Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

If you’re in the market for something to scan medical cards you really need a specialised scanner as you’ll spend ages getting them scanned using a standard scanner.

The Medicscan scanner offers you all the features you would expect of a specialised scanner and all you need is a USB port on your computer to use it. Both the scanning and the image processing are automatic and start as soon as you insert a card into the scanner. To save your time, the image processing takes place in the background so you’re not left waiting around for that to be done.

Once you’ve got it into your system you’ll not need to be constantly referring to photocopies of the cards as the scanned image can be pulled up right in front of you whenever you need it. Naturally both sides of the card can be scanned.

The ScanShell 800N is a small-footprint, twain compatible, A6 color scanner with 600DPI scanning resolution for sharp and clear images. What’s “twain compatible”? That just means that it’s compatible with just about all scanning software. Since it’s USB powered, you don’t need yet another power socket to plug it into either which, as we all know, seem to breed!

The castle at Chantilly is one of the small collection of spectacular chateaux in the general Paris region. Yet, there’s a whole lot more to it than that as you can see from our Whole Earth entry on it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the castle houses one of the foremost collections of historical paintings in France and yet it receives relatively few visitors for that collection.

It’s easy enough to get there from Paris and very worthwhile too. Not only do you get a chateau, there’s the magnificent gardens and the artwork thrown in too!

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Whatever size your development team is, there’s always an advantage to be had if you can standardise on a common platform and maximise the reuse of any code that’s been written.

It’s obvious really yet you see many people throwing up totally different websites solely for the purpose of being different and nothing else. Yet, look at what the big boys are doing. You’ll have seen untold numbers of very similar hotel reservation sites for the simple reason that there are perhaps a dozen major players out there and they offer what amounts to a franchise to their data via easily customiseable templates which range from the simple click-through banners that you see everywhere to sites that appear pretty much unique, yet aren’t.

On a very small scale, I’ve been busy building on the database of property listings that I’ve built up over the last few years and running up variations on that. Lately, I’ve gone one step further and started using the database structure and front-end template to hold our growing Whole Earth Guide which gives me totally different content yet displayed within the framework of our new-generation sites.

The other plus point of all this is that with a common platform, it’s often the case that a new application running on that platform will require a tiny enhancement which thereby appears across all systems using that platform. For instance, we now have a major improvement in the menu structure on the new-generation sites courtesy of Whole Earth developments (see Inns4U).

It’s surprising just how much mileage you can get out of a database driven website template.

Our B&B and self-catering listings sites have been held on the database for around two years now and we’ve been able to run up several new variants of them since, each taking just a few weeks to get operational from the time of the original concept.

Of these, our new-generation template is proving to be the most flexible. We’re still adding enhancements to it but already we’ve been able to launch our Whole Earth Guide based on in and we’ve been working on yet another variation, Inns4U, which for the first time includes all our properties rather than separating them out into B&B and vacation rentals and thereby creates a website with a much larger footprint than the others.

Tidying up Inns4U will probably keep us out of trouble for the rest of October and perhaps into November though we’re also plugging away with the new-ish blogs at An Age of Magic and On a Postcard of course.