Smell The Coffee
Bank holiday weekend and as usual lately it seems I’m always working. The family have gone off to a local beach leaving me to do a little business, before having a BBQ this evening as at last it’s a sunny day in the north east of England.
I started the day, like every day, with a double espresso with added milk frothed to perfection, to make a beautiful latte. It’s not much of a breakfast I know but when coffee is this nice who needs food?
It’s taken me a long time to get the equipment right to do a “proper” coffee at home which equals or betters any of the chain or independent coffee shops that have finally taken off in the UK. I’ve spent a small fortune on manual grinders, automatic grinders, espresso machines and all in one bean-to-cup machines and I have now settled on a combination of two devices.
The first of these is a freshly ground coffee pod based espresso machine from the Nespresso range. I only recently got over my coffee connoisseur snobbery and finally gave in to the convenience of these devices after tasting a sample espresso in a retail outlet. This was produced in about 10 seconds and tasted fantastic. No messy coffee grounds around, no using the grounds before they go stale and no tamping with just the right pressure and still a perfect cup! I was impressed and thought to myself that I no longer need my finely tuned and self taught barista skills and I bought one straight away.
However good the espresso is though the mild frothing is equally important in getting a latte that is just right. Again I’ve tried all sorts of machines for this and disappointingly something called and aeroccino again from Nespresso, which was supposed to revolutionise milk frothing for convenience and quality, was a bit of a letdown which is a shame considering I got two of them! It did the milk not too badly but produces far too small a volume for a decent sized latte. Leading me to the second machine, a 700 quid bean-to-cup Gaggia Titanium, this with the use of small add-on device automatically draws the milk out a container and froths it into the coffee without any mess.
With another latte for lunch and by mid afternoon a single espresso to keep me going I’ve been toiling with java scripts and various codes to add some function to some of my web sites. I came across a very cool little program called MyContactStation which adds some forms to your website for contact, feedback, opt in to mail list and refer my site to others if you like it. This is very neat but I have to say it was not the easiest to install. Installation required editing two php scripts, a theme css file and manually inserting 4 to 5 code links on your web pages and adding the aweber opt-in code to another php file. It did work however and if you want to take a look at it in actions it’s at the top of my home page at www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com . I’m still toiling trying to get it onto one of my other sites which is on my “My Affiliate Store” site www.TheGardenLovers.com . This is a bit trickier as the site is produced from a template that they provide so I am still trying to work out how to access all of the appropriate files that on a locally produced site would be straight forward.
The rest of my afternoon was spent again meddling with code with google analytics. This was relatively simple in comparison and involved simply getting the code from google and inserting it into the right place on the web pages. It was a little trickier installing it to my Wordpress blogger page and this required a plug-in which was a little tricky to get going but eventually worked.
So quite an intense days work all in all for the start of a bank holiday weekend. No proper work really in terms of developing the business although, I guess if the opt-in buttons work I may at least get a boost to my lists. I certainly learned a lot anyway about codes of various types, drank a lot of coffee and now I’m off to fire up the BBQ and start to smell the beer.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
Add comment August 24th, 2007
