Jack Sinclair is a pretty impressive kid.  When he was 15, he and his dad rode their bicycles across Australia. And I mean west to east, not north to south.  In a family of cyclists, they have a lot of bikes – and bikes are always tough to organise.  You want them to be out of the way, but not so much that you have to move boxes before you go for a ride.

Enter this little beauty: A ceiling mount bike lift!

You just affix the mounting brackets to your ceiling, which is easy done with a few screws.  You can then hook your bike to the rope, and lift your bike up out of the way.

The pulley system means that you don’t need much strength to haul up the bike, and the locking mechanism means that the bike will stay in place until you gently feed the rope some slack on the right angle.

If you lose your grip and let go of the rope, it locks back into place – so you’ll never accidentally drop your bike from the roof!

Jack sells these bike lifts via his Australian website – www.bikelift.com.au.  Right now (January 2011) he’s offering a special – free shipping – and you can’t go wrong with that!

He’s also a big fan of Aussie Fit Sport Heart Rate Monitors. It’s important to use an accurate heart-rate monitor like these. Training at the right intensity can make a big difference.

I heard the most wonderful stream of profanity at the office today.  Funny story, really.  The long suffering Sinclair women (Brendon’s wife and daughter) have fled the country.  They’re spending a few weeks holidaying in Europe.  And no, the profanity wasn’t because Brendon and his boys are starving without Mel to cook for them.

The girls need some documents sent over, and its causing a lot more trouble than it should be.   They’re not staying in one place for very long, so timing is everything.

So Brendon mailed out the package via Australia Post, using their 2-4 day express service.  He was assured it should be there in 2 days, which would be great.  But naturally, it arrived after the girls had moved on.

When he expressed his displeasure to Australia Post, he was told that the 2-4 day express service typically takes 5 days to deliver.  Methinks they need to rename that service.

So he sends out a replacement package using UPS.  As you do.  He uses a $93 envelope GUARANTEED to be there by April 1st.  When he checks the tracking service 5 hours later, its already been rescheduled to be a day late.  Unbelievable.

Bless Ray Tomlinson, I’ll never take the reliability of email for granted again!

New Tailored Design

It’s always nice to receive recognition for your work.

At my workplace, we’ve taken to using the Thesis theme and WordPress together for a lot of sites.  This combination gives us powerful content-management capabilities, backed up by a highly-customisable design framework and strong search engine optimisation.  When you add some custom-built plugins to the mix, this platform can accomplish damn near anything.

The creator of Thesis, Chris Pearson, likes to tweet links to site launches and redesigns built around the Thesis theme.  So of course, when we re-launched Tailored.com.au with Thesis, we let him know.

He then tweeted:

pearsonified: Wow, this is a damn fine Thesis-based site… Odds are incredibly good that you will dig it: http://www.tailored.com.au/

A few others commented:

igobydoc: @pearsonified WOW is right – That is one really damn good looking #thesiswp site!

montanaflynn: @pearsonified that is a nice thesis site!

brendonsinclair: @pearsonified And apparently the bloke who owns it has an enormous… um, ego as well! Cheers.

pearsonified: @brendonsinclair Hahhaha, cheers!

TariAkpodiete: @pearsonified definitely that’s one of the nicer implementations i’ve seen of Thesis, honestly, some look boring, this is unique #thesiswp

Whoo!

Another Thesis-based site we’ve just launched is for an excellent non-profit organisation: the Spinal Injuries Assocation.  Be sure and check that out too.

A few months ago, we had Jack and Brendon’s amazing ride across Australia.  Like any trips, when you get home there’s a lot of tidying up to do.  You have to empty out the car, clean your equipment, and find somewhere to store it.

With a large family, all bike riders, Brendon has a lot of bikes in his garage.  But where to store them?

Enter the Bike Lift.  Brendon found this wonderful gizmo to suspend his bikes from the ceiling, storing the bikes out of the way.

Click for more Bike Storage solutions.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been working on re-launching the Tailored Web Services site.  For a long time its been a painful mix of Blogger and static pages.  The design was also a bit outdated.  There’s a ton of content on this site, but poor navigation and structuring makes the good stuff very hard to find.

Today I give you:  Tailored Web Services Reborn.

Based on the Thesis wordpress theme, we’ve customised it heavily.  Customisations include;

• Custom widgets
  • For twitter, Sponsors, Featured Product
  • Also to show 1 category of links at a time (Recommended Reading, Worth a Look, Top Resources, etc)
• Additional dynamic sidebars
  • The three columns in the footer are widget-enabled, for easy management
• Heavily customised Header area
  • Includes Blog Archives, Newsletter Subscription, and Contact Info
• Custom 404 page
• Youtube video in Multimedia box
  • This can be customised on a page-by-page basis with the new version of Thesis

And of course, we’ve had some birth-pains.  Shortly after launching, we discovered a bug in Internet Explorer. (Isn’t that always the way?)  Fortunately, I’ve run into that bug before, so it didn’t take long to fix.

Importing all the old posts from Blogger is a hassle, of course.  With almost 2,000 old posts going back to 2003, there’s a lot of horrible blogger-brewed code soup.  It’s going to take us a while to go through all that, and clean things up.

There’s also a lot of redirects that don’t work.  I’ve caught most of the big ones, I think, but I’ll be monitoring the server logs for a few days looking for 404 errors I’ve missed.

Brendon wrote that what we see when we look at a webpage depends on our perspective.  As web developers we look at a site and see all the aspects that make the whole, while others can look at the page and just see a picture.  Then they judge the site by whether the picture appeals to them, rather than by how effective the site will be as a tool.

We’ve long argued that you can treat your website as a business expense, or as a business investment.  If you look at it as a picture, then its an expense.  If you look at all the aspects that define how the site will perform, it becomes an investment – hopefully a profitable one!

Look at your site as an Employee!

I’ve just thought of a new angle – consider your site to be another employee for your business.  You want it to work for you and make money for you, don’t you? So…

• Find an employment agency
  • Meaning your web development company
• They’ll GROW your perfect employee
  • When you hire an employee, you have to pick one from all the applicants
  • Imagine you could grow one based on your specialised requirements!
• Put your new employee to work
  • Your vat-grown employee can take on any persona you define, to better represent your business,
  • Can work tirelessly 24 hours a day,
  • Is the perfect salesperson to attract and field initial enquiries,
  • Will follow your instructions to convert enquiries to sales!

How cool would a vat-grown employee be? One who can do all of the above?  One who you pay to have grown, who doesn’t ask for a weekly wage to keep working for you?

Well, that can be your website!

Generally, I hate receiving spam. Probably 80% of the email my work account receives is spam, which makes Monday mornings a drag as I sort through my emails. But every now and then, I get one that stops me in my tracks.

If you think about it, you could come up with all sorts of amusing ways this proposal could have taken place. Did he gift-wrap his “p0rn star” instrument in a ribbon? Was there a piercing involved?

I leave you with:

I’ve probably posted before how Brendon and Mel operate Brandboots.com – a site selling Ugg Boots.

Brendon writes on Tailored about how Ugg Australia was driving his Online Ugg Boot Store out of business by providing a higher quality of boot at lower prices, with better customer support to match.

From my point of view, this has quite an upside. Christmas is typically the busiest time of year for Ugg Boot retailers – Americans and Europeans are feeling the cold, and Ugg Boots make great Christmas gifts. And this year, I don’t have to field phone calls from Ugg Boot customers! Merry Christmas to me!

Last night I got another strange email:

Dear xxx,

My Name is xxx, I am an Software Engineer, and i belongs to Kerala, India.  while i was searching for an article, I just came to know about you through the website www.tailored.com.au , So we both are working in the same field. I would like to know, will you be able to share friendship with me. I expect positive results from you and look forward to speaking with you.

regards
xxx

This email came to my work account, which is listed on tailored.com.au. I thought it was kind of wierd, and a little creepy.  But the other staff here have received the same email.

This appears to be a more targeted approach to phishing.  The phisher has located an ‘about me’ page, found my email address, and customised his email to target me.  (Somewhat poorly, I might add).  Still, this is a little frightening – There’s a wealth of information online about all of us web citizens, and its available to anyone who takes the time to look for it.

This is a little scary.  Its incredible how many people still get taken in by Nigerian scams, even today.  More personalised phishing emails will surely sucker even more people in.

We sometimes forget that even experts must occasionally consult the documentation, lest they slip and fall.