A Pretty Penny is a new online store for everything retro and collectable including a wide range of designer glass and ceramics.  I would highly recommend it as a place to get quirky, unusual Christmas presents! I built the store on the free shop script platform (which uses Smarty templates).

Screenshot:

The store is now open. Check it out: www.aprettypenny.co.uk

I have recently been working on my first project on the MediaWiki platform, a football wiki site for FootballFanCast.com. The Football Fans Wiki is a wiki written from the fans perspective, with information about each team's stadium, transport info, where to eat & drink locally, songs, programmes, merchandise store, links,video clips & more.

Key features that I added as MediaWiki extensions:

• Register and login from the FFC site instead of through MediaWiki itself
• News & blog feeds on the wiki homepage

Check it out now: Fans Wiki

I have been working for some months now to develop an e-commerce module for Admin76,  the CMS which is currently exclusive to 76 Creative. The e-commerce module, called Cart76, utilises many of the nice features of Admin76 such as drag n drop functionality, advanced image gallery management, etc. It is now in it's final stages of development, so if you are interested in running your self-managed site on the Admin76 platform, or if you require a self-managed online store please contact 76 Creative for more info.

Privacy Policy for www.samburdge.co.uk

If you require any more information or have any questions about our privacy policy, please feel free to contact us by email at

At www.samburdge.co.uk, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by www.samburdge.co.uk and how it is used.

Log Files
Like many other Web sites, www.samburdge.co.uk makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons
www.samburdge.co.uk does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Our advertising partners include Google Adsense, .

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on www.samburdge.co.uk send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

www.samburdge.co.uk has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. www.samburdge.co.uk's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.

When starting a fresh HTML site it is very useful to have a basic HTML template to use. This template should include:

• Doctype declaration
• Head and body tags
• Title tags
• Most commonly used meta tags
• Include for a CSS style-sheet

Having an empty template document will save you time, and will ensure that you don't forget to include any of the most important features of the html page structure. This template should serve as a 'blank canvas' as it were, rather than starting with a completely blank document every time. Here is an example of my template for XHTML 1.0, which can also be downloaded from the link at the bottom of this article:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 
<head>
 
<title>HTML Template</title>
 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<style type="text/css">
@import url(style.css );
</style>
 
</head>
 
<body>
 
</body>
</html>

DOCTYPE:

The doctype declaration (DTD) is important as it tells the browser what type of HTML you are using, and therefore which conventions you will need to follow when coding the site's content. For more information on this check out this Recommended  list of DTDs to use in your Web document.

TITLE:

This is the title that appears at the top of the browser window, it is also the title that appears in the google listing for your page. It is good practice to have a different title for each page of your site. The title can be split into two parts:

1. The name of your site
2. A description of the page

resulting in something like:  UK Diving - The worlds largest internet resource for divers (Site name - Site description) or:  UK Diving - Contact Us (Site name - Page description).

STYLE-SHEET:

The stylesheet provides all the colour, layout and text-formatting styles for your html page, it is written in CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).  Please refer to this document on Cascading Style Sheets for more info about CSS. The style-sheet can actually be written entirely between the two style tags, but I prefer to include it as a separate document, as this can be easily included in every page of the site, and once it is stored in the users cache it will also save on page loading time. The style-sheet in my example template is called 'style.css'.

META TAGS:

I use three basic meta tags in my HTML template:

1. Content type — This tells the browser which character set you are using. In my template I use UTF-8.
2. Description — This is the description of your page that appears in search engine listings.
3. Keywords — A list of key words and phrases that relate to your page,  seperated by commas. This is for search engine purposes too.

ABOUT WRITING XHTML 1.0:

Here are some of the rules of XHTML 1.0.

All nested tags must be closed in the reverse order in which they are opened:

<div><span>Hello</span></div> = Correct
<div><span>Hello</div></span> = Incorrect

All tags that don't have a closing tag must be treated as self-closing with a backslash:

<img src="test.jpg" /> = Correct
<img src="test.jpg"> = Incorrect
<br /> = Correct
<br> = Incorrect

All special characters must be encoded correctly:

& = incorrect
&amp; = correct

Please feel free to use my template as a basis for your HTML pages. You can also test your HTML markup for errors using the online W3 markup validator, or the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox.

DOWNLOAD TEMPLATE: