Six-figure sledges

As the year closes and the snow melts across the UK leaving the winter detritus, Callisti can reflect on an interesting 2010 and look forward to 2011. One milestone was the sledges online shop breaking the six-figure record turnover for the December, a far cry from when Callisti first took over management of the website - a lot of snow certainly helps. New possibilities have emerged as a result of the improved online presence heralding some business developments in the years to come.

JBA seed potatoes has grown significantly and is scaling up in terms of hosting and development requirements - Callisti has acted as a nursery for the ecommerce site, bringing it from a catalog website to the number one seed potato ecommerce site in the UK,  but with the new ranges of domestic and merchant services, a new strategy for hosting and development is required - Callisti will likely offer specialist support in 2011 with other support services being provided to ensure the most stable solution.

One difficulty for small operators is the balance between specialisation and broad adaptability for the range of potential clients. Do you concentrate on hosting services and volumes? Or specialise in one particular development platform? 2011 will be a year for new decisions...

A toe in the waters of Drupal

The Braidwoods website provides a selection of property in Dumfries and Galloway and Callisti is pleased to be able to help with their website hosting requirements. This is one of a growing number of Drupal content-managed websites on the books.

The website is updated by Braidwoods staff with properties for sale for which they act as estate agents. The property details display the schedule as a web page but also include a print-friendly option.

Welcome to the world of cron jobs...

The Albany Group

The Albany UK website has a soft launch period at the moment so we'll be monitoring how the site stands up with some top-heavy scripts. There are some known issues with Internet Explorer 8 and the Featured Content Gallery so this may be reviewed depending on feedback.

The website is a bespoke design update to the previous site and includes Ipix and Flash virtual tours, press-releases, past and present property projects, modal contact form, textured navigation, search engine friendly urls, interactive slideshow and image carousel, and information about the team.

Based on a wordpress CMS with lots of template editing and updates to functions.php

This represents more Callisti endeavours for The Creative 6 in London

Thanks to this useful mime types work.

Ipix - where are they now

If you're trying to display Ipix virtual tours on a Windows 2003 Server with IIS6 and get a "file access error" error, remember...

Go into the Properties of the website in IIS Manager

Select the HTTP Headers tab

Select MIME Types

Select New

For Extension, enter .ip

For MIME Type, enter application/x-ipx

Thanks to this blog

Smartermail 5.5 ClamAV log files (Revised)

You may need a file unlocker for this...

Just when you thought you had all your log files under control so they didn't expand to take up all available disk space we discovered that the SmarterMail + ClamAV combo had a bug which was writing temporary locked files to a folder on the Windows 2003 server c:\ drive.

%ProgramFiles%\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Service\Clam\tmp

Also the folders would show as 0 bytes when in reality they could be using up to 50MB of disk space so you may have noticed a discrepancy between reported disk size and available space.

If possible, stop all SmarterMail and ClamAV services, or other processes that may be using the files, then use file unlocker to move the files to a more appropriate place (or delete the files)

LeaveTemporaryFiles No*

*(don't know if this really works - files seem to appear and disappear but after a while a few get left behind)

can be added as a new line to clamd.conf

in %ProgramFiles%\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Service\Clam\etc

to prevent the temporary files being kept after use, but you have to ensure that the \Clam\etc folder and all contents are not set to read-only and that the required users (e.g. System, Administrator, etc.) have full permission to modify/write (and delete) files.**

**not an elegant way of doing it and doesn't work properly - Eminent South of Scotland Coder provided a simple batch file example to be used with Windows Task Scheduler which is more effective.

At least that's the theory for now... ***

*** The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Snow revisited

Quick thanks to the team at PowerDNN (now with a UK presence) after an online support session for sledges.co.uk. The legacy DotNetNuke installation is at an impasse with the version of ASPDotNetStoreFront and issues arise, unsurprisingly when the website is being hammered with online sales. Thankfully the website was only offline for a few minutes...

Snow forecast

The perennial threat of winter snow has sent the Sledges website sales on a rocket this month. This website is due an overhaul and Callisti will be working with the Glenmore Mountain Shop team to develop a staff- and user-friendly website and interface in 2011 when the madness subsides.

ClamAV (ClamWin) on Windows servers

Heads up from SmarterTools, provider of SmarterMail server software: recent ClamWin update causing some Windows files to be quarantined and seriously affected Windows servers.

Callisti tip: check ClamWin settings are set to report issues without quarantining or deleting so that the server administrator can review any files before taking action.

More info...

Flip off

We are experimenting with ways of presenting a wedding brochure or album of images on Comlongon Castle gallery using the FlippingBook plug-in for wordpress (2.5 or above). There is a developer/pro licence or a site-by-site licence so could well consider it as an option.

Persits persists

Ha, it turns out Heart Internet's shared Windows servers do have ASP Upload (Persits.Upload.1) installed.

But you can also try Free ASP Upload if you're looking for a license-free version to muck about with.

Post production video services

Gently trying to improve relevant content for a video post-production services website to improve Google Adwords quality score.

The website is built using flash so providing readable content is the challenge. Some of the original quality scores for seemingly relevant keywords were like 3/10 which is not good enough. Directing the Ad link to the relevant page containing richer content can help improve advertising budgets significantly.

In this case a simple jQuery script is used to toggle content

areas.

Hammock the week

After convoluted development process using Actinic v9, Handmade Hammocks website is now refreshed and taking advantage of some Kit Allen design work and integration with google services.

The ecommerce website sells handmade hammocks that meet Fairtrade standards to meet the prinicples of ethical trading. The company is based near Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and ships internationally

Callisti has gained a lot of experience working with the nuances of Actinic development from different locations, development by remote access, and all the joys of site exports, missing files, huge folders of backup files, cgi-bin dramas, incompatible server platforms, and payment gateway issues. The reward is a sweet-looking ecommerce site that now has more SEO potential for the new season, and a clean working environment after some thorough administration work.

Documentation for NextGen Gallery plug-in...

...could be improved.

Luckily, Vuthy Thorn (a Bostonian living in Los Angeles) has given a good run-down on how to use the NExtGen album and galleries feature within the popular Wordpress plug-in. The explanation and guide also gives some insight to Wordpressers into the 'logic' of the system which aids understanding.

Separate Wordpress sub-pages are created for each gallery within an album using the NextGen interface and the main album display can sit on the parent page.

See the Comlongon Castle wedding photos for a working example.

Shared hosting

Using a reseller account to provide web hosting has the advantage of a control panel, the use of which can be learned. This may seem trite but it is important to have some kind of stable and consistent platform that is easily documentable, allows for more experienced clients to update their own hosting preferences within defined parameters, provides broad monitoring data on bandwidth usage and disk storage, and is scalable at lower risk to client website uptime.

Something to do with horses and courses.

It is clear that the needs of clients aren't always best served by dedicated hosting solutions when budget is a factor in providing expedient service.

Electric boogaloo

...Newspeep...

This October, Callisti welcomes Dumfries and Galloway musical performers Boogaloo to the new hosting service on offer. A customised 'website baker' website inherited from the old Digitl legacy with scope for some fine-tuning and modernisation.

...End Newspeep...

Property maintenance in Dumfries

The Ewart Property Maintenance website was created using a customised wordpress template from thebookofblog.com to provide a simple, navigable website describing property services in Dumfries and Galloway, extending to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle and Newcastle.

This was not heavily marketed but concentrated on onsite SEO and xml sitemaps to give the content some foundation that could be developed when required. Happily the client is reporting that business is being generated by the site's presence so it is wiping it's own bum or washing it's own face, depending on your idiomatic preference.

Youtube takeovers

Having fun with appearance and reality. These are entertaining advertisements stemming from the WariolandShakeIt youtube takeover in 2008...

Tippex - this must have been fun filming for the various probable range of outcomes users would have suggested - the 404 error raises a smile. Good use of takeover techniques.

Expendables - the comments text has degraded a bit in the image used but the promotional interview for the 2010 movie is still worth a chuckle.

Old Spice (especially amusing are the youtube replies to various tweets and diggs, etc) - more of a character build up using the actor Isaiah Mustafa, a former wide-receiver in the NFL.

Pay as you go e-marketing

A strong 5 out of 5 from Callisti to Contact Multimedia's E-marketing services, yet again. An agricultural client has recently launched a successful subscriber-based campaign to update customers on seasonal offers and pre-ordering for 2011 to a great response.

Contact Multimedia's account based system lets you set up campaigns with great ease, using a pre-designed existing html webpage and an easy to use interface so you know where you are in the process at any given time. You can send test emails to make sure everything appears correctly before committing to scheduling the mailshot. Great stuff.

Calenderifornication

The events calendar on dg Arts homepage arose out of some ics file experimenting with The Events Calendar (Wordpress Plug-in), Google Calendar ics feed import, and ICS Importer plug-in (which basically brings the feed back into the Wordpress system and outputs it in a much customised calendar.

This will update automatically to include new events as they are added by dg Arts staff. New events are automatically included in ics feed and on the website events page. The ics feed updates the dg Arts public Google Calendar which feeds back to the calendar on the website every few hour by supplying an external ics URL.

There's life in the old Fasthosts server yet

Fun weekend's wouldn't be complete without several hours tweaking fasthosts dedicated servers to improve client website performance. Thanks again to the region's Bespoke Coder for sharing time, skills and tips.

The fun menu included optimising .NET application pools, defragmenting the drives, going through the event logs, removing or disabling unnecessary services and resource hogs, installing or re-installing software to improve the mail-server, updating web-config files to cut out the .NET proxy problem so scripts could access the web-server faster, updating log file settings so as to not fill up the C:\ drive, and that sort of thing.

Now the original Callisti server performing with some gusto, given its modest technical specification. However, it won't stop the server upgrade plan...

The server is leased from Fasthosts but nearly all of the Matrix control panel and Matrix services are bypassed to help improve performance and control.

Identify yourself

This is very handy for getting a flickr id using only the friendly profile name.

Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival is in fallow mode just now so we'll be reviewing how to improve the site for the 2011 festival.

 

Current changes have brought the flickr image feed into where the flash feature used to be, until next year's events and highlights are confirmed. The external blog has been replaced with the less formal twitter feed as this is updated more regularly at this time of year.

There are also some articles on how to get involved with the arts festival in various capacities.

London property on sale in Singapore

The London apartments at West Heath Place are now being marketed by HRL Properties with an exhibition on 2nd and 3rd of October 2010 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore.

Time to serve websites by geographical region. Server location less important but registering the correct domain extension can require residency or registering through an agency in that country. Also serving content in the same language is duplication but it's not clear if this is relevant when each audience would only be able to access one site.

DG Arts soft launch

The Dumfries and Galloway Arts (formerly Association) website is now in soft launch mode. This is another partnership project with weesleekit who provided the design creative.

We met with DGA(A) during the tender process and were able to present a unified case to develop the new site. The booking system for arts events links up to the Patronbase system with booking to take place on the patronbase server.

This was built using a substantially customised Wordpress 3.0 engine and it is a good way to learn the strengths and limitations of the new Blog/CMS system.

XML Sitemap generator for Wordpress

This is an excellent XML sitemap generator tool by Arne Brachhold and is listed on the Google XML sitemap code pages.

It is a free plug-in for Wordpress and is tested and compatible up to version 3.0.

There are easy to toggle on/off controls depending on how you want to include or prioritise your pages, and the tool automatically submits to the major search engines (although you need an API key for Yahoo) when you update your Wordpress posts.

You can also manually generate and submit the XML sitemap if necessary.

DVD transcoding

A client provided a DVD of some video footage to submit to the Youtube channel that accompanies the website, but extracting and processing the video wasn't as straightforward as first imagined.

 Throw away the PC and use Handbrake (0.9.4) for the Mac OS X and they put it best...

There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.

It was a straightforward, quick (relatively) and easy to use resource which prompted a VLC update to make sure everything worked out ok. Lots of default presets for output devices and purposes but allows a codec-minded transcoder to tweak as required.

Bit of a cocktail message theme going on suggesting that alcohol and computers do mix. Callisti disagrees.

Queen visits Dumfries

Yes she did.

Just playing around, playing around

Wordpress 3.0 is still a bit of a playground so some things are being tried out on the Dumfries bed and breakfast site...

Trying out a few plugins, and some of the features of the framework. There is a new php file in the template called loop.php which is an advance from 2.9 - this could probably be streamlined a bit though.

Fixing Macs

Ever get that problem with a MacBook Pro when you plug headphones into the headphone socket and when you take them out the built-in speaker volume is disabled?

Sound emanates on start up but even once boot up is complete, System Preferences shows a greyed out box for volume. Until you plug the headphones back in again.

Solution in this instance:

1. Think logically, study symptoms in relation to the whole
2. Observe processes without panic
3. Check user forums and apple support
4. Inevitably try the Command-Alt-P-R but to no avail
5. Skoosh WD40 in the headphone socket and wiggle a stick in it

Possible inference:

A bit got stuck in the socket when the headphones were in. Agitation and lubrication managed to unstick it.

Advisory note:

Use USB headphones in future

Property is nine tenths

This London apartment property website is now live. Featuring flash image maps of the apartments by floor level, special loops to show the various apartment plans, virtual tours of the show apartment and lots of shiny brochure images.

As time goes on the apartments will be marked sold or reserved so website visitors will be able to see at a glance which apartments are available.

The proximity to Hampstead Heath in northwest London is an attraction which may well be reflected in the property prices...

CMS a la Wordpress 3.0

Well, it's here and there are some significant improvements...

Allan McNish starts the Le Mans 24 Hours

Dumfriesshire born Allan McNish starts the Le Mans 24 Hours in 6th position, 3rd row on the starting grid. Race starts at 2pm (BST) on Saturday 12th June, 2010...

Wholesale seed potato merchants

Jamieson Brothers now have a merchant website for wholesale supplies of Scottish seed potatoes. This is database driven with use of php and asp scripts to control content display and user account features, and was developed in partnership with the prodigious Kit Allen.

This runs in conjunction with the "JBA Direct" website that is geared towards selling seed potatoes to domestic customers in the UK.

The wholesale site has been built specially for garden centres, allotment societies and other seed potato merchants so that they can benefit from trade prices when they buy seed potatoes in bulk quantities.

NextGen Gallery again

The existing Comlongon Castle website image gallery module was struggling to cope with the volume of images so it was time to employ a Wordpress installation with the renowned NextGen gallery plug-in to help organise the photos into themed galleries (AJAX pagination) with slideshow and piclens options.

This is to be achieved using an alternative Comlongon Castle domain as a sort of mirror to the main site so that web visitors can switch between the two resources, with each resource being able to provide either text content and documents, or images.

By extension, this could also be applied to video content - at the moment the Comlongon YouTube channel is in it's infancy but this is the ideal resource to host video content that links back to the main 'outcome' site, where web visitors can complete goals such as make contact or use the wedding calculator to generate a guideline wedding quote.

Property in north west London

Callisti is currently assisting with Glentree homes with their West Heath Place website development for new apartments in NW11 (off Finchley Road, near Hampstead Heath.)

The site will include virtual tours of selected properties, interactive floor-plans for the apartments, and sold/reserved notifications.

Selling property in London is a highly competitive market so some sensible SEO strategies are required...

What is the standard screen size anyway?

What are you designing for?

There is a glut of possible display resolutions or screen sizes for your viewing interface now, largely due to variation and convergence of traditional computer display screens, digitalisation and wide screen, then HD television.

These are roughly split between 3 main contenders:

18% approx - 4:3 ratio (following in the great VGA tradition)
42% approx - 16:10 (Widescreen)
20% approx - 5:4 (1280x1024 pixels)

It is a design consideration for fixed width display websites but also for desktop wallpapers based on bitmap images. There are some new Allan McNish images available on the official website...

Upset the form book

Well done to FC Twente Enschede! Especially after holding their nerve on the last game of the Eredivisie season away to NAC Breda, while Ajax had been on a free-scoring run of games to keep the pressure on.

(van ons)

Event decor hire

This is a recent customised Wordpress CMS website for a Dumfries-based event decor hire company.

The wordpress installation is based on a customised theme in line with the existing printed marketing materials of Tantrum Events.

The image galleries are controlled using the NextGen Gallery plug-in which also allow for the jwplayer slideshow effect based on random gallery images.

The functions.php file for the theme has been updated to use the post thumbnail feature present in Wordpress 2.9 onwards. More details...

Thornhill blues fundraiser and website

After a mayday fundraising blues jam evening in Thornhill the Thornhill Blues event is up and running for next year.

Tickets were sold out for the event at Thornhill Bowling Club and the large support augurs well for the official opening next year.

The headlining blues bands expected to play at the 2011 festival are listed on the website with links to their respective youtube and myspace pages.

Pay-as-you-go e-marketing

Finally, a sensible pay-as-you-go e-marketing service!

Callisti was in contact with Contact Multimedia's team in Glasgow and it was a breath of fresh air knowing that small organisations that need intermittent e-marketing services don't have to sign up to a monthly contract or get charged hefty set-up fees.

The user interface is very straightforward and any imported email lists are checked externally to ensure the email addresses are recent, not spammy, and that the end client has a proper opt-in/opt-out policy for subscribers.

The reporting system is easier to grasp and there is ready reckoner guide for what the average response is to e-marketing campaigns depending on the nature of your organisation.

Tickets now on sale

Tickets are now on sale for the 2010 Arts Festival in Dumfries and Galloway. The organisation uses a third party booking system called "The Booth" which allows visitors to book from an online allocation of seats at events.

Most of the ticket sales are still available using the ticket hotline number (01387 253383) which is handy for many of the events being run in partnership with other local organisations and venues.

Part of the event itinerary during the festival is the "Fringe" which lists some of the events on during the period of the festival - these are listed as part of a wider range of events being hosted in the region during the arts festival.

Planting potatoes - news

This won't win any design awards but is an informative website - some fooling about with Google news displays on seed potatoes (Note: always be very specific about the search terms you want the news for...)

The client has been providing content covering a range of methods for growing potatoes in space-restricted areas - the use of old tyres is a favourite.

html5

Ah. New standards. What do you think the worst browser will be?

Vindicated

The Cyprus Holiday Villa market is pretty saturated. A Callisti client had challenged us with the task of building up quality web traffic for a young website to attract a share of the Cyprus holiday online booking market.

The challenge involved using only "white hat SEO" techniques, no Google Adwords or sponsored links, and work within a tight budget on a "shot to nothing" basis. The work is now paying off :)

After investing time in reducing pagerank leakage, making more friendly URLs, optimising meta tags, sourcing website and blog links from external and relevant websites, utilising a rich Flickr photostream, and tweeting when appropriate, etc., the bookings are now starting to come.

A strange feeling of satisfaction results.

Optimising wedding photos - a special thanks

Callisti had been provided with a script from the region's Bespoke Coder to run on some of the content managed sites in the portfolio.

Comlongon Castle had taken care to update all their image descriptions (normally ALT tags) throughout the website - no mean feat given the volume of wedding photos the castle venue generates!

The site and database were then backed up and the script was applied. This cycles through all the images in the content folder, copies back-ups for each image e.g. thumb, medium and full-size, into a temporary folder, then renames the image using the description stored in the database, or failing that the image file-name. The new file-names are put back in the original directory and the database updated to account for the change in image URL.

Why? In this case, the original content management system would rename any image file-name during the upload process to a string of digits. This update means all the images now have a keyword relevant title and URL.

Itsh a compromizhe

This has been on the back-burner for a while. Initially the site was transferred into Callisti's website hosting service toward the end of last year. The vision was to develop a Dr Martens focussed ecommerce site as these products seemed to perform well online, while reducing the in-shop administrative burden of monitoring and updating hundreds or thousands of products.

The site was developed for Christmas 2009 but hit a snag with Dr Martens (who advised against the particular design and domain name we'd settled on.) So what we have done is used a Zen Cart ecommerce engine to replace the previous incarnation of CubeCart and merged the first new build structure into the existing Outdoor Spirit design.

The outdoor-spirit.co.uk has a domain history which can be used and is also familiar to existing customers. More subsidiary work is being done to build around the Outdoor Spirit brand using content channels such as Youtube, a Blog presence, and other linked entities to help promote and review products and provide relevant outdoor activity feedback to help inform website visitors.

Other initiatives such as the Gap Year travel kit have helped package outdoor equipment into one stop shop kits that offer savings to customers and ease of in-shop administration.

Wedding Fare

Callisti is off to enjoy spring equinox at the Comlongon Castle wedding fare, where many wedding service providers and romantic couples will be finding out all about each other.

Weather has been mild and bright so it could be a good opportunity to get some footage (still and motion) of the castle grounds.

 

Comlongon now has a customised twitter presence (in its infancy!)

Get your story straight

Work has started on The Dead Tree Press initiative to encourage a more balanced reporting of the events and goings-on in Dumfries and Galloway and beyond.

Writers are invited to submit content and articles, cartoons, illustrations, etc., that have a bearing on local, regional and national issues from a local perspective.

The web presence is still in it's formative stage and is open to flexible development to suit the needs of the readership and contributors alike.

Comments welcome!

Wedding balloons

The "wedding industry" has a diverse marketplace given the sophistication and customisation desired by modern lovers who want a perfect day that's just right for them.

Dumfries and Galloway is home to the famous UK wedding capital, Gretna Green - internationally renowned throughout history for being perched on the Scotland-England border. Callisti is now hosting the Balloons for All website which outlines the range of decorative services available to dress any wedding venue and we aim to help the website improve in the coming year.

Learning disabilities consultancy

As part of the foray into using Wordpress as CMS we are now setting up basic hosting services with the latest version of Wordpress installed so that clients can start from scratch and add all their own content, images and wordpress themes.

We also set up the .htaccess so that permalinks work from the off and encourage an xml sitemap generator to help with basic SEO.

The latest of these is BeaconLearningDisabilitiesConsultancy, a lengthy URL but descriptive all the same. This is currently being edited and transformed by the client.

Fence Post

Callisti is now set up to host Allan Smith Fencing, a regional service in Dumfries and Galloway for fencing work and poles, crash barriers and sleepers.

The website may be getting a spring clean with partnership providers Communications Technology Limited.