Friday 31 December 2010

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...

Saturday 18 December 2010

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...

Monday 13 December 2010

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.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

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

Saturday 4 December 2010

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

Friday 26 November 2010

Snow revisited

Quick thanks to the team at PowerDNN (now with a UK presence) after an online support session for sledges.co.uk. The legacy DotNetNuke installation is at an impasse with the version of ASPDotNetStoreFront and issues arise, unsurprisingly when the website is being hammered with online sales. Thankfully the website was only offline for a few minutes...

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Snow forecast

The perennial threat of winter snow has sent the Sledges website sales on a rocket this month. This website is due an overhaul and Callisti will be working with the Glenmore Mountain Shop team to develop a staff- and user-friendly website and interface in 2011 when the madness subsides.