The tomato plants keep on growing, the one on the left is still significantly smaller than the others, but I think I now know what has happened. When I was pinching out internodes a few weeks back I may have inadvertently pinched out the top of the plant. Pinching out the top of the plant is how you stop a plant from growing once you have about five to six trusses of fruit to ensure the plant continues putting energy into the fruit rather than into sprouting new shoots, unfortunately I did it to this plant way too early with only a couple of trusses set.

I may be lucky and the plant will shoot again from the top which will mean I may possibly get another truss or two before the end of July, only time will tell. I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.

The plant on the right is doing really well, truss after truss keep on setting and the fruit which has already started growing is getting bigger and bigger. Hopefully when the weather cheers up we will see a lot more flowers dropping off and little tomatoes will be appearing in their place.

Talking of the weather, April was the warmest ever, with the average temperature being 6˚C higher than normal in the South East of England, and the plants had wall to wall sunshine giving them a great start. However May 2007 was in contrast the one of wettest ever on record, and June does not appear to be showing much promise of improving either. Whilst I sit here writing this blog it is dull and overcast with mist.

I am still investigating the different kinds of fertiliser on the market for tomato plants, and will have to make a decision soon, as the feeding will need to commence in the next couple of weeks.

Still it is not all bad news, I have found fruit on my tomato plants! Only a three at the moment but it is a good sign no less. Once the second truss starts to set I will begin feeding the plants once a week with fertiliser.

Plant feeding, particularly for those plants with flowers, fruit or large leaves, is an important job which must not be overlooked. In nature, important minerals such as Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P) and Potassium (K) amongst others are absorbed by the plants through their roots during the cycle of death and decay from rotting plant matter. Since my plants are grown in a grow bag the likelihood of the plants being able to absorb the required levels of nutrients is minimal, this is why you must fertilise once the fruit begins to set to ensure the plant gets all the goodness it can to maximise the tomato's growth.

I know from last year feeding the tomato plants will ensure they are stronger and healthier. It is important to choose the right fertiliser for the tomato plants. I used Levington Tomorite last year which seemed to work well, as I ended up with a real bumper crop.

I will investigate a little over the coming weeks and see if there are other kinds of fertiliser which I can use or whether Tomorite is the right product for the job.

Well I think I picked a good week to go away on my summer holidays, whilst my family and I have been sunning ourselves on Lake Garda in Italy my tomato plants have been exposed to some real heavy rain fall. Apparently in 2 days there was 80% of the entire months average rain fall. The good news is though having added the extra string to support the plants last week, the grotty weather does not appear to have affected my plants at all.

In fact the heavy rain seems to have helped bring the plants on, there are now 3 trusses of flowers on each plant and the signs are encouraging for yet more to starting setting over the next couple of weeks.

The weird thing I have noticed is that the plant on the left appears to be significantly smaller than the other two plants. Up until now the plants have all been of equal size.

It looks like the second truss of flowers are just starting to appear at the top of each of the plants, I will have a much better idea next week of whether this is the case.

The aphid problem seems to have settled down without too much intervention, in fact I have not seen one for a few days prior to writing to this post, so hopefully they have moved on to pastures new and will leave the tomato plants to continue their development in peace.

There is not much else to write about this week, so it looks like it is a short and sweet one!

I thought I would achieve this with javascript, but to my surprise you can actually do this using the disable property of the checkbox. See the examples below.

Disabled Checkbox Enabled Checkbox

Code to disable a checkbox

<input name="checkbox" type="checkbox" value="checkbox" checked="checked" disabled="disabled" />

As you will see in the photos the plants have grown significantly in the last week, I have already got my first buds/flowers appearing on each plant. It is these flowers which after blooming become the tomatoes, the flowers die and drop away and the tomato begins to form in its place.

The tomato plants had become really bushy as well as taller this week. I have had a good prune to remove all the extra leaves and internodes which were either too close to the base of the plant or just not required. By pinching out the internodes you allow the plant to spend more energy producing tomatoes and not waste time growing leaves.

I had mentioned in week three, that I would experiment with one of the tomato plants and leave the internodes to grow at the base of the plant to see whether I would get tomatoes coming in earlier or remove the internode once it was a few inches long and plant it elsewhere. I have decided against this, it occurred to me the plant which has lots of leaves close to the base of the plant will be too close to the damp soil, if these leaves did start to decay or get disease the disease could spread to the healthy pruned plants. To avoid any disasters I have pruned all the plants.

Since I design websites with accessibility issues in mind, I realise it is always a good idea to include either the abbreviation or acronym tag. These tags ensure people with screen reading software can interpret the web pages content correctly, and provide a useful way for others to find out what the letters actually stand for by hovering the mouse over the letters.

These are examples of abbreviations and accronyms. Hover your mouse over each example to find out what they stand for.

• HTTP


• USB


• UFO


• BBC


• NATO

Now which of the above are abbreviations and which are accronyms. Well they are all abbreviations other than the last example which is an acronym.

The Abbreviation and Acronym Rule

The rule is, if the letters are pronounced as a word it is an acronym, in our example we refer to the letters NATO as "NAYTO". If we pronounce the individual letters like BBC it is an abbreviation.

I found this photo on the laptop, which I took before we started on the kitchen diner, I am sure that you will agree the kitchen diner now is a remarkable improvement to what was there before.

I spent the majority of the weekend out in the back garden painting the decking. It amazes me, how just a good coat of timbercare can revitalise even the most tired looking parts of a garden. The decking looks brand new… well for the time being, once the cat's start sharpening their claws on the posts, and people shuffle the deckchairs along it, my hard work will no doubt start to come undone. However I fear I may have made a rod for my own back, having rejuvenated the shed and decking, I now have decided to do the fencing as this looks like it has never been done and looks awful next to the freshly painted shed and decking.

So still on my to do list is wallpapering Dylan's new nursery, and treating the fencing in the back garden. I wonder if I can get it done before the bank holiday weekend is over?

The King's School project was my first website that used a content management system, although I have been involved in web design projects that use content management systems, this has always been an area others members of the team deal with. Normally my designs are used for the front end and the content management system is integrated into my designed templates. Whereas this project would mean I had a much more involved role in using the content management system after the templates were built.

At the beginning of the project I new there was a serious learning curve ahead of me, but now after completing the project, the knowledge I have gained will be invaluable for future projects. As it is predicted that content management driven websites will increase significantly over the next few years, these new skills will hopefully serve as a good foundation for the future.

The content management system used by the King's School website is provided by Edeptive™. Working alongside Andrew Bailey and Neil Perry from Edeptive to build the website was a real pleasure. The Edpetive™ content management system is so powerful, easy to use and the support throughout the project from Edeptive™ was first rate. As a result the new content management system will enable the schools non-technical staff to easily and efficiently manage their website, keeping content current, and of interest to pupils, teachers, parents and prospective visitors to the school.

The website utillises the Edeptive Gallery system and a sophisticated Calendar which uses the latest web technology to deliver a highly functional event diary. Microsoft Vista users are able to add a Kings Calendar Gadget to their desktop to easily keep up to date with forthcoming events.

For those of you who are not familiar with content management systems, let me enlighten you, a content management system, often abbreviated to (CMS) is a web application or software used for content management.

A content management system facilitates the organisation, control, and publication of a large number of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. Content management systems are ideal when collaborative creation of documents is required. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

Web content management systems are usually used for storing, controlling and publishing specific documentation such as news articles, upcoming events, technical manuals, and marketing brochures.

Web content management systems are more than just a way of managing documents, a web content management system is a computer system used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of web material (HTML documents and their associated images).

A web content management system provides the following key features:

Automated Templates
Standard page design templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content.

Easily Editable Content
Having content separate from the visual presentation of your website, makes editing much easier and quicker. Most content management software include WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.

Scalable Modules
Most content management systems have plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing website's functionality.

Web Standards Upgrades
Content management systems usually receive regular updates that include new features and keep the system up to current web standards.

Workflow Management
Workflow is the process of creating a system of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the content management system. For example, a content author submits a news item, but it is not published on the website until the content editor cleans it up, and the editor-in-chief approves it.

Document Management
Content management systems provide a means of managing the life cycle of a piece of content, from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.

Hopefully this explanation has given you a better understanding of what a content management system is, and what it could do for you or your organisation.

Now with the better weather coming, I have been splitting my spare time between Dylan's nursery and the back garden. I have primed and glossed the skirting boards and painted the coving in Dylan's nursery, the walls are all ready for me to begin hanging wallpaper. Guess what I will be doing on the upcoming May bank holiday!

The back garden is going to be a huge project, at the moment there is a lot of slabs covering the majority of the back garden, these will be replaced by grass, so we can play football and watch Dylan playing in his sand pit. At the moment it is not a particularly child friendly area, certainly not for a toddler who is prone to banging his bonce, and falling over. So as a matter of urgency I will be getting the slabs up and having a lawn laid at some time this year, so next year Dylan can enjoy running around outside, this Summer he is unlikely to be wanting to go outside and run around, at the moment he is just crawling and chasing the cats.

I have planted two varieties of Clematis at the bottom of the garden, and put up some trellis for them to climb. In a year or two they should be covering the majority of the garden wall.

This weekend I have taken down a fence which was around the postage stamp of lawn we currently have, and have painted the shed with a coat of protector. Next weekend, weather permitting will be enough time for me to weather proof the decking, and start clearing some of the debris left from the previous owners.