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Ahh yep have an Amazon Echo, love it 

If you haven't done it already ask "Alexa how many planets are there"  Kids love that one.

Saw demo'd recently at a meeting in London a Chinese Amazon clone called "Ling Long Ding Dong"  It's actually better than the Alexa and is hugely popular in China who seem to be way ahead of us in voice search queries!

Did a blog post all about voice search and the future if anyone's interested  
Its the end of the Search Engine (as we know it)

Anyone going to the SME 2017 event at the Birmingham NEC?

Shall be popping along on the Tuesday for a nose

Welcome aboard, what an interesting question!

I can only offer advice as an employer and from experience, versus being legally correct, but I tend to fined common sense can settle most issues. Few people genuinely want to go down the road of a tribunal.

The employees holiday entitlement will be written in black and white in their employment contract. As long as this conforms to the minimum legal entitlement, then I would put the responsibility of keeping track on holiday days on the employee. The company will obviously keep records, but this is primarily to manage resource as well as keeping track of employees entitlement.

If it was me, I would go in and have a 1-1 with her and explain your options, ie cancel 4 days, or if not possible, explain you are willing to allow authorised absence but it will be unpaid.

If she starts banging on about employee rights, then refer her to her contract and stated holiday entitlement. Depends how valuable an employee she is to you, and how she values her job. If she wants to start raising legal arguments, then that's hardly going to generate a friendly team atmosphere. 

Plan B, if she's very belligerent and you think the situation is going south, then accept it's your cock up, put stricter holiday controls in place then manage her out of the company as soon as possible  

If you are genuinely worried, the ACAS site is a good place to start: ACAS - Holidays

Now that's really worrying! That's like a professional chef recommending MacDonald's  

Wix is what it is, free  Personally I think it's awful, we get loads of listings with Wix sites and I haven't seen a good one yet.

If you have cracked wordpress, can't you stick with that? Gives you much more flexibility and looks much more professional.

Well went into the Coventry store last night and it was deserted. Once my daughter had spent her vouchers we went to the check out. Talking about the news, the girl on the checkout gave a smile and said it was nothing to with the UK and just affected a few stores in America.

Didn't have the heart to say that her parent company that has filed for bankruptcy 

It doesn't have to if you do it right, as i said in my earlier post:

...Basically you don't want to redirect your http website to your https one until Google has re-indexed all of your webpages as https, which is why I give the 6 month rule of thumb. This ensures any rankings you have (and therefore web traffic) is unaffected...

If you plan it well in advance and run HTTP & HTTPS in tandem then you won't see any drops or have any risk. Planning is critical. Those that have see drops in traffic have normally cut over too early or not planned or configured their sites correctly. 

Unfortunately most of us skim read which is human nature, which explains why a lot of these phishing mails work so well. It's only on closer investigation you suddenly realise 

A close shave 

Surprising headlines this morning, hearing Toys R Us has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US and Canada. Although it has said UK stores are trading as normal for now, I wouldn't sit on any vouchers or gift cards for too long!

I hope they manage to rescue the business, it's one of those industries that just isn't the same online. We've got lots of photos of our kids picking up teddy bears and giving them a cuddle, with their eyes on stalks looking at all the toys. How can you recreate that on Amazon?

Maybe a lot of parents simply let their kids find something they like, then actually buy online elsewhere. Pretty much what most of us do when it comes to kitchen appliances, but there is something magical about watching the kids spending their birthday money at Toys R Us. I know mine get excited about the prospect of the birthday trip to the nearest store and are now at the age where they prefer gift cards so they can choose their own presents.

We've actually got about £40 in gift cards as it was my eldest daughters birthday recently, so with today's news, will be heading down to our nearest branch after school today. Just in case!

If they do go out of business, it will be a shame. We had a large independent toy shop in our town which went bust last year, so that leaves Asda as our biggest toy shop where the kids can actually see and touch things.

Have you got any local toy shops near you or do you buy everything online?

Blimey, just sat and stared at this for 10 minutes!

C. Daughter