Today I have been mostly...

While the dust settles from recent website hiccups for Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival, Callisti started populating an Arts Festival blog on Wordpress as an experimental resource.

I was also discovering the strangest feelings while learning about the flirtation of getting quotations and prices for potential work. For the quoter it's like buying a house in Scotland - blind bids... and it's true what they say about Rackspace...

Still been checking out the famously cheap films on iLoaded for download - some good titles in the movie download section.

Also our Annan seed potato merchant is now a Callisti SEO number one for "seed potatoes" - how about that!

Still waiting for a PageRank and a re-caching by google is the bat surveys and wildlife consultancy service but you can't get to number one overnight.

Another touchbase was the self catering log cabin down at Kippford which isn't that far from Elm Cottage in Kippford.

Finally the Lockerbie Computer Services persons are getting all multimedia this festive season - we await with mulled breath what Santa will bring.

Usability and Accessibility

Excellent feedback from a Ryan O'Malley today on the Callisti fledgling website: the colour contrast between text and background is not properly readable!

"The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness" and more information is at the Colour Contrast Analyser resource.

In fact the Colour brightness formula goes like this:

To conform with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, foreground and background color combinations should provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone with low vision or colour blindness, or when viewed on a black and white screen.

The formula suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to determine the brightness of a colour is:

((Red value X 299) + (Green value X 587) + (Blue value X 114)) / 1000

Two colours provide good colour visibility if the brightness difference is greater then 125 and the color difference is greater then 500.

Bat Surveys

This is a whole new world of activity for a desk jockey like me.

Stuart Spray Wildlife consultancy have recently launched their new website informing of their bat surveys, tree surveys and habitat surveys - all part of the range of wildlife consultancy services they offer.

They cover the UK but most of their work is in Southern Scotland (Dumfries and Galloway) and the North of England (Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria)

Where to download a film...legally

Recent marketing has drawn attention to the film download market as we move away from DVDs to digital storage on our own devices. iLoaded took a benign view of the credit crunch and encouraged users to download feature films for £1.99!

There are also good deals on music videos and games for PC but it's very Windows PC oriented. The film downloads are copyright protected to prevent piracy so you know you're getting the real deal but it's a Windows DRM based security that's in place. Just make sure your windows media player is up to date, that's all I'm saying...

One interesting feature is the OMA DRM format (.DCF) that can be transferred to supporting mobile phones - this is a pretty sweet idea in principle but there are compatibility issues and the market is still settling down to some sort of cross-platform industry standard.

Note: Mac users do have a limited selection of Quicktime titles that are DRM-free :)

Wildlife Consultancy

Callisti has recently carried out SEO work for Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy.

This is a UK based wildlife consultant that specialises in bat surveys, habitat surveys, and range of services for protected species survey, mitigation, research and so forth to ensure proposed developments adhere to Scottish, English and European legislation.

MyWishWand on Wordpress

There is now a dedicated Wordpress blog keeping abreast of updates to the MyWishWand wishlist and gift ideas for the family website.

When links aren't allowed

One of the irritations of building links is affiliate based wholesalers.

There is a mini-blog for MyWishWand, the gift wishlist site with virtual shopping mall and gift ideas tool but we've been frustrated in our attempts for the wholesalers and retailers to provide a link to the website even though it is a portal to their products.

You will often find that these companies will have a one-way link policy so they benefit from all traffic driven to them by external affiliate partners without reciprocating.