Mar 18 2011: Due to attempted site attacks by cretins, comments have been disabled site-wide. Pity, because there have been some interesting ones, but the overwhelming majority have been spam of course.
NOTE TO ALL THOSE ATTEMPTING TO LOGIN TO THE ADMIN AREA OF THIS SITE :
Every IP address has been recorded and will be forwarded to the appropriate authorities, so expect action!

Apr 14: Wow! Implemented Javascript to Footer plugin to see if site can be sped up a little. I wasn’t disapointed. I’d recommend that anyone with a WordPress site give it a try as it works like a charm!

Mar 30: Finally found time to upgrade to the latest WordPress version which seems to have fixed all the ‘bugs’ – so now the contact and newsletters forms are back, the site slow downs should be fixed and the Live Help is also back too.

Mar 1: Had to remove the live chat thingie. Yet another service that doesn’t live up to the hype… Nevermind, just use the contact form or call me! EDIT: Put it back again, turned out to be a small conflict with another plugin…

Feb 19: Added a clever plugin today called ‘Related articles by Tags’ – basically it means that if you view an article a new menu will appear on the left called ‘Related Articles’ that will have articles with (hopefully!) similar content so you can read more about the topic you are interested in.

Feb 16: All back online again. Seems that the US company that provides the service had a problem with their server provider during a shift of hosting or something. Now all is back and hopefully it will be reliable!

Feb 15: I can’t win, I have to ditch one live help chat service (Digsby – that worked ok, but the desktop client was slowing my PC to a crawl) and try another – this time eTalkup – and their US servers go down the gurgler… I’ll monitor the situation next week and see if they come back online again.

Feb 03: Well, 2009 is well underway. It should be the year that Microsoft replace the less than wildly successful Vista with Windows 7. Let’s hope it lives up to all the hype. Like the new header image? I decided to ‘tinker’ with it a little to make a bit more like home. If the new surf shop and cafe ends up as a reality, the beach might end up more like this! I had to include my favourite beer of course…

Dec 12: Thankfully, wholesale prices have gone down again – not by as much as the increases, but enough to be able to be fairly confident that I can supply most of the systems and parts at the prices shown here. Do call and confirm first though. Only a couple of weeks until Xmas so if you need some assistance this year – do make an appointment as soon as you can! I will take a short break over the holiday period this year and I will be unavailable from the close of business on Tuesday 22nd Dec and open again on Monday Jan 5th 2009.

Oct 14: As expected (but worse than we feared) and due to the sudden aussie dollar ‘plunge’, prices for nearly all parts and software is about to take a sudden jump skywards. Some items have already increased overnight by as much as 30%, so prices on this site can’t be assumed to be correct. Please confirm prices for any system or item you require prior to ordering.

In the past, prices quoted here were usually slightly higher than what I would quote for a system when a customer placed an order due to wholesale pricing gradually dropping over the course of a month – not any more.

Nothing we can do about it unfortunately – PC wholesalers and retailers work with slim margins anyway and absorbing these kind of price hikes is simply not possible. I’ll advise my customers of any change to the situation in the newsletters, but it’s safe to assume that until the dollar starts to return to ‘pre-recession’ levels this will be the state for some time to come.

Sep 26: Commenting has now been turned on for all articles on a trial basis (strong anti-spam techniques and comment moderation should prevent spamming, but you never know). If you have a question or a comment about any of the information in an article, just leave a comment. I, or another reader will probably answer or respond. While it is required to enter an email address to comment, it is not published. You can also tick the box that says ‘Notify me of followup comments’ and you will be automatically notified.

Sep 25: Ouch! The poor exchange rate at the moment means price increases for most computer parts next month. My suppliers are great at holding prices stable for a month at a time but from October we can expect a 5-10% price-hike. Get in touch with me asap if you are wanting a new system / upgrade and I should be able to get it for you at September prices.

Sep 23: After problems with the previous theme, I’ve changed to another one from the same free themes site that displays the fonts correctly in Internet Explorer 7 AND allows the Chat with Andy widget to work in Firefox.  Turned out to be a theme problem rather than a Firefox issue. Hope you like the relaxing ‘beach holiday’ theme. I know we don’t have palm trees on Seven Mile beach but I do like the picture!

Sep 10: The new site is progressing very well. WordPress is such a fantastic ‘leap forward’ in website design. I remember only to well all those long nights spent slaving over the old site, it took me weeks and weeks of work to get it to a stage where I was happy with it. Consequently, updating it just became too much effort.

After spending a few hours customising a theme and creating the ‘header’ image for the site, I was able to import the entire old site content (by cut & paste mainly) into the new one within a day or two. I’ve just now completed the import of all the articles from the old ‘blog site – now, that was easy thanks to WordPress. I just used the ‘Export’ tool on the old site and save a file containing all the articles and then imported it into the new site – just magic.

Now I have a combined business site and blog and will be able to update it much more easily!