Some of you will know I’ve been planning my move to Birmingham in the last month or so. These are very exciting times for me and for OnePage, so I’d like to share with you why.

Why move?

One of the first responses from people when I mentioned that I was considering moving was “why?” and “can’t you run a startup from Sheffield?”. It’s just over a year since I had the idea which sparked OnePage to exist, and 8 months since we launched our private beta. We’ve just opened it up completely, so I think we’re going at a decent pace. However, no matter how fast and how far we’ve come in the last 7 months, there is no doubt that there was a thought in both mine and Oo’s mind telling us that we could have moved much faster had we been located in the same city. So, the primary reason for the move is so that me and Oo can be in the same location and can take OnePage to up a gear. Since the start of the year we’ve both agreed we need to keep the momentum going and gradually accelerate, and this is certainly a big step forward for us.

Why Birmingham?

Since the reason we were moving was for OnePage, the reasons for Birmingham relate very much to the startup. We wanted proximity to London without the costs it brings. That combined with great programmes such as BSEEN, Birmingham is very much becoming a potential technology hub. We plan to make our mark here and show to other startups that Birmingham is a perfect place to work on your startup. Myself and Oo with both be blogging about the city as we experience more of it.

What about Sheffield?

Sheffield will always be my hometown and I will always want to help other entrepreneurs with young startups get off the ground. Having started StartupMill in Sheffield, it will be continuing and I hope to be back in Sheffield at least once a month to attend the main StartupMill event. In the future, I hope I can do much more for Sheffield and for startups in the UK as a whole, but the priority is for me to succeed with my own startup, and before I have the experience, credibility and hopefully funds that come with succeeding with a startup the impact I can make is limited.

The story so far, two weeks in

I’ve only been here for just over two weeks, but since moving here I have met some great young entrepreneurs who are part of the BSEEN programme with me and Oo. Amongst them are Helena Kazi who has a unique business model twist on her social enterprise, and Fahad Farooq and Omi Mahmood who are moving very fast with The Energy Advice Bureau. The environment is one of young entrepreneurs with lots of energy combined with experienced entrepreneurs who are very happy to advise us. It really is fantastic.

In addition to the great people on the BSEEN programme, the move was great timing since Launch48 was last weekend. I took part, and in just 48 hours our team created a startup called twitballot which allows individuals to create polls on Twitter and view the responses visually in the form of bar charts. I contributed my development skills and chose not to continue the startup since OnePage is my focus, but many of the team have chosen to continue and try and make something more of it so that will be interesting to keep an eye on.

The real reason

In reality, there were plenty of things to hold me back from taking the plunge to move to a completely different city. The real reason I decided to jump in with both feet is that I have realised over the last year that the way for me to improve in every area is to push myself out of my comfort zone, or rather my familiar zone. I am speaking at a conference in September, and I am striving to do as much as I can to push myself further. As you can probably tell, I’m having great fun already and a lot has happened in just two weeks. If you’re hesitating about something, you should probably just go for it.

Stay tuned for more updates! If you’re in the Birmingham area, I want to meet you! Get in touch.

I have some bold aims for 2010. I truly believe it will be a tipping point that I’ll look back on for years to come, and all I’ve been learning and instilling in my mind in 2009 will be put into action. I am very excited about the year ahead. I’d like to take a few moments to share my aims for this new year.

A look back at 2009

Firstly, a quick glance back at the year that has passed. So what did I manage?

• Graduated with a first class degree from a top university.
• Both started earning a good amount and have taken my own choice of path by creating a startup.
• Put myself out there in some situations outside my comfort zone, with huge rewards.
• Met so many great new people, some of which have become great friends.
• Solved my worry of moving back to Sheffield in terms of the lack of technical and ambitious people.
• Made going to the gym and swimming a habit which I love.

I’m very happy with what I achieved in 2009, but I’m certainly not satisfied. I’m hungry for success.

Major goals for 2010 (that’s twenty ten!)

So, what are my goals? Here goes:

My startup

2010 will be the year that OnePage, my startup, will thrive. With my great friend and business partner Oo, we have been working hard and we are definitely reaching some significant stages now. We both believe “always be learning” and applying that to ourselves and to the problem we are trying to solve with OnePage has got us far already and I’m confident we will achieve a lot by continuing with that mantra.

Goal: Start earning revenue from OnePage

Personal and health

I’ve been working on improving every aspect of what I do towards the end of 2009 and I aim to continue this into 2010.

Goals:

• Continue regular gym sessions and swimming (3-4 times per week). Something to aim for – swim a mile of front crawl.
• Make eating 7 fruit or veg a day a habit.
• Consistently have at least 7 hours of sleep a night.
• Go for a short break by myself at least once.
• Continue drinking less.

Education

Sure, I achieved graduation with a first class degree in 2009, but that doesn’t mean my education is over. I’ve discovered so much top quality information in books towards the end of 2009 and I’m eager to read much more. If you read a great book by someone it’s like a shortcut.

Goals:

• Read 52 books
• Improve my knowledge of people and news – after an embarassing game involving describing people at Christmas this year, I realised just how few people I know about!

Sharing

Sure, I love to share and I’m a  good guy. However, one thing I learned this year is that the more you give back the more you will succeed. So you can be a nice guy and experience real benefit too.

Goals:

• Release 12 bits of open source code throughout the year.
• Write at least 12 proper blog posts (that’s this blog).
• Write 100 miniblog posts (my posterous for on-the-fly discovery publishing).
• Be more involved with startups I can help.

Networking

I discovered the true power of networking in 2009 and it enabled me to meet many great people and find out their discoveries so that I can shortcut my success. I plan to do this much more in 2010. It’s not about numbers, but it’s nice to set some targets:

Goals:

• Attend at least one big tech conference
• LinkedIn: 300 connections.
• Twitter: 4000 followers.
• Facebook: 700 friends.

There’s more

That’s certainly not all I plan to achieve, I also plan to travel much more. This will be a nice blog post to come back to in order to remind myself and let you guys keep me on track. I hope you achieve what you want to in 2010!

The problem

I was recently working through some Internet Explorer issues with a web application I’ve been involved in developing, when I came across a strange little bug related to the “change” event. I found that I had to click a radio button twice, or click a radio button and then click elsewhere on the page in order for the event to be triggered. This obviously pointed towards the event triggering to be buggy in Internet Explorer.

Why send email with Gmail rather than the server’s SMTP configuration?

On Sunday morning I awoke to find an email and an @reply which both gave me invaluable information which I could not have found elsewhere. It was a fantastic feeling and I am very grateful to Timothy Fitz and Andy Young who are both great CTOs who I’m trying my best to learn from. In this post, I’m going to emphasise the gains possible simply by being more open and asking more questions.

Timothy is the CTO at IMVU which is a 3D chat messenger. That doesn’t fascinate me so much, but what does is the way in which they develop at IMVU. They use a technique called “continuous deployment” which in simple terms means that everything they code goes live almost instantly. There are a number of benefits which are possibly not immediately obvious when doing this. I won’t go further with this as it isn’t the topic of my post, but it is what has triggered me to write this post. Timothy’s two posts explain it very well, including this part which I shall quote:

Continuous Deployment is simple: just ship your code to customers as often as possible. Maybe today that’s weekly instead of monthly, but over time you’ll approach the ideal and you’ll see the incremental benefits along the way.

From Timothy’s reply to my email in which I simply asked a few questions about parts of continuous deployment I wasn’t completely clear about, he’s now put me in a great position to work towards the goal of continuous deployment in my startup OnePage.

I’d like to share some bits of advice for anyone trying to launch a web startup. As Co-Founder and CTO of OnePage, I am striving to make OnePage a success, and in order to do this I am pushing myself to research and analyse as much information which is already out there. Here are 5 top ingredients which I think are key:

On 16th July I was lucky enough to be invited to travel down to the BT Tower in London for the launch of the National Paediatric Toolkit. I’ve been involved in the development of the software for around 2 years at Priority Research Ltd. now and things are getting quite exciting with the project.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

I just had to solve an issue I was having with input elements dynamically inserted via JavaScript and it took me an hour or so to find the solution, so I thought I’d post it here for the opportunity it may help someone else reach the solution faster.

document.createNamedElement = function(type, name) {
    var element;
    try {
        element = document.createElement('<'+type+' name="'+name+'">');
    } catch (e) { }
    if (!element || !element.name) { // Not in IE, then
        element = document.createElement(type)
        element.name = name;
    }
    return element;
}

This week I realised yet more important things on a new chapter of my ambitious journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur, so I’d like to share.

“Together, you all achieve more, faster, easier. You can spot one another’s blind spots. You can encourage discouraged team members. They can encourage you when you’re down. They fill in the gaps in your skill sets. They can be strong when you’re weak. As a team, you all run faster. A 4-by-4 relay team runs the mile about two seconds faster than the individual runner. If you want speed, you need a team.”