This sporting life - Dumfries and Galloway

Ross Wylie is another talented sportsman from Dumfries and Galloway. Following in the successful footsteps of racing drivers Allan McNish and David Coulthard, there must be something conducive to developing talents for racing cars in the south of Scotland.

The new Ross Wylie Racing website is to mark the start of Ross racing Mini's in the 2012 season. This is a progression from his successful kart racing years in the UK and Europe and he has had to work hard to show that being slightly older than his peers is not going to be a barrier to success.

Callisti is looking forward to developing the website and integrating some interesting in-car video footage showing what really happens during races...

Arts Events in Dumfries and Galloway 2012

The Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival kicks off on 25th May 2012 this year with the events now listed on the arts website.

A Calameo feature allows the print version of the event listings brochure to be viewed, downloaded and printed from the screen, and some recent Flickr images have been updated by the dgartsfest staff.

Tickets will be available to buy online on 16th March via ticketweb - this seems to change every year so the wordpress custom fields need tweaked to suit. In previous years it has used TheBooth and also the PatronBase ticketing system provided by the now defunct Dumfries and Galloway Arts.

Luckily the DG Arts Festival is forced to stay within a strict budget so isn't able to go bust or into administration every few years!

Pre-pack Wordpress Templates

Callisti is using the Platform template for WordPress but is re-considering this to allow full customisation of the desired Callisti theme. Currently some customisations would need to be made to the core Platform files to get everything just righ, which makes future updating more arduous as these changes could get overwritten.

Using the child-theme approach would allow for core WordPress and plug-in files to be automatically updated without causing conflict with the Callisti theme.

It's also been noticed that some plug-ins are starting to experience memory fails when executing certain processes but this could be in part a setting in php.ini or htaccess. Further consideration required.

Yum Yum - Free Italian Pizza Offers

A few quick tidy-ups for the Ivanos Italian website resulted in a WordPress MailChimp plugin being used to add a double opt-in registration widget for fans of Pizza in the Dumfries area.

Subscribers only will be eligible for the free pizza offers highlighted in the newsletter for menu and "special offer" updates.

Much cappuccino was imbibed during this process.

Facebook domination of web page screen real-estate

A simple Facebook page was created for Sledges.co.uk with some information about the Aviemore-based outdoor shop in the Scottish highlands, along with some product images from the different sections: wooden sledges, snowshoes, budget sledges, etc.

The latest step was to add and test the like button for each of the products on the e-commerce website so that visitors could share products with friends within their own facebook worlds. Also a link from website to facebook page seemed obligatory!

The emerging trend is that wee facebook icon links and like buttons (and associated html5, og meta-tags, etc) are getting peppered across more and more sites on the internet. Facebook can piggyback on the hard work people put in on driving relevant traffic to their websites by siphoning off "social" activity by visitors.

Rivendell B&B - Dumfries

This required some admin work - sorting out Facebook accounts and pages, TripAdvisor accounts and widgets, customising Wordpress themes, and inevitably the transfer of hosting to Callisti services from the legacy provider (see earlier posts.)

The B&B website features an online booking widget and calendar for visitors to book without having to speak to a human directly and in their own time. Not all the rooms are available online so if you're looking for a Bed and Breakfast break you can resort to telephone calls and emails. Or like they did in olden days, turn up at the door and ask.

The design was influenced mainly by the Rivendell team to match their existing offline marketing materials.

Chime.in (beta)

The third way in 'rich-media' posting - this can link with facebook and twitter accounts. Currently trying it out (chime.in beta) tentatively after an automated email from Mixx. Naturally there's a mobile app and you can edit your profile, etc.

Kind of like twitter UI but nicer looking. Not sure where it will fit alongside linkedin, google+, facebook and twitter but maybe it offers something more holistic.

Claim your usernames now before they get taken!