I figured it was time for another Excel tutorial. This time I’m looking at the IF function. IF is really just like it would be in a sentence. If A=B then “something”, else “something else”. The syntax is :

=if(logical_test,value_if_true,value_if_false)

Check out the video for more.

It’s Sunday morning in the Perkins household. My wife, Natalie, is fast asleep still after having a nightmare (should I be sharing that? Oh well) and I’m pondering the future of my website. As you might remember, I moved my blog to http://www.nicholasperkins.com/blog/ a few week ago, and there was a reason for this.

Recently I’ve been working with Drupal a lot. I worked on getting Natalie’s new portfolio site up and looking awesome (if I do say so myself). Drupal is not really a CMS, although it can be used as one. Drupal is more of  framework that gives web developers the tools to create very complex sites without having to hand code thousands of lines of PHP.

In the case of Natalie’s site, I still needed to hack into some of the modules code, wrote a few lines of customer PHP database lookups to create the dynamic sub-menu and a few other bits and bobs. What I didn’t need to do is create an entire CMS from scratch. When I wanted to have a new content type for her portfolio images, I didn’t need to design the database structure and code the posting and editing and whatever else functions. Drupal just made it happen.

So I’m now considering moving my blog across to Drupal as part of a larger site redesign. I’m currently looking at creating a main website for my Excel and PHP development business, which is why I moved the blog. It will be a few months before I have the design and content ready to go up though, but that gives me plenty of time to get Drupal into shape.

What I am wondering is whether I should transfer my blog into Drupal and away from Wordpress.

Wordpress is probably the best blogging software I have ever used. The interface is clean and easy to use, the plugin and themes are so easy to install, configure and “just work”. When I helped Natalie with http://www.axisoffat.com/ (it’s on Drupal as well) I wondered if it was really the best option. It did work out in the end but it required more fluffing around to get it to work just the way we wanted it to.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on both Drupal and Wordpress, but also any other CMS/Framework solutions you have used. The decision on what I use for my own site is critical. Whatever I choose I will have to work closely with and become and expert at using and modifying as required so that I can offer similar services to my clients.

Ben Grubb over at It News has reported that Exetel is planning on banning P2P use (that is Bittorrent, Limewire, Kazaa (does that even exist still?), etc) during their off-peak period. I’m not surprised that John Linton, the founder and CEO of Exetel is considering such drastic measures, however I was concerned for my ability to download Linux ISOs at night. (Yes, all P2P is Linux ISOs — didn’t you know?)

At the beginning of this month, our off-peak time was trimmed from 12am-12pm to 2am-12pm. This was to stop a phenomenon that would basically kill the entire Exetel network at midnight. People just have to have that latest Linux ISO at 12:01am so start all of their downloads at the very start of off-peak. No worries, except people who wanted to browse web pages, use VOIP or do anything else suffered.

As John has mentioned many times over on his blog, most downloads would be finished by 12:30am or 1am and the network would be back to normal speeds. Despite years of trying to fix it, nothing worked.

This was a great cost to Exetel, who would continue to try different ways to combat this, including a P2P cache, asking for downloaders to be fair and push back their downloads and purchasing a ton of bandwidth they didn’t need except for that half hour. Seems this new tactic worked. So since most souls are in bed by 2am, they bit the bullet and moved off-peak back.

So what about the threat of banning all P2P during off-peak? Well this would only be after November, and only after they move back to a 12am-12pm off-peak period. And only if you choose that period over 1am-1pm or 2am-2pm. And it’s only banned during the first two hours. And it’s self-regulated.

A whole lot of ands really.

So I can have 60Gb of downloads over half of the month, and I either avoid P2P for two hours (which I was doing anyway voluntarily after a request another previous post from John) or move my off-peak to 2am-2pm, which since we are late risers would help us out anyway. Woah, I better get the tin foil hat out.

I still find Exetel to be extraordinary value. They usually have good service, and if it is bad they will be upfront and admit their issue. They aren’t for the faint hearted, as you have to know your stuff well and live with a support culture expecting you to find your own help in the forums, but if you can live with that you will get more from them than your regular ISP.

Free SMS from the web, they do email to fax and fax to email ($1 a month – wtf?), and more. I love them. I really do.

Have you ever had a spreadsheet with 150 lines of data and you need to know how many times “Red” appears in a cell? The COUNTIF function in Excel is for you. Here is a run through of how you can use this in your spreadsheets.

Welcome to my first, of hopefully many, tutorial on how to use Excel’s SUMIF() function. My first ever YouTube video too – how very geeky. This function works the same in both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.