Dan Karran's blog

A new Bed & Breakfast in the Isle of Man

I'm proud to launch the new website for the Bed and Breakfast accommodation at Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottages in the Isle of Man.

Recently awarded a four star rating and located in the hamlet of Ballakilpheric near Colby, the cottage is just a short drive from the airport, the golden beach and sunset views of Port Erin, the working village folk museum at Cregneash, the historic capital of the Island at Castletown, and many more things for visitors to see.

If you're looking for a comfortable, family-run B&B in the middle of the beautiful Manx countryside - perfect for outdoor activities such as walking, cycling or just as a base for exploring the Island - look no further than Cronk-e-Dhooney.

The website is based on Drupal to make it easily maintainable, includes some mapping from OpenStreetMap and also photos that I took in and around the property to help show it off to prospective visitors.

Posted in Drupal, Isle of Man at 10:00 PM on Sunday 27 April 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Bed and Breakfast Drupal OpenStreetMap Isle of Man Tourist Accommodation

What to do on the Isle of Man?

I got an email from a colleague (author of some great Mac apps) the other day asking what was good to do on the Isle of Man. It's not something I actually think about very often, so it was nice to spend some time thinking about all the things I love about the Island, and coming up with some recommendations...

I'd probably recommend visiting Peel for a wander round the old streets, maybe the castle and the coast, especially at sunset. Just south of there is a little place called Dalby/Niarbyl where there are some more great coastal views and walks as well as a pub and cafe.
Also, I'd suggest the village of Cregneash and possibly its living museum. Port St Mary is a nice quaint fishing village just down the hill from there.

In Douglas the museum is worth at least a quick visit.

Up north, the Point of Ayre is quite breathtaking. The village of Laxey on the way up there is quite pretty.

If they know anything about the annual TT races, perhaps a trip around the course would be worth doing.

Otherwise, I'd just say head for the hills for a bit of a walk.

I was typing it out on the iPod touch, so the responses were getting shorter as I went on. I also didn't know what his friends would be interested in seeing, or how much time they'd have, so I tried to keep it general enough that any visitor would like it (though I'm aware it centres around places I love to go to take photos). I must say, despite my 'quick visit' recommendation, the Manx Museum in Douglas is well worth more than just a quick visit, as long as you've got the time to spare.

Have you been to the Island, or live there? What would you add to the list?

Posted in Isle of Man at 1:07 AM on Monday 17 March 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Isle of Man tourism tourist attractions

London Heathrow Terminal 5 preview

The public opening of the new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport is less than a fortnight away and the Queen officially opened it yesterday. I was very pleased to have been given the chance to take a look around while it was in its final stages of preparation the week before last.

Having found the British Airways office, a small group of us (people who had blogged about Terminal 5 or may be interested publicising the opening) were given a tour of the terminal by a BA guide. Paul Parkinson of the This Week in London podcast was also on the tour and gives a great overview of the afternoon in his latest episode, and the terminal5insider has been doing a great job of sharing Terminal 5 photos and videos in the run-up to its public opening.

So, what were my impressions? Looking at the terminal from a distance, it doesn't look all that impressive, and it's only when you approach that you start to realise the sheer scale of the place. Departures are at the top of the building, with a passenger drop off area that gives great views of the countryside out towards Windsor. Entering the terminal via the pedestrian bridges, you start to get a better feel for the building, with a number of floors in view beneath you and an airy departures area welcoming you in. Standing in the main hall, the first thought I had was that it reminded me a little of Stuttgart Airport but on a much larger scale.

The terminal is laid out in such a way (see a diagram on the BBC News guide) that passengers should just flow through from the entrance to the gates with little hassle. In the door, to the self check-in kiosks, drop your bag off at one of the many bag drops and then pass through security to the main shopping and departure area. One thing that I really liked was that even before you go through the usual hassles of security (now even more complex, with biometric information being taken for domestic passengers) you can already see the sky through the glass walls on the other side of the terminal.

Even arriving from the Tube, it looks like there will be a relatively comfortable and short trip from the platform, through the wider than normal ticket barriers, and straight up the escalator to the check-in area.

Transport around the airport is set to be made easier as well, with the introduction of the ULTra PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system scheduled for 2009, initially taking people to and from the car parks (apparently only for privileged passengers) and later around the rest of the northern side of the Heathrow complex. I also read somewhere that travel on the Tube and Heathrow Express between terminals will be free.

It's obvious from the tour and from the photos that security will be paramount in Terminal 5, with cameras designed into the fittings and signage wherever possible, self check-in desks that have space for a camera to be embedded at some point, the added biometric security, and the new design for X-ray scanning machines that physically separate off anything that needs to be checked by hand (which also has the added disadvantage that it's easy to lose track of where your trays are when passing through), to name just a few of the features.

All in all, I was very impressed with the new terminal building, the only real niggle I had being about the precedence of advertising over information in some places (such as arriving into the baggage collection area to be greeted by an advert instead of pointers to the correct belt, but it's still vastly improved over the design in the other terminals where Vodafone adverts take precedence and you actually have to hunt out the information screens).

I'm looking forward to trying it out as a real passenger, and will probably take the Tube out there to take some photos around the place when it opens to the public on 27th March.

Posted in London, Transport, Travel at 10:29 PM on Friday 14 March 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5

Why you shouldn't navigate by postcode

Thanks to a blog post I wrote a couple of years back, I was recently invited on a tour around the new Heathrow Terminal 5 before it opens to the public later this month. More on the tour in a later blog post (also listen to the This Week in London podcast for a walkthrough of the new terminal ).

To get to the British Airways headquarters for the tour on Monday, I had typed the postcode (UB7 0GB) into the Transport for London Journey Planner website and found a set of connections that should have taken me there with plenty of time to spare. It did strike me as a little weird that the headquarters were situated so far from the airport itself (see the same location on Google Maps), but didn't think too much more of it as mt flatmate and I started on our journey to Uxbridge and the end of the London Underground Metropolitan line.

Walking through a residential estate and arriving outside the Uxbridge Royal Mail delivery office, I did start to wonder where the British Airways office was. Named Waterside, it was bound to be next to some water, and of course there was a canal flowing through to lull me into a false sense of security. With desperation growing, we walked into the delivery office to inquire there. As I walked towards the counter it suddenly started dawning on me that BA had perhaps had their mail directed to the delivery office. The Royal Mail guy confirmed this, saying something along the lines of "They do have a PO Box here, yeah. Did you follow your TomTom to get here?".

We were already running later than planned, and it turned out we were miles away from the actual headquarters bordering Heathrow (see map). Luckily we managed to get a taxi and caught the tour group just as they had given up hope on us arriving and were starting to head off.

Postcodes can be a great way of finding a location, with mapping websites and journey planners typically having knowledge of postcode locations across the whole of the UK. That said, how can they be useful considering their sole purpose is not for telling everyday people where something is, but instead for telling a postal delivery worker where to take the mail? How do you know when a postcode is going to relate to a building (often for large users such as businesses, schools, hospitals, etc.), a street (as is often the case), or somewhere completely unexpected such as a postal depot?

Perhaps this is where the user-generated databases of postcodes can start to step in. I've added the postcode UB7 0GB to the New Popular Edition Maps website that allows people to add postcodes they know the location of, as long as they can work out the location from 1940s Ordnance Survey maps. The database of postcode locations is then available to anyone without restriction.

Posted in Geographic, London at 6:26 PM on Thursday 13 March 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: London postcodes Royal Mail British Airways navigation

Why does Amazon punish mobile users?

Sitting on my sofa this evening, reading through some tips and tricks for selling photos for use in magazines, calendars, postcards and the like, my Photos That Sell book made a number of references to the Freelance Photographer's Market Handbook which gives details of publishers and publications that are on the lookout for photos to use.

Curious to find out more about the different ways to crack into the freelance photography market, I reached for my iPod touch and tapped out the address for Amazon into its Safari browser. Amazon had detected I was on an iPod (well, it thought it was an iPhone) and gave me a nice mobile interface to work with.

I found the book with ease and added it to my basket. Wondering what the minimum order was for free shipping, I went into their help section to try and find out. It was then that I noticed that they punish people for using their new mobile interface, stating 'All items ordered from your mobile device will be shipped standard shipping, unless you are an Amazon Prime customer.'

Why make it easier for customers to buy products from you but then not give them the shipping option that must have attracted them so more customers over the years? Admittedly, they do give the option to use their full site instead, but it's not as convenient on a mobile device.

In the end I resorted to using the laptop, so Amazon didn't lose the custom, but it would be nice if they'd give the free shipping option as part of their iPhone/iPod beta site.

Posted in Photography at 10:32 PM on Thursday 14 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Amazon online shopping photography

Holiday cottages on Drupal

Last night saw the launch of the new Smeale Farm Cottages website (first launched back in 2000), helping market a new holiday cottage that they recently opened.

The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.

Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.

As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.

I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.

Posted in Drupal, Isle of Man, Web at 7:41 PM on Thursday 7 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Drupal Freelance Isle of Man

Welcome, iPod Touch

Last week I added a new iPod to the family - the iPod Touch. This is not just an iPod in the sense of music, but an iPod in the sense of a truly portable network device with a sexy interface to boot. The iPod is no longer the music player that it was when it was originally released, with music now just playing a much smaller part of the product.

When planning my purchase I was torn between the iPod Touch and the iPhone, the only differentiating factors being the camera and the phone capabilities (and therefore its ubiquitous data connection). At basically the same initial price for both, it didn't make sense for me to go for a mobile phone with an 18 month contract that had a below par camera when I could also go for a free Nokia N95 and its embedded 5 megapixel camera while paying around the same amount of money on a contract. Thanks to my employer I already had a chance to try out Nokia's internet enabled camera and loved its quality and ability to post photos directly to the internet and am looking forward to being able to do that again in the near future.

There's quite a bit of overlap between the iPod Touch and the N95, but the Touch has an interface that's just so much nicer to use than the N95, for mail and web browsing especially. Talking of overlap, at eight gigabytes the device isn't big enough to hold my entire iTunes collection, so I don't think I'll be ditching my 80 gigabyte iPod Classic any time soon.

Despite being very pleased overall with the Touch, there are a few things that I'd really love to see added to the device:

Media streaming from other iTunes libraries on the network
Wireless syncing with host computer
Jabber chat client
Video plugins for Safari to allow viewing of RealPlayer content (e.g. from the BBC)
Email search in the Mail app (server-side)

Without a cellular data connection, the wifi on the device is very important for those times you want to access the internet when out and about. There are a number of UK companies and organisations starting to provide free wifi in their premises (e.g. Wetherspoons pubs, McDonalds, local libraries and other places) and in public spaces which is great, and the Cloud has dropped their monthly fees for iPod Touch owners to a price that mirrors what you'd pay for a single hour at most wireless hotspots.

It's also amazing how many other venues have wifi available in them thanks to some unknown third party provider. This is a grey area when it comes to the law though, with wifi theft already being punished under the Communications Act 2003 in a number of cases. I say it's a grey area because there is often no easy way of telling if an open wifi hotspot has been intentionally provided free of charge either by a venue or by someone else actively sharing their connection for passers-by.

Posted in Communications, Miscellaneous, Photography, Systems at 9:57 PM on Sunday 27 January 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: iPod Apple portable network device

Art Auction for Age Concern Isle of Man

A group of Applied Business students from St. Ninian's High School in the Isle of Man is holding an art auction on 29th January in aid of Age Concern. Over 40 local artists have donated artwork for sale in the auction which will hopefully produce a nice donation to charity as well as a great thing to put on the organisers' CVs.

The organisation of this event significantly trumps my involvement in a Young Enterprise group as part of a similar scheme when I was at school. We managed to make some novelty items and Christmas decorations as well as coming out with a slight profit for members of the group, but nothing quite on the scale of this.

If you're going to be on the Isle of Man next Tuesday, go and put a bid in for a piece of local artwork, perhaps a photo of the Point of Ayre Lighthouse ;)