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.