If you are in the UK you may have seen on the news the current going-ons at the Royal Mail. It looks like we are set for national strikes causing severe disruption to our postal service leaving a backlog of millions of letters and parcels. This could run on into the Christmas shopping period for this year.

With this part of the year being the busiest, and the predicted trend of ecommerce sales to increase, it could turn into a horrible situation with late parcels, and ones getting lost altogether. Even small items like budget photo takers are a risk. But there are a few ways to try and avoid problems for yourself.

• Place your orders in good time, don’t wait until the last deliveries can go out, order early in case the parcel gets lost, damaged or you have to return it.
• Try and have deliveries sent by a courier (such as TNT, Parcelforce, DHL, Interlink, Fedex etc) when possible. Thankfully a lot of electrical goods already are due to their size and value.
• Keep in contact with the company you have purchased from. Even if it is only a few days you may want to drop them a call simply enquiring when to expect delivery. It is good to know where you are at so complications can be spotted quickly.
• Logistically the bigger companies normally have better processes in place than smaller companies. So if possible you may want to purchase from someone like Amazon. Smaller businesses tend to be a lot more affected by postal strikes. We don’t like to encourage people to avoid small business (we are one ourselves!) but in this case it may save you a lot of time/hassle.

Finally just keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best! Or alternatively drag yourself around the horribly busy shops on a cold night. Ecommerce is great so don’t let the Royal Mail strikes put you off. And come the magical day you can play with that new quality high def video recorder with your family!

We have recently installed a new section on our website, it is a gadget directory listing websites similar to ours. It is currently empty so if you run a blog, forum or related service we welcome you to submit a link to help us build up the content.

The aim is for the directory to make Digitpedia even stronger allowing us to post more good quality articles for readers. It also gives other webmasters the opportunity to get a decent inbound link to their domain.

We don’t want any old rubbish submitted, only genuine websites with unique quality content.

Eagle-eyed Google users will spot a bigger font on the search engine’s front page text search box, and the ‘Google search’ and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ buttons that go with it. The move comes in a bid to get those using the site to put in longer search strings.

It’s one of the first changes to the search engine’s front page in more than a decade.

Text, as well as the suggestion lists, in the box are larger, although the page’s overall weight remains more or less the same. Google has copyright on the design of its front page, and received a patent for its design at the start of this month.

The change is likely to be welcomed by those who work on laptops, who generally have to grapple with smaller displays and smaller fonts.

The bigger search field has been installed across the site, and is used on the search engine’s results page as well.

But if the larger Google search page is not to your liking, you can just make the font smaller by hitting the Control and ‘-‘ keys at the same time.

The company says in its blog: “This is a simple idea, but we’re excited about it because it symbolises our focus on search, and makes our clean, minimalist homepage easier and more fun to use.”

The blog adds: “Google has always been first and foremost about search, and we’re committed to building and powering the best search on the Web — now available through a super-sized search box.”

Additional reports say changes are being made to some versions of Firefox as well.

Some users are not seeing the change yet, since Google pores over every little change it makes, to assess how well the adjustment has been received, and it appears that this is what is happening now. Equally, changes are very thoroughly tested before being put into place.

And while the change may seem minor, given that millions of people use Google every day, any alteration, however apparently trivial, is bound to make the news.

Google may says its search engine is its priority, but it’s also been exploring beyond search to things like online advertising and payment processing, digital book processing, web browser software, mobile operating systems and applications, and is even working to develop new solar technology.

As to whether bigger really does mean better for most Googlers, only time will tell.

If you haven’t heard of them yet they are called the Pirate Party, the photo on the left is the leader Rick Falkvinge. They already have seats in Sweden and Germany and have now docked their boat on British shores by officially registering in the UK and they plan to run in the next general election.

What do they stand for? They have three policies; reform patent & copyright law, ensure real freedom of speech and also end excessive surveillance that currently goes on.

Instead of just winning seats (we all know how hard it is for small parties) they want to try and have an impact to a level that forces the main parties to adopt the Pirate Party policies so change can really happen, and relatively quick.

One thing they could do is appeal more to the youth, given they are the ones at the front of technology usage and they are likely to understand the party more than people in the older age groups. The percentage of people who actually vote is still woefully low with many youngsters making up the non-voters. So this would be a benefit for the system.

The party also has plans to run in the next European election and no doubt we will hear more about them before the UK elections, so watch out for them.

Source: ITpro. Image: komponisto