Wedding considerations

The Comlongon Castle wedding calculator has been updated and restored to display more information on each of the wedding and accommodation options and this is now updated again with the new additions for seat covers (to customise your wedding banquet) and the Honeymoon Lodge.

The castle now has a new Honeymoon Lodge in the castle grounds. This is complete with underfloor heating and is decorated with sculptures by Lucianne Lassalle and interior design by Jason Shackleton.

Fasthosts dedicated servers

Fasthosts dedicated servers response early this morning after a number of dedicated servers suddenly went down around 10pm last night:

We have been experiencing a connectivity issue which caused intermittent or no availability of some services.

The issue was known to have impacted some customers access to email and hosting services and dedicated servers, as well as causing our support phonelines and system status pages to be unavailable for a short period.

We have now restored all services to normal levels.

We thank you for your patience and understanding and will update our system status pages with further information as soon as we can.

If you are still experiencing any issues please let us know asap.

Regards,

What can you do?

Pre-emptive sledges for winter weather

More coverage for Sledges.co.uk on the BBC. The winter sales have been in line with the extent of the snowfall across the UK and record sales for November and December 2009, and January 2010 so far, have almost overwhelmed the outdoor shop's staff.

One challenge is actually getting the sledges delivered to the customers as many roads across the UK are not reliable under current weather conditions. Courier and delivery companies are now looking at using motorised sledges to deliver goods in snowbound territories...

Cyprus Villas - I dream of sunshine

The shortest day is behind us, we have feasted and rested. Many of us slid around badly gritted roads and pavements in our bid to congregate with family and friends. Tonight the bells will toll a new year in, and free television channels will broadcast best of and worst of lists and charts of the top 100 whatevers, peppered with product adverts, ad nauseum.

The noughties will give way to the teens (but what about 2010, 2011, and 2012?) as pundits struggle for decade nomenclature now that mass media memes are de rigeur. The sun will get higher in the sky as the days go by and people will start talking about crocuses. Tonight's the night for too much alcohol in this week of excess. Maybe it would be good to read a book or play risk instead.

Oh to be in Cyprus where you can chat on the beach academically about sub-zero temperatures.

New potatoes

We've been updating the JBA Seed Potatoes website and it now boasts a new design by Kit Allen Ltd. There is some added functionality such as the advanced search and a streamlining of the basket and checkout process.

This site is updated regularly with content and new potato products and information so we hope 2010 will be another good year for the seed potato website.

Sleigh bells ringing

Looking forward to the new year at Callisti - a number of new projects to get stuck into and we're pleased to say our customers have been enjoying a good year. We have a new ecommerce site about to launch but the news of the day is surely the performance of Sledges, the Aviemore based retailer, since we organised professional DotNetNuke hosting and updated the site to a more stable version.

Traffic and sales are escalating wildly, even just the mention of snow on a UK weather forecast has an impact on visitors to the site, and this month online sales have hit a record high in the website's history. The month's not over yet but there may be a tail-off as the last order cut-off for Christmas 2009 delivery approaches.

Historically the sales and visitors rise again in the new year as demand for sledges is very much winter weather dependent and Scotland won't be short of that in the coming months.

Waney edge boards

Carronbridge Sawmill has its own pressure treatment tank at Carronbridge, Thornhill so timber products can get the green treatment. This is a more eco-friendly method of preservation.

Wordpress is interesting to develop with especially with the wide range of themes and powerful blog (originally) engine driving the resulting websites. Callisti is looking forward to developing and submitting some themes for general use to the wordpress community in the new year.