is running out of space, move files onto an external (or separate disk) and you should get some improvements too.