Dumfries wedding photographer

Callisti is pleased to be hosting and maintaining the Martin McNae Photography website and gallery after a recent transfer. There are gigabytess of image files being manipulated by Drupal and Imagecache as you would expect from a wedding photographer near the wedding capital of the UK, Gretna.

The .com now redirects to the .co.uk website which was a simple courtesy tidy-up, and Google Analytics has been properly installed now so that it is possible to monitor website visitor trends. Some content pages have been updated and set to display under the gallery section.

A further step into Drupal and cron jobs.

Under the radar stuff

January has been a time of investing in new equipment and software as well as working on some yet-to-be-made-public projects so nothing much to post to the world. Pleased to get VMware up and running at last and upgrading workstations to dual monitor setups - amazing to have gone so long without this!

Some new ecommerce developments in the post as well as some interesting logo design and wordpress experiments.

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