My approach is is to use Firefox and the developers toolbar.

At the start of the session use the Clear Session Cookies, Delete Domain Cookies and Delete Path Cookies options to give yourself a completely clean browser.  You can check this then by using the View Cookie Information option.  The screen should display that you have zero cookies.

The next step is to work through the pages of your website.  For most sites simply going to the homepage will reveal most cookies as they tend to be set during the display of the standard headers and footers.  In my example here I’ve just gone to the BBC homepage and as you can see they run a very clean site…

These are both session cookies an expire almost immediately so are acceptable under the new law without any further changes.  You need to look out for cookies with long expiry periods and in particular those being set by third party tracking systems.  It was specifically those cookies that the law was designed to require user content for.

First came iCloud support in the UK. I’d always been. Put off downloading films and TV shows in iTunes because I knew I’d soon run out of disk space. Now with iCloud you can delete the content when you’ve finished with it and download again from Apple if you ever want to watch it again. The Apple TV is actually even better than that. Instead of streaming the content from you Mac or PC it now streams the content from iCloud so you no longer need you Mac switched on. Indeed the average consumer no longer needs a Mac or PC in their home. It’s still annoying that photos can’t be stored in iCloud forever, as this is as far as I can see the only reason an average consumer still needs a PC or Mac. So for me the ability to buy content, not have to worry about storing it and backing it up whilst still having access on demand is really amazing.

The next great improvement came when the BBC updated their iPlayer App to support AirPlay. To watch BBC programmes I used to connect up my MacBook Air to the HDMI port on the TV which works but is a bit of an annoyance. Now I can just sit down with my iPad or iPhone, find the programme I want to watch on iPlayer and the press the AirPlay button to transfer it to the big screen and audio in the sitting room. This works really well and is amazing. I just hope that ITV and Channel 4 now catch up and allow this in their player apps.

Finally this week NetFlix have arrived in the UK. Netflix has been integrated into the Apple TV in the US since it launched. I immediately signed up for Netflix and enjoyed cancelling by LoveFilm subscription. Films and TV program’s stream smoothly from Netflix and are integrated really well into the Apple TV. I was really impressed that they have fully embraced the Apple TV menu system and maintained the whole Apple look and feel. Netflix isn’t perfect at the moment. They have a lot of content but equally lots of notable TV shows and films are missing. That said I’m sure that now they have launched in the UK they will quickly start putting the deals in place to make more content available in the UK. Either way it’s great for consumers that LoveFilm finally have a serious competitor in the UK. I’ll also happily live with Netflix because it’s integrated into the Apple TV so neatly.

For me, it’s as if very little changed during 2011 and then in the first few weeks of 2012 everything I’ve been waiting for arrived at once.

I ask this question because although i’m very much in favour of cloud hosting i increasingly feel that where clients really need 99.999% availablity they need to look at a hybrid solution which eiether combines your own hosting scaling out to the cloud which has been done succesfully or maybe ultimatley a mix of hosting over two or more cloud providers which as far as i know no one has really done on a large scale successfully yet.

So while contracts often call for five nines can the client afford that extra nine, are they prepared for the complications it brings and even if they are is it more of a target than something anyne will actually commit to in application hosting today?

1. In GWT select verify ownership, DNS and then Other
2. They will now give you a unique string which will look something like “google-site-verification=tfUN8-Fj_jy6n2c76IZXXXXXxwpdqEmHsRLXXXXEvE”, highlight this and copy it to your clipboard.
3. Login to your 123-Reg account
4. Select the domain name you want to verify ownership of
5. Under the advanced domain settings select Manage DNS (A, MX, CNAME, TXT)
6. Scroll down the page until you get to Add New Entry
7. You should now see 3 input fields
8. in the first field enter an @ sign
9. in the middle field select TXT from the dropdown list
10. in the third field paste in the id string Google provided
11. Scroll down a little further and click on Update DNS
12. Wait a few minutes for the DNS change to propagate
13. Go back into GWT and now click the Verify Now Button – if this does not work give it a little longer for the DNS changes to propagate.  It can take up to 24 hours but its usually much faster these days.
14. If it still does not work exit 123-Reg and then go back in and make sure it saved your changes.  I’ve occasionally found that changes fail to commit the first time.

Finally the health warning, if you don’t understand DNS entries then be warned that making DNS mistakes can easily knock out your website, so if you’re not certain what you are doing get someone else to do it for you.

1. iCloud for streaming and storing any content you have in iTunes.  I worry that my iTunes isn’t backed up properly because its so large and I don’t currently buy a lot of video based content that I would like because it will consume too much disk space on my Mac.  If you add to this the problem that the content you want tends not to be on the Apple device you have with you when you are traveling unless you are very organised and sync what you want in advance then iCloud can’t come soon enough.
2. iCloud for backup and storage of iPhoto and other content.
3. MobileMe either replaced or upgraded so that I can access all of my iCloud content on the go.
4. The Post PC Era.  When Steve Jobs said we’re now in the Post PC Era I couldn’t help feeling he was slightly ahead of the technology.  As of iOS4 you still need to plug your Apple device into a Mac or PC to register it, upgrade it and sync content onto it.  For many people with old printers you still need a PC to print!  iOS5 needs to truly remove the need for a PC or Mac base station.
5. Facetime, I would like to see an upgrade so that you can conference in two or more people on the same video call.  Now that Microsoft own Skype I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Apple counter this by brining out a Facetime client for Windows.
6. iBooks, we need a reader application on the Mac.
7. Time Capsule.  There have been a lot of rumours that Apple will be upgrading their router / Time Capsule and this makes a lot of sense.  A device which can sit in the home and cache or backup your content from your Apple devices acting as a buffer between your home and the iCloud would be a great solution.  I would not put it past Apple to take this one stage further.  They could allow these devices to talk to each other across the Internet to form a grid, where all the communication are coordinated via their new data centre.
8. Lion – Security.  I’ve always recommended Mac’s over PC’s to non-technical friends and family because of their ease of use and better security.  I would like to see this taken a stage further in Lion so that by default Applications can only be installed from the Mac App Store.  Of course there would need to be a way to switch this off for more advanced users but for most of my non-technical friends this would be a welcome security improvement.  As we have seen with the recent Mac Defender Malware it’s currently too easy to trick non-technical users into install software.
9. Voice Recognition.  I want to see this done really well on every Apple platform.  I want to be able to be able to select tracks, listen to e-mails etc while driving or laying in the bath.  I don’t want to have to press a button to initial the voice command, it needs to be triggered by a phrase.  I want this to work like the LCARS Computer on the Enterprise, “Computer: Lights Off.”

Anyway not long to wait now, I’ll be back later in the week to review my wish list and review by 2011 Wish list from back on New Years Day.

1. When you are just starting out with a brand new blog you don’t worry too much about the hosting.  It’s easy and cost effective at the time to just put your blog on a low cost shared server.  A few years down the line and as the blog traffic takes off it becomes more important and you need to move it to a professional hosting platform.  My advice to people now is when starting a blog or probably any website buy the smallest hosting package you can from the provider you will want to be with in a couple of years time.  The good hosting companies will be able to upgrade your package and move you to their bigger servers with minimal disruption.
2. We’ve been doing this for a while now but back when we originally set-up this blog site we didn’t document the build and all the server tweaks.  For any hosting I really recommend that you keep a log of all the build steps and tweaks that you make.  We do this now by having a Word Document which details our procedure for building a WordPress site and then a site specific document which details anything unique to the site such as the name of the template used and any extra plugins.   This will save you a lot of time later wonder how something worked.

We’ve got lots of great ideas for articles over the coming weeks but as ever we are also interested in receiving guess blogs or products or services for review.  If you would like to get in touch please see the Contact Us section at the top of the site.

1. OmniFocus. This is a great tool for managing your to do lists. I have quite a large team and I use OmniFocus to record the tasks I allocate to people, target completion dates etc. You can include notes and email the task details directly to people from the application.
2. The built in Mail and Calendar Apps are fine and work with legacy Exchange servers. To be honest unless you’ve got a really up to date Exchange server not all the functions work quite as well as they should but when used with modern mail servers such as Googles it’s excellent.
3. Dropbox. I run this on my Mac, iPad and an old Microsoft Windows PC in the office and it’s a great way to store files in the cloud and sync them onto each machine.
4. Kindle ebook reader. This is my preferred ebook reader at the moment for one main reason… You can buy books from Amazon and then read them using the Kindle reader on iPad, Mac and PC. I like the way that they sync the page you are on and book marks across all the readers. If Apple ever do an iBooks reader on the Mac I might start to use that instead.
5. EverNote. I now scan all important documents into Ever Note which provides OCR and searching over the scanned documents. Great for getting access to you documents on the go.
6. IA Writer. This is a nice simple little text editor. I use it for quickly and simply taking minutes in meetings. It also integrates with Dropbox so that notes you type can be stored in your Dropbox account automatically.
7. Twitter. I use the official Twitter App which was previously known as Tweetie. I wish this iPad version was available on the Mac. It’s a shame that they don’t sync where you have read up to between the desktop app and the iPad app but I live in hope.
8. Pages. This is the Apple Word Processor. I’ve only been using this for a few days and in many ways it’s quite refreshing. The main problem is that it’s not MS Word and that’s what we’ve all been forced to use since Word Perfect failed to get a foothold on Windows. I would say that for 99% of people Pages is probably a better choice than Word for producing short, simple documents. I look forward to getting used to this over the coming weeks. I’m planning to buy it for the Mac when the new Mac App store opens.
9. WordPress. Yes I’m writing this blog post on using the WordPress app. It’s got room for improvement but isn’t bad. I love typing on the iPads virtual keyboard. I tend to find that as iPad apps run as full Screen applications rather than in windows there is less distraction and I focus on my writing and get more done.
10. TuneIn Radio. My iPad is now my main radio. It’s great when travelling. I often used to find myself in a hotel room with a poor choice of radio stations or stuck waiting for a train and unable to hear programmes I’d planned to listen to. I’m really pleased with this application.

When the iPad was launched some people called it just a big iPhone. I think it’s a whole new class of device. For many people who used to have a laptop, the iPad would be a great upgrade. For others a laptop may still be essential, for example photographers using light room will still want a Mac but they’ll also want an iPad to carry their work on to show clients.