A while ago I needed to write some code which would automatically recognise a URL in plain text, and turn it into a hyperlink.  Being a lazy sort, I turned to Google, and found this article on DevX.  The regular expression it gave there was not perfect, but worked reasonably well:

\w*[\://]*\w+\.\w+\.\w+[/\w+]*[.\w+]*

At the time, I was sufficiently rushed off my feet that I forgave its flaws and implemented it.  Over time, however, it’s been bugging me, and as the service it’s implemented on gets more traffic, so the need to improve it has become greater.  And so it came to pass that this evening I bit the bullet and tried to write a better one.  After a couple of hours of testing various permutations, here it is (after the jump):

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, it is a thing of beauty.  But before you copy and paste it into your auto-hyperlinking code, it seems only fair that I break it down into its constituent parts, so you know what you’re getting yourself into.

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

\w+:// means ‘one or more word characters, followed by ‘://’.  I took the deliberate decision that if people wanted a hyperlink, they were going to have to prefix it with the protocol and ‘://’ to give us a heads-up.  I suppose I could have looked out for ‘www’ and two more word groups, separated by full stops (periods for our readers in the US), but since the easiest way to create a link is to copy and paste from the address bar, I figured that this was OK.  It’s not like everyone uses the www prefix, anyway. And it keeps the regex from being truly horrendous.

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)* means ‘one or more word characters, optionally followed by any number of  full-stops-and-words’ (from now on, my use of the term ‘word characters’ includes hyphens).  Basically, this takes care of the domain.  Crucially, if you have a full stop you have to follow it with some word characters.  This avoids the biggest flaw with the original regular expression; namely that full stops at the end of the URL were being counted as part of it, when they should be ignored.

 \w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

(:[0-9]+)? means ‘a colon, then one or more digits, can occur zero or one time’. Essentially, this allows a port number to be specified if required.

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

[/\w-]* means ‘any combination of forward slashes and word characters. This takes care of any directories or filenames after the domain.

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

(\.[\w-]+)* means ‘a full stop, followed by one or more word characters or hyphens’.  This looks after the extensions of any file names matched in the previous step, once again ensuring that it doesn’t match any trailing full stops.

\w+://[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?[/\w-]*(\.[\w-]+)*([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)?

([#\?]+[\w-\?=\+%\&]*)? is good fun, meaning ‘a hash or question mark, optionally followed by any combination of word characters, hyphens, question marks, equals, plus and percentage signs, and ampersands’. You are only allowed these additional characters if you use the preceding # or ? meaning that you can use them in querystrings or named anchors, but nowhere else.

So, one regex to rule them all.  I’ve probably missed something, so let me know how you get on.

Check out my tasty simulation after the jump.

I say ‘apparently’ unnecessary because I can’t quite bring myself to believe that Google would add something so frivolous, that slows down the browsing experience, for no reason.

I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal – They added a fade effect?  My god, man; these power-mad fools must be stopped! – but it is.  The great thing about Google is that it is one of the purest examples of simple and effective functionality around.  Almost everything they do is simultaneously very powerful and absurdly easy to use.  Google Maps, Analytics and Docs spring instantly to mind, and that leaves aside Google’s core mind-blowing ability to search through tens of billions of documents in sub-second times.

It just seems kind of erratic.  Like your dad ditching his U2 CD collection, buying an iPod and downloading Jay-Z’s back catalogue, you sort of stand to one side looking bemused, wondering when normal service will be resumed.  Perhaps it an elaborate joke, or the first step in a hitherto unforeseen master plan that will soon become clear.  I hope so, because the other possibility is that it’s the start of a longer downward trend that ends with a red convertible and regrets all round.

This was brought home to me recently when I was drawing up a proposal for a client who plans to set up a new business networking group, or more accurately, a network of networking groups.  Our M.O. involves a lot of upfront business analysis, so it was clear that the optimum solution involved much more than a simple website with some card payments for bookings.

The business model involved 6-8 groups, each with 20-30 members attending a monthly meeting.  ‘Directors’ would be recruited to run each one, in return for a percentage of the profits.  Visitors would also be welcome; the incentives to pay for membership would include a reduced meeting fee, inclusion in an online business directory, and access to a private members forum.

My proposal had the web-based software running everything, from the regions containing the groups, down to an automatic reminder when people’s memberships were due to expire.  Members and visitors would be able to buy online, and members could amend their directory listing as required.  Directors could log in and view their delegate lists, and the system would calculate their commission each month.

A ‘back-of-an-Excel-sheet’ calculation showed that if they managed to fill 6 groups with 20 members, they’d make about £38K a year after venue fees and directors’ commission.  The cost of writing the software from the ground up came to just under £12,500; a third of their profits in their first full year.  Another way to look at it; if the website convinced 40 new members to sign up, it would have paid for itself.

I’m still not sure if they will go ahead with the system as specified or will ask us to chop out a lot of functionality in order to bring the price down.  The essential elements are the member directory, a payment option for visitors, and the forum – these things directly or indirectly bring in money. 

All the other things, such as membership payments, meeting and attendee management, director access, commission reporting and  membership reminders could be handled manually.  These are the things, of course, that will help the business to scale; for example, if members can sign up and pay online, you could double (or treble/quadruple) the membership without needing more staff to proccess them.

This is where we get back to the idea that websites reward ambition, because our £12,500 system would work equally well with 60 groups, each with 30 members (profit: £540K), or even 600 groups with 40 members each (profit: £7million).

I’ve seen our WebShop software turn over £10,000 for one client and £400,000 for another; the difference in the price they paid us was negligible.

That’s why my current focus is on finding ambitious clients who put the web at the centre of their plans.  They see that a really good site may cost them nearly as much, or maybe more, than an employee for a year, but that a) they only have to pay once, and b) their site can work harder than a human ever could.

So far, we’ve found several clients whose plans we could turbo charge with a hard-working website:

• The cruise holiday specialist whose site processes 60,000+ data items every day
• The sales recruiter who needed 40+ industry-specific sites to publicise different jobs
• The global travel network who needed social networking tools to facilitate communication between local experts and travellers
• The ultrasound manufacturer who needed a multi-lingual CMS to map the different products, technologies and applications they work with.
• The teacher training company whose website takes booking and manages their trainers – and who now have three times as many trainers as they did when we redeveloped their site

If you’d like to be added to the list, and have a cunning plan that involves the web, feel free to get in touch and see if we can help.

Russel McPhee, a stroke victim paralysed for 20 years, has been able to walk again after injections of Botox. Apparently, Botox is comonly used to treat the muscle stiffness experienced after a stroke, but usually shortly after the episode, not two decades later.  The difficulty is that Botox relaxes the stiffness, but also the muscle tone, which makes controlling the newly relaxed muscles very difficult.

But here’s the bit that really grabbed me:

Crucially, Mr McPhee had repeatedly, over the years, attempted to get out of his wheelchair and stand on his own.

He was not successful, managing at most a few seconds on his feet before he collapsed.

“Often I would lie on the floor for hours, just hoping that someone might drop by so they could pick me up again,” he said.

Those repeated, heart-breaking attempts to stand built up a core muscle strength on which his doctors and physiotherapists were able to work.

This is a guy who simply refused to give up.  Even though bitter experience, built up over 20 years, must have told him that attempting to stand unaided would lead to failure, that walking was impossible, he never stopped trying. This immense willpower, sheer bloody-mindedness really, meant that when modern medicine came up with the tools to unlock his body, he had the core strength to make the most of it, and finally walk again.

In a nutshell: for the past 72 years, a sample of 268 men have been followed and their entire history - medical, familial, physical, emotional, mental - recorded in great depth.  The study is coming to end, mainly because only half of the original group are still alive, and they are in their late eighties.  It has a huge amount to teach us about how our lives shape our personalities, and vice versa.

The Grant Study, as it was called, took its sample from Harvard, and ended up including politicians, best-selling novelists and even one president (you’ll have to read the article to find out who).  However, not everyone was a success; far from it.  The study, then, was able to reveal some insights into what makes for a happy, healthy life, and how those things may vary at different stages.

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80.

What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”

There’s much more to it than simple ‘healthy living’ advice though (even the “happy-well” subjects were not uniformly content).  It is ultimately a meditation on the distance between the life you want and the life you get, and the success – or otherwise – of this group of men in dealing with that gap.

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays.

Sadly, it’s all downhill from there; The Telegraph have a story about migrating salmon being used to generate electrivity, while The Times can only manage this tame effort.  They are joking, right?

UPDATE: The Guardian’s efforts just keep getting better and better…

This time, she targets onscreen mothers who are in reality only a few years older than the actors playing their sons.  The classic example is Alexander; Angelina Jolie, playing the mother, is just one year older than Colin Farrell, her ’son’, but others include The Graduate (OK, not his mother exactly) and North by Northwest (strangely overlooked in the article).

However, sadly Hadley sticks a pin in her argument when she cites Back to the Future (Lea Thompson/Michael J Fox) and Forrest Gump (Sally Field/Tom Hanks); two terrible examples.  In both films, the actresses are required to play younger women for a period, during which time their sons (if they have any) are played by children.

It has apparently not occurred to Hadley that if the film covers an extended period of time (say, 30+ years) you’ll need an actress who can convincingly play young as well as old.  Since it’s much easier to age an actor using makeup than it is to reverse the effect, a younger actress was always going to be the way to go.  

With her argument deflating like a faulty lifejacket, Hadley starts thrashing around in a sea of tired ideas, eventually returning to the familar love-interest angle: “Isn’t it a bit creepy how some actors date much younger women?  Jack Nicholson and Woody Allen, I’m looking at you.”  Apparently Jack Nicholson’s average age gap with his onscreen lovers is 16.7 years – although given that he is pushing 72, this is not so vast in percentage terms (like a 36 year old guy dating 28 year old girl).

The problem with this argument is that last year a number of films started to turn the tide, from blockbusters like Mamma Mia! (starring a 59-year-old Meryl Streep and her three younger lovers – Colin Firth is 11 years her junior) to heavyweight fare like The Reader, dealing with a relationship across a 15 year age gap, where Kate Winslet is the elder party.

Sadly, instead of hailing these brave, yet sensible, casting choices, Hadley ignores them in favour of slating films from previous decades.  She’s the master when it comes to fashion journalism, but I think her film-related commentary desperately needs a makeover.  Ba-boom tish!

The first thing to acknowledge is that making your website work harder is a pretty inexpensive thing to do, all things considered.  We approach all of our clients with the same question: What do you need?  If we can deliver the perfect solution for hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, we will.  Our overriding mission is to build a long-term trusted partnership with all our clients.

Second, many of the new customers contacting us have been aware for months, or even years, that their website was a weak link in their marketing strategy, but had not got round to fixing it while the work was flowing in. When you sense that things might be about to dry up, it makes you even more sensitive to the things that are hindering you in the marketplace, and for a lot of people their website was a ‘tick in the box’, somewhere between getting business cards printed and placing an ad in the Yellow Pages.  Those sort of sites simply won’t do any longer.

Finally, there is an appreciation that the web is an increasingly large part of people’s lives, that decisions about the quality of your company are made based on the quality of your website, and that a poor website can do real damage to your business.  If your customers are spending more time researching the options, and less time spending their money, where are they doing that research?  Overwhelmingly, they will be checking out the options online, so it is essential that you can compete in that environment.

In amongst all this has been the realisation that we need to be a proactive part of our customers’ web strategy; a trusted partner that they can rely on to guide them through the many possibilities the web offers.  This takes time, something that I was short on in the latter part of 2008, while we grew our customer based and delivered some exceptional websites.

So, the logical conclusion was to hire another developer.  Not just any developer, of course; ideally I’d like to have cloned myself (!) but actually the opportunity arose to hire a better, more experienced developer than me.  I jumped at the chance, and on Monday 19th January 2009 we welcomed the latest member of the team to PM Towers: Derek Sorensen.

Derek has already made himself invaluable, writing back-end code for our two biggest projects, which have to pull in data from a number of different providers and turn them into something sensible.  I’m very excited to have him on board, and to see the difference that a first-class developer can make to a development team.

If you have a business challenge that would benefit from a web based solution, give us a call on 01908 239971; we now have an even bigger development team to help deliver exactly the solution you need.

Figure 1: Initial A4 Page

Now, Word has what looks like the perfect option; the ‘Pages per Sheet’ dropdown in the Print dialog box.

Figure 2: Print dialog with 2 pages selected

Trouble is, if you pick this option, what you get is this:

Figure 3: A5 page, but only one on A4

No problem, you think, I’ll just choose 2 copies in the print dialog.  Unfortunately, what this gives you is two copies of Figure 3; you don’t get the two A5 copies side by side, but on two bits of A4 paper, with the same wasted space on the right.

At this point you probably bite the bullet and copy your A4 page onto another page, so your source document is now two pages long, page two being a duplicate of page one.  This is less than ideal because any subsequent changes will have to be made to both pages, increasing the risk of errors creeping in, and also wasting valuable time.

Figure 4: Two separate A4 documents

There is a better way! My method uses just one A4 page, so any changes need only be made once. All you need to do, in the Print dialog box, is change the ‘Page Range’ from All to Pages: 1,1. Remember to keep ‘Pages per Sheet’ set to 2.

Figure 5: Print dialog with custom page range selected

VOILA! Your A4 page is now perfectly printed as 2 A5 pages, side by side on a single A4 sheet.

Figure 6: Two A5 copies on a single A4 sheet