I've got a client with a relatively large site - 50 odd pages - that needs re-writing to a new format. We're bringing the site up to date and developing the calls to action. The client can write copy, but they are really busy and so far we've only managed to get some of the site wrritten.

Writing copy for websites is one of those skills that, I have to admit, I've always undervalued. Generally, I've advocated getting the client to write their own copy:

• they know the business, and are usually passionate about it
• they should know their customers
• they know what they are hoping to achieve

This week, I've been doing some research on what copywriting costs and how it "works" - I mean the process of getting it done rather than how the copy works.

What I found was I read a lot. And I kept reading.

Obviously, a top position in Google should indicate some of the world's best copywriters, but I was still surprised that I wanted to keep reading, that they maintained and managed my interest. Even if the site was poorly designed and unattractive I was still prepared to keep reading.

I'm nearly converted.

I've put this client in contact with a copywriter I encountered a few months ago and given them enough information about where we're going with the website. I'll let you know how it goes!

And the cost? - Pretty much every website I read used the "how long is a piece of string" analagy. Specifically for this project  - I'm not going to tell you - though it is a lot cheaper than a busy business owner not quite getting it done.

We've done a few sites for schools. I've just been looking at the stats for a couple of these sites, and it's been really interesting.

We've had a lot of snow this week, and some schools are closed, some are open.

Both schools have a CMS on their website that's easy to use, and they've used it to update their home pages to give parents information about whether the schools are open or closed.

Even if half of the vists to the site saved a phone call then being able to update the site saved approximately 1000 phone calls a day for the school.

Well, NettMore has gone slightly greener over the Christmas break.

Over time, the number of servers that we run has slowly increased. Each time that I want to do some testing, show something to a customer or test something slightly unusual then it's safer to put it in it's own server. Many of these are only live for a short time, however a few survive.

Over Christmas, I took the plunge and set up the infrastructure for virtual servers, and have managed to move all the development servers onto a single box.

Generally the processor usage seems reasonable so far.

My only diffiiculty now is that I have to do something with the old hardware!

I’ve been trying to find a way to keep abreast of technology, learn  from others about new developments and generally have an excuse to play about with some stuff the I wouldn’t usually find the time to look at. Having not found an existing group that suits me, I thought that I’d try to see whether I could get a group of people together for a day to investigate a topic, brainstorm and discuss it possibly leading to actually building something.

From my point of view, it has to be:
- Fun and relaxed
- Interesting
- Teach me something
- Open and non competitive
- Fairly contained (i.e. up to a day long) unless otherwise decided

As a vision, it might be that at the end of the day we could have produced a “mini product”, however this might be a bit ambitions.

The sort of topics I’d like to look at are

• Silverlight
• Augmented reality
• Twitter and its API (and other social networking stuff maybe)
• Mobile apps – probably IPhone
• JQuery
• Real time search
• Cloud computing opportunities

So, what I've done is invite a few people round to my office. I'm a bit uncertain about how it's going to work as I don't want to spend lots and lots of time doing something that doesn't add any value to anyone, and I also want it to be fairly free and flexible. At the moment the outline plan is:

• Meet at the shed at 10:00 on the end of January
• 10 mins introduction and discussing what you want from the day
• 2 hours investigation, brainstorming
• Pizza for lunch
• Decide if we want to spend the afternoon actually implementing what we’ve talked about (if we’re bored, then it’s fine to finish here)

I'm quite excited as the people that I've invited are all people that I respect and admire. Some have different skills - most, though not all - are microsoft based and they range from a business focus to designers to geeks like me.

If there's any topics you think we should look at, please comment...

Having thought about it a while, I've decided to publish the prices for What Am I Doing on the website.

 Have also added pages about the addins available to help with getting better information from Outlook and Visual Studio.

Having got a great deal of value from the Outlook addin I wrote for What-Am-I-Doing, I've written a similar addin for Visual Studio 2008. Lukily there was no changes to the What-Am-I-Doing application. The interface for collecting the information from Outlook was appropriate. All I had to do was write a similar addin that detected when the selected file changes and push that information to the What-Am-I-Doing interface.

The information pushed is the full path of the file being edited.

Anyone with a directory structure for their projects will be able to slip staight into createing rules that automatically allocate the time spent editing files in that project folder to a project.

Anyone without a directory structure that enables them to do this should be fired!

As an aside, the outlook addin I worte a while ago is succesfully allocating almost all of the time I spend on email to customers.

I had a presentation to a potential client today. A couple of weeks ago I got three pople a the client (they're solicitors by the way) to install What-Am-I-Doing, and it's been logging their time since.

I woke up in a panic at 5:30 this morning - I realised that while what it was doing was clever, appropriate and significant, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to communicate this to the potential client. What I had to show them was not compelling!

This resulted in the "Visualize" screen being created.

 This scrreen has lots of functionality. The main parts Are:

• View the full 24 hours at the top of the screen
• Zoom in to an hour to se it in detail.
• Click on the unallocated time and allocate it to a project
• Use the outlook view to allocate time based on appointments.

One of the exciting things implemented on this screen is the "Sequential" button. This runs through the day and allocates unallocated time based on what happens before and after. Some logs are just not specifically identifyable as there is no project specific information, and this enables them to be automatically allocated. It's probably increased the amount of automatic allocation by 15 to 20 percent.

 Anyway, with the visualization screen, the meeting with the client went really well. It meant that they 'got it' almost immediately.

I've been looking for ways to get more information in to What-Am-I-Doing.

The first step was to grab information about the files locked by the target application.

A significant piece of the puzzle that was missing was time spent in outlook. Email consumes about 30% of my time, and I'd really like to be able to allocate this to projects.

The solution (for me at least) was to create an addin to Outlook that uses the event triggerd when a selected item changes to identify the selected email item. Once I have the item, i can get the sender, recipient and subject of the email. I use and API call to send this information to What-Am-I-Doing.

Using the "Other Info" field of the rules, I can automatically allocate time to a customer / project because I'm dealing with an email that is from that customer. It doesn't matter whether I'm reading an email, or writing one. It also doesn't matter whether the email is being read in it's own window or in the preview pane.

If you want to download the addin, you can get it from the what-am-i-doing website. You have to register / login to download it. I guess it's not much use to you if you're not running the app anyway.

While What-Am-I-Doing has been succesfully starts on XP and Windows 7, the user account control stuff has stopped it starting succesfully on vista machines if you're not the administrator.

There's a few people on the web that have been addressing this problem, the info in this post allowed me to fix this issue.

The key things are:

• On first run create a link to the appref-ms file, and put it in the SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run registry key
• Switch off automatic updates
• Manage the update in the program.

The only problem with this approach is that if the app is uninstalled then the link is left in the registry key.

This has probably been the most difficult technical problem that I've ever had to solve!

I've been trying to get additional information into What-Am-I-Doing about what's going on on the computer at any time. Any application, particularly things like word and excel, have a current open file. A lock is maintained on the file. This should mean that I can identify the full path of the file being edited.

It took about 2 weeks work to tie it down and make it reliable, however it's now been implemented in the current version of What-Am-I-Doing.

To use this information, I've added a third information field to all logs to hold the "Other Info". I've also added an additional field to the rules so that this information can be used for auto-allocation.