Those of your who know me will know that I have put on a little weight over this summer, but I can't get myself into a proper gym routine. I have got to the point where if I do something now, getting back into shape would be much easier for me. Recently, I saw a few folks on Twitter talking about the Couch to 10k app and Kevin Rose, on Diggnation, talking about the 100 Pushups app. After a little Googling, I also found that a "200 Sit-ups" app also exists. This made me think up a litle experiment. What if I could replace a personal trainer or gym class, with my iPhone? So, I bought these three apps for a total of £3.87, which is not bad considering one hour with a personal trainer at the gym around the corner from me is £30. Today, 26th September, is Day One, and I'll use this blog as a way to track my progress and to share my experiences with you. For comparisons sake, heres a picture of me now, if you dare to look...

Lot of new things have been happening recently, the biggest of which should be finalised in the next few days. I'm getting the keys to my swanky new flat (Pics attached). I'm looking forward to regaining my freedom, which I gained and lost this summer. Another new thing for me is my new business I'm currently frantically working on. I'm not giving any details away as yet, but believe me: if your a freelancer you'll love it! Hopefully I can reveal more in the coming weeks. I'll be running this under my name as a product, but also providing development and design services for clients. Im also joining the gym when I move, as I've put on a little more weight than I'm comfortable with this summer, but that topics for another post. In hoping to update this blog a few times a week from now on. Here's to the future!

One thing I really like about Square, Jack Dorsey's mobile payment system, is that there is absoloutley no cost to get started. When a new customer signs up, Square will send you their mobile card reader free. Surely thats how things should be. Why charge users to start using a service that they will pay for anyway. A nice touch from Square. More companies should follow suit.

Well it's been a long time since my last post, so I thought I better write something about my intent to post more regularly on here. A lot of things have changed since my last post. I am pretty proficient with Ruby on Rails, and I now own an iPad 2, which is an amazing device. As for Rails, I'm working on a cool new web app aimed at writers, so stay tuned in the next day or two and I will tell you more about it. Well, that's all for now folks, but I'm looking forward to getting back to my blog again!

So, after a year or two of being a reluctant PC user, I have finally made the switch to Mac, and to be honest, I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. To me the most amazing this about OS X is that it just works as it should. As silly as this may sound to you Mac veterans, half the time Windows just doesn't do what needs to be done, which is most obvious while trying to develop with open source technologies, such as Ruby and Python. While I have spent hours sometimes getting these things to run properly on Windows,it took just a few minutes to get them up and running on my Mac. In short, my life has been made significantly easier. The other key factor considered when making the switch was the software available to me. Here are some of the tools I use:

TextMate - Code/Text Editing

Transmit - FTP

Tweetie - Twitter App

Things - Task Management

I'll probably post some more once I get a few weeks use in and have more time to play around with new apps, but if there is anything you feel I couldn't live without, let me know in the comments section below. Overall, using a Mac has made work at lot more easy and fun!

I recently decided to start an interview series, focusing on web designers, developers and those who run successful online businesses. The goal of this series was to give an insight into what it takes to be successful in the web application industry and get advice from those who really know what they're talking about.

First up is Tokyo based Web Producer, Jon Yongfook Cockle, who's blog is well worth subscribing to.

Read the rest of this post »

Having recently read 37Signals' great new book, ReWork, one of the essays in it that stood out for me was on titled Go to Sleep. As you can probably guess it's about sleeping well while working on a startup/website.

When reading this essay, pre-SocialKloud, I thought to myself; "Surely this is a no-brainer, obviously I'm going to sleep."

How wrong I was. 

About two weeks into the build of SK and I'm feeling it. When you really get down to working on a site, you become attached to it, much like a mother and child. As far-fetched as this sounds to all you folks who aren't into web development, just ask those who are. It's an addiction.

So my main goal now is to try and get more than 4 hours sleep a night. Not likely. It's exciting stuff :)

2009 was a great year but I aim to make 2010 even better! Here are my New Years resoloutions:

1. Get to the gym and get in shape.

2. Learn PHP and then follow up with the CodeIgniter framework.

3. Launch my freelance business.

4. Start a tech podcast.

Hope you guys have a good year!

I started properly using Twitter after the untimely death of the much loved Pownce and I have came across many interesting people, some from Pownce. So in a salute to the best of them, here is my list of top 5 tweeps (in no particular order!) :)

Mike Lewis

Chris Poteet

Gaya Kessler

Graham Smith

Julie Geng

To everyone I follow on Twitter, thanks for a great 2009 and I hope 2010 is even better!