Amy Kendall (amykendall.com) and myself have been working together in informal partnership on various website projects for the last 8 years. We have now formed an official business partnership and launched Sparrow Creative LLP

Sparrow Creative is a small design agency that offer graphic design and illustration for print and web and open-source website development using drupal and magento.

Please visit our website at: sparrowcreative.co.uk

The GeoIP database and API from MaxMind provide an easy way to determine country and region from an IP address. This can be used on a website to determine which country a site visitor is from, to provide them with a tailored experience, or to direct them to an alternative website.

Combined with Magento's multi-store capabilities, this can be used to provide the most suitable currency, language and product selection automatically.

One thing I wanted to be careful with, was to make sure that my implementation didn't have a negative effect on SEO. For example: redirecting to a country specific domain based on IP address might stop some domains from being indexed by search engines (Googlebot IP addresses are nearly always US based). Also, having the same domain to serve different countries might mean lower (or no) search ranking for country specific searches.

There are lots of different scenarios that are possible, and I can't cover them all, but hopefully you'll find something useful below. Let's get started...

What could be more basic for human existence than food and shelter? Clean safe drinking water! Unfortunately 884 million people around the world don’t have access to clean drinking water.

When I was confronted with this issue I decided to do something about it, that's why I'm organising the Scarborough Walk for Water.

Please support our Walk for Water either by donating, or by joining in and getting others to sponsor you.

Update: (Nov 2010)

Thank to those who took part and those who sponsored. We raised about £3000 (short of the £4000 target, but not a disappointing result).

Magento is a great ecommerce platform that is creating a revolution in the ecommerce world. It has been my pleasure to be involved with it from day 1, although I must admit that there has been a shortage of documentation for developers like me. As a result I'm very glad that there is a new Magento book published that is specifically aimed at developers - Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide.

I'm hoping that my copy will arrive in the post today! As soon as I have had a chance to have a good look at it I will report back with my first impressions. After I have finished reading it I am planning to write up a full review.

Does anyone else have a copy? What were your impressions?

This is a cool video, and a great idea! Find out more and support the "Robin Hood Tax" at robinhoodtax.org.uk

The NIV (or New Internation Version) is the most popular english translation of the Bible, as a result I imagine it is one of the (if not 'the') most sold books in the world - ever! (I think about 300 million copies have been printed).

The other night (09/09/2009) I had quite a special experience that drew me closer to God.

Well I feel like a bit of a luddite waiting this long to join the micro-blogging bandwagon, but I finally have. I guess I found all the hype a bit off-putting.

I am now on Twitter @rosskendall

Also, since I'm an Open Source (and open-data) fan, I have also signed up on Identi.ca - identi.ca/rosskendall
(the two accounts are linked, so all identi.ca posts end up on twitter)

Since I am usually short on time to write proper blog posts, I actually find micro-blogging suits me well. It is also a great way to keep up-to-date with things I am interested in - and pass helpful things on.

I'm going to keep my twitter posts focused on web-development, including: Magento, Drupal, programming (Perl and PHP), design, SEO, etc. I find trivial personal comments a bit distracting, especially if there are lots of them, so I won't be making them myself

I just received an email asking me just that.

I see on your site you mention about open source software like open office etc, can you recommend an opensource web design software that competes with dream weaver etc?

Well, here's my thoughts...

Those who are 'into' the Perl programming language will know about the mammoth project to re-design Perl for Perl 6. Part of that was to develop the Parrot Virtual Machine - a next generation VM specially designed for the unique needs of dynamic languages (in particular Perl 6).

...well, it's been quite a few years now, but I really feel that things are starting to come together. The launch of a shiny new website for Parrot at parrot.org is another thing that helps to confirm this. (As a side note, it's good to see the site running on Drupal, although I doubt they are using PHP on Parrot just yet.)