I have just finished filing my tax return for the 2007-08 year, using the online “service” provided by HMRC. This is the third year I have done it online and I cannot remember it being this difficult before.

I’ll preface this by saying that I have over 40 years’ experience in designing computer systems. The self-assessment system has these design and usability faults which delayed my successful completion of the form:

• The self-employment section asks for your turnover, and in the next box for ‘any other business income’. I had none, so I entered £0.00 — how was I to know that I should have left it blank?
• Having learned that lesson, there were several boxes which weren’t relevant to me so I left them blank. There was a supplementary question about these irrelevant boxes which wanted the answer Yes or No but I skipped them … mistake number two! I had to answer a rather pointless No.
• In the unlikely event that the Revenue owe me money, they ask for my bank account details. Now my bank statements and cheque book both say my sort code is 30-95-76 so that’s what I entered. Another error, they wanted 309576.
• Next, the gift aid section. As far as I can work out there’s no point in filling this in unless you earn enough to get into the 40% tax band, (which I don’t) when you can claim some extra tax relief. Remember all those places you visited 18 months ago run by charities, who ask you to pay a small premium so they can claim back the gift aid? Did you make a note of it? No, so you have to estimate it.
• Almost finished. I noticed that the response time is dire, no doubt because everybody else is trying to do this on a Sunday evening. I dread to think what the response time will be as the deadline gets hours rather than weeks away.
• Last thing: the box for extra information. I wanted to tell them about the gift aid estimate. I also wanted to tell them about the two directorships I hold, neither remunerated, in case a smart official cross-references tax returns with information on file at Companies House. So I tell them all this, which takes up about half the space in the input box, and press next. And get a tax return update failure which lists the three possible reasons. None of which applies to me. So I log off and leave it to the morning.
• Logging on this morning the same thing happens. When I finally get through to the technical helpdesk, a very helpful Glaswegian suggests, almost immediately, that the reason was that my extra information exceeded 256 characters. Which it turns out was the problem. Not that there was anything about a limit on the form that I could see. Or a countdown of characters left.

Most of these are considerable annoyances but the last one is a showstopper. Anybody hitting this one as the deadline approaches could well go past it and incur the automatic £100 penalty. Don’t they test these things?

Roger and I had a wonderful holiday last spring, when we travelled to Shetland for the launch of White Nights, the second book in Ann Cleeves‘ Shetland Quartet. The book launch was just an excuse – the Northern Isles are beautiful, and I’d recommend anyone to make the trip.

And now Ann is offering everyone a chance to take a virtual trip to Fair Isle, not just by reading her books, but by being in them! She is conducting a charity auction, and the highest bidder will have their name (or that of a friend or relation nominated by them) used for a character in the last book of the quartet (set on Fair Isle, and currently entitled Homecoming Blues).

If you are interested, you can learn more about the auction on Ann’s web site. It is being held to raise money for Vaila’s Fund, set up to commemorate Vaila Harvey, who died of cancer last year, at the age of sixteen. Vaila and her sisters made an appearance in Raven Black, the first of Ann’s Shetland books, when one of the lead characters goes to their party. "Appropriate, I thought," says Ann, "because whenever we visited Liz and Paul and their daughters were home the house was full of people and laughter."

Shetland is beautiful, and more accessible than you would think. But for people who live on the islands, there’s still an extra hurdle to be crossed between you and the rest of the world – which makes travel more complicated and expensive. Vaila’s Fund will be used to help young Shetlanders of Vaila’s age to do what their contemporaries in the rest of Britain do, and to explore the world away from the islands.

One of the things I love about my job is that it brings me a regular supply of poems. Once a month, Ellen Phethean of Diamond Twig sends me her selection for the Poem of the Month. So my first task of the year was to "publish" a fresh new poem, aptly titled One morning…

There was good news on the poetry front at the end of the year, too: Flambard poet Peter Bennet appeared in two consecutive editions of the Guardian Review, whose very positive review was followed a week later by inclusion in the year-end roundup of reader recommendations.

I hope the coming year brings more good things to all our clients, and to all our readers, too!

It’s the season of ‘Year’s Best…’ features, and it seems that while we have been busy with other things, Véronique Tanaka’s Metronome has been chosen by New York Magazine as one of its Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2008.

There’s nothing unusual about interchange between comics and animated film – but Bryan Talbot’s frame by frame animation of Metronome is something quite exceptional, and Cornwell Internet is proud to host it.

Yesterday’s Technology Guardian led with an interesting article about picture agencies asking exorbitant fees from people whose web sites use their pictures without permission. The article makes it clear that in accusing the large agencies of bullying, it is not defending disregard of copyright. The objection is that the payments demanded are not proportionate to the fees that would be charged if the pictures were properly used, with permission; they are not even proportionate to the fines that might be imposed if the copyright breach went to court. The implication is that these are wild demands, issued in the hope that people will panic and pay up.

Part of the evidence for this is that in the majority of cases, the offending sites had been put together by small organisations with no real expertise, or even by volunteers. Most professional web designers – and that includes Cornwell Internet – know that copyright applies to the internet, and we take care to source our pictures legitimately. This can be frustrating: it isn’t always possible to find exactly what we need at a small fee or none, but professional fees can lift a site out of our customers’ budget.

We know about this from the other side of the coin, too, because the assumption that ‘if it’s on the web, it must be free’ does not just apply to pictures, and we sometimes have to contact people who have – sometimes with the best of intentions – reproduced one of a client’s (usually Julia Darling‘s) poems without permission. Yet copyright holders can be very generous if they are asked, and often agree to allow their words or pictures to be used for no more than an agreed acknowledgement. One project which really stretched Cornwell Internet’s skills was the adaptation of Valerie Laws’ poem Big Frocks which we commissioned for Durham Literature Festival in 2004: Valerie not only wrote us a wonderful poem, she also suggested accompanying visuals – and we were able to track down all the pictures we needed by asking permission of friends and strangers – and by rifling our own collection.

It is possible, then, to illustrate a web site without infringing anyone’s copyright; and I try to repay my debts indirectly, by making my own photographs available on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence which permits people to use them for non-commercial purposes, provided that I am properly credited, and that the pictures are not altered.

Which brings me to today’s conundrum. Coincidentally, while I was thinking about this, a request arrived in my in-box: would I allow one of my pictures to be used on the BBC’s GCSE Bitesize web site? Mostly I say ‘yes’ to these requests without a second thought: an organisation like The Folly Fellowship is very welcome to include my picture in its newsletter. But I was a little taken aback that the BBC doesn’t have the cash to pay for illustrations to its web site. I still want to abide by my existing Creative Commons licence, so, on reflection, what I will do is ask the BBC whether they think their proposal satisfies the terms of that licence.

And that’s what I will do right now…

We have discovered that PayPal have updated their code and have introduced an error which could inconvenience people who use PayPal to collect credit card payments for things they have sold. This post tells you how to work around it until PayPal correct the fault.

The problem is this: until 11 November, the payment notification emails that were sent to the merchant by PayPal whenever a customer bought something from them would say what they had bought. They currently do not give this information. In order to find out what you have sold, you now have to log on to your merchant account on the PayPal web site to find out.

PayPal have (at least in the developer forums) acknowledged that this is an issue and say “We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.” Obviously we regret this state of affairs but the solution is out of our control. I have tried to raise the issue in the specialist media in the hope that a little publicity might concentrate PayPal’s minds on this one.

I will keep you posted with developments.

Update: later that evening. The problem has now been resolved.

Maintaining web sites has its own particular satisfaction, and one day I’ll write about that. But there’s a particular buzz that comes from completing a site.

In a sense, of course, no web site is ever complete, though some are abandoned. A live site is a site under construction (which brings me back to that thought about maintenance). But there is a moment where the client approves the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes, and we can raise the curtain on a new site, and start inviting the public in. I’ve recently done this for two sites, and they couldn’t be more different.

Daniel Fox is the author of a new fantasy series. The first volume, Dragon in Chains will be published in the US in January. Since ‘Daniel Fox’ is the pseudonym of a British author, he has no plans to visit the US to promote his book, so it’s doubly important to have a web site which will do that job for him – but at present the book is not yet avaulable, and it’s difficult to say anything about the pseudonymous author! So the site is a single page, with plenty of room to grow.

SixSix Design is a design consultancy with a substantial portfolio of past work to show off, and the site has a complex structure – a main page leads to a set of menu pages which in turn lead to examples of SixSix’s services. Working with a designer is always stimulating, too – we have such very different strengths! The client’s graphics have to be converted into material which will work on the web, and attract hits from the search engines – but the resultant page is distinctive and visually striking.

I couldn’t ask for a better demonstration that the web is no place for a ‘one size fits all’ approach!

Beryl Nicholson writes from Albania:

As you will be back from your holiday, may I tell you about this beautiful evening in Tirana. It is so mild I am wandering around in short sleeves. All day the sky has been bright blue, and the sun shines every day.

So to business: I expect to go to the Tirana book fair towards the end of next month, always a stimulating event. Besides spending too much money, I wonder if I might make some useful contacts. Could you perhaps mention this to people you [and in some cases I] know who might be interested in having their books translated? Would it be useful to get details of potential publishers – chatting them up first – or does one give them contact information, web addresses, etc.? Don’t you have a blog or something? There is definitely a market here, small, but eager to read. The papers carry a lot of cultural news too. If this is just a mad idea, let me know, but if it is not, ditto.

Beryl is something of an expert on all things Albanian, not just the academic (though she is that too) but also the best internet cafés, where to eat, etc. and we’ll be passing on her offer to those of our clients and contacts we think might appreciate it. (If you think we’ve missed you out, do get in touch.)

Cornwell Internet returned from holiday, and plunged straight into the Durham Book Festival. Although we no longer sponsor the Festival, and no longer have any connection with the running of its web site, we still live in Durham and love books, so we would want to make the most of the Festival, quite apart from the number of events which involve our clients.

As a result, our first week home from holiday included two visits to Bishop Cosin’s seventeenth century library on Palace Green (to consider the past and present of the book as an object), a book launch by Vane Women, two separate readings by poets published by Flambard Press, a session organised by Mslexia at which Valerie Laws was one of the readers, and a Book Fair in the Town Hall.

The fair was small, but we were amused to see how many Cornwell Internet clients were present. Looking around the hall I counted Smokestack Books, Chaz Brenchley (selling his elegant ghost story anthologies, Phantoms at the Phil, Red Squirrel Press (who must win the prize for best sales technique!) and Diamond Twig (pictured above, in the place of honour in front of the hall’s spectacular fireplace).

It’s over a week since Cornwell Internet attended a gathering of the Northern Chapter of the Crime Writers’Association, and I’ve been meaning to write about it, because it was an interesting and enjoyable occasion. Crime writers have a reputation for being friendly, sociable people; they tend to say that they get rid of their violence and hostility in their books, and are all the nicer for it. (They say some very unflattering things about romance writers, who don’t have this outlet, but I don’t know how true they are). Certainly the Northern Chapter have a very sensible approach to their regular business meetings: they like to combine them with Sunday lunch.

This particular Sunday we lunched in very grand surroundings, at the Dunkenhalgh Hotel at Clayton le Moors, in Lancashire, in a small dining room known as "the Portrait Room", because the elaborate décor includes portraits set into cartouches – the sort of room the detective would have commandeered as his base in the traditional country house murder mystery.

It was an opportunity to meet people, among them Roger Forsdyke who organised the event (and will be organising the CWA’s 2009 conference), and very new CWA member Frances McNeil; and it was an opportunity to catch up with old friends, including Murder Squad members Margaret Murphy and Martin Edwards – and fortunately I don’t need to say any more about it, because Martin has written about it in his own blog – complete with a photo by Roger and a very flattering – and entirely unsolicited – plug for Cornwell Internet.