TheAtoB.com is an unconventional journey planner for The Tube (also referred to as London Underground). The main concept is that Tube users know from the start of their journey what carriage of the train to be on for their destination, so the exit is right in front of them, and they don’t waste time walking the length of the platform finding the way out.

Users can also find information about changing from one tube line to another for their journey.

Other features of the site include information for wheelchair access, what zone stations are in, where stations appear on The Tube Map by grid reference, maps of where Tube stations are and much more.

Daniel Bartosik of theopenworld.com said “I am delighted to have developed this site. It has taken two years of careful research and planning and now we’ve finally done it!”

“It’s been a real effort and by far the most complex site we have done to date. We hope though that our users find the information both helpful and informative to make their Tube journeys as quick as possible.”

The site is currently in beta whilst taking feedback and suggestions from users. Further modifications will be made during this time.

The Future

Daniel also added “TheAtoB.com is in beta at the moment and is only designed for PC use at this time, but we hope our users will be excited to hear that a mobile version of the site is already being developed”.

thetechangel.com looses it's Ws'

There are many reasons for this change:

1. “www” is redundant.
2. “www” is hard to say.
3. “www” is a waste of time to type or write.
4. Think about it. Did you read something cool at “www.thetechangel.com”, or did you read it at “thetechangel.com”
5. “www” is an old way of the Internet and just no longer needed.
6. You don’t use it when emailing someone i.e. someone@www.thetechangel.com, just someone@thetechangel.com.

This should make navigating to the site far easier.

For those with bookmarks / favourites, links from other sites and from email messages will automatically get redirected over to the non-www. site. It would however be helpful for those sites that do link with www. to update their links to reflect this change.

Regular users do not need do anything or change their settings.

The other reason for the change is that some people will type the URL without www. and will get an error message. Some of these will be annoyed, and some of them won’t even bother to add the www and instead go somewhere else. By doing this change thetechangel.com is helping to keep some web visitors.

In order to create individual identities for our international sites, we looked at all available ideas and options, and we have dedicated that sub-domain URLs is best. They are the following:-

• au.theopenworld.com
• ca.theopenworld.com
• ie.theopenworld.com
• us.theopenworld.com

Whilst no content is currently available on these web addresses other than the splash page, we will launch each dedicated site, in turn, over time, in the very near future.

theopenworld.com UK site will remain in its normal position of theopenworld.com.

It’s a very exciting change for us, and something that has long been on the drawing board for a while. Stay turned for more info!

New features have been added with immediate affect: RSS feeds, categories of news for each country that theopenworld.com serves, and a higher frequency of updates.

All previous updates have also been migrated over to here. However, to save time we have opted not to give each post from the past a title, just the date that it was originally posted.

But there is one final part to this move, and something that our regular users will notice straight away – we have a new look logo and top banner.

Enjoy!

Screenshot of thetechangel.com homepage

Why is this being done?

Originally theopenworldtechnician.com was housed under theopenworld.com. In 2005 it then broke away onto its own domain name and separate identity. As both theopenworld.com and theopenworldtechnician.com have now grown into significant enterprises, theopenworld.com media group decided to distinguish between two business and brands.

This means that starting in 2008, theopenworldtechnician.com site will be referred to and redirected over to thetechangel.com

“The good news this morning, and I am sure many people marked this in their calendars – the Blogberry is celebrating its first birthday. Over 130 articles (posts) have been written since the original back on Thursday, October 26th, 2006. The Blogberry now has on average 3 posts a week.

The better news is that more people than ever are reading it. In fact, despite having 380 customers in Central and West London, viewing figures for the contents of the Blogberry are much higher. Seven and half thousand [unique] users have viewed content here in the last 12 months from across the Globe.

But further to this, where these people coming from in the world. Obviously, the United Kingdom tops the list of countries viewing the site, however, nearly half of the World’s countries have paid a visit in the last 12 months at some point or another.

All in all, this Blog started out as an experiment, but has now grown into an important cornerstone of theopenworldtechnician.com business and I am delighted by the result.”

He had always been fascinated by the Internet and its potential. Whilst most websites were experiencing massive growth and over inflation, the schoolboy was quite happy to continue creating his site as a pastime.

In 2003, Daniel completed his studies and had already landed himself another job in radio media and journalism. At the time, Daniel had decided to discontinue working on theopenworld.com and decided to close the site. Daniel listed the domain for sale, however, the prospective buyer failed to pay and so he decided to keep and renew the domain name for another year.

It was only until 2004 that Daniel decided to leave media and return to doing IT support and reinventing theopenworld.com brand. On January 4th 2005 a new version of theopenworld.com was launched, and as a breakaway, he decided to move his technician business to a separate domain, but still very much incorporating theopenworld.com into this business.

The purpose of theopenworld.com was to make users digital lifestyles easier to understand, more informative, and more obtainable. Daniel had recognised that whilst younger generations where happy to absorb the Internet, demographics of 35 and up suggested otherwise.

Overtime, more features where added, in particular a search engine was created, bringing together some of the Internet’s most popular features: Google search, Amazon, iTunes and YouTube. A toolbar was created as well incorporating the quick search features of the search engine.

Today theopenworld.com celebrates its seventh year and continues to stride forward with the quality technologies that the Internet provides.

The rest, as they say, is history.

“It is finally here, and I am really chuffed by the result. A brand new squeaky clean website for theopenworldtechnician.com was uploaded late on Sunday night.

So what has happened here?

Well, for starters, the entire site has been re-coded from scratch. All the graphics have been changed. The only thing which has remained the same is the Blogberry, which was dealt with earlier in the month.

The Knowledge section has vastly been upgraded, with new additional tools and sections.

One small change, but I am sure some of you will notice it and query it, I have also decided to drop the ‘www.’ from the web address. It makes it easier and shorter to just enter theopenworldtechnician.com. Don’t worry, the old way will still work too.

A little trivia

Theopenworldtechnician.com actually began as a sub-site under theopenworld.com (parent company), before moving into its own domain. That was a little over 951 days ago now, and things have changed a lot.

Other than that, do explore the site.”

However, the rest of the site is still being worked on, and a separate announcement will be made when the site is complete – which will be sometime in the next ten days.

A couple of facts about Theopenworldtechnician.com’s Blogberry:

• The Blogberry has had over 111 postings and articles since it was started back in October 2006.
• The Blogberry’s most prominent pages are the Adobe Flash Fix for Windows Vista. The fix was amongst the very first of a series of solutions for Windows Vista users who were experiencing issues with Flash based sites, such as YouTube.

The new style is not the only change, further to the changes being done, the way that theopenworld.com sites are coded is also being changed, so that a far wider range of browser compatibility is achieved.

There is now also a new feature to theopenworld.net, a news blog, which is now up and running. The idea being that users can easily catch-up on news from all of theopenworld.com, thelexicon.com and theopenworldtechnician.com.