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.