Micro CMSes like PageLime, CushyCMS and Perch are nice, but limited…

Posted on April 4, 2011

I’ve just finished a rapid Freelance web development job for an old client, a design agency in Wiltshire. The requirement was pretty straightforward, convert their Indesign layouts into templates that would work with their micro-CMS of choice, PageLime.

From a development point of view, it was a nice job to work on. I had free reign to code the HTML from scratch without having to think about making it fit in with the CMS engine at all. So nice shiny HTML5 markup was the order of the day, and I just had to add a few classses to tags to make them editable.

These sort of “CMS-light” solutions seem to be becoming increasingly popular for small projects, as they allow the client to easily edit copy and images in specific places. What they aren’t particularly great at is allowing them to add new pages, edit meta tags, link structures and the like for SEO purposes. However for non-technical or less demanding clients, “micro CMSes” seem to hit the sweet-spot of low pricing, design flexibility and end user simplicity. Because of this I expect to be developing quite a few more web sites on a freelance basis for my design agency clients in Bath and Bristol using these sort of systems.

Looking for some help converting your designs into user friendly, cleanly coded and inexpensive web sites? You need to call your friendly neighbourhood Sweet-Apple and get some freelance web development mojo working for you. Please give us a ring on 01225 390162 – we’d love to help…

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Cheap Refurbished iPads from 289 pounds…

Posted on March 29, 2011

UPDATE: If you  look on Amazon for iPads and accessories there are some pretty respectable savings on new Apple iPad and iPad2, and some great prices on used ones.

If you can live without the video cameras on the new iPad 2, there’s some extremely cheap pricing on Refurbished 1st Generation  iPads. Pick of the bunch are shown below. As always, stock changes very quickly, so get your cards ready…

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On-site Apple Support for iMac in Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Posted on March 17, 2011

Yesterday I was with a client in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, who had a problem with their rather elderly Mac. It’s not that often I get to work on a G4 iMac these days, so it was a nice change. Their Mac was intermittently crashing with the dreaded ‘Spinning beachball of  death’ and they’d spoken to a computer support company who had suggested performing an Archive and Install of the OS. They didn’t have the confidence to do this themselves, and got in touch with me.

It was fortunate that they did, because within a few minutes of visiting the customer to give them some on-site technical support, it became pretty obvious that software wasn’t the problem – the hard disk was in the process of dying. You can often find this out by looking in Disk Utility at the SMART status, or alternatively just by listening to the computer – frequently failing hard drives will make strange chirping noises, or repetitive noises whilst the computer locks up.

Quickly I backed up the important information on the hard drive, whipped over to Comet in Trowbridge and grabbed a replacement hard disk. A short while later I had fitted the hard drive, reinstalled the Mac Operating System and restored as much of the data as the initial data recovery was able to achieve.

Need on-site support for your Mac, iPhone or iPad? Don’t know were to turn to for help? Give us a call on 01380 830224. We’re waiting to help you out.

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Easy Search Engine Optimisation tip for Magento stores

Posted on March 11, 2011

Google isn’t a big fan of your website making it work hard, and as with many dynamic websites, Magento can create a labyrinth of urls with complex querystrings – none of which lead to unique content. Which may mean you get penalised for content duplication.

An  easy fix is adding nofollow attributes to Layered Navigation (should you have it enabled). In your theme, duplicate:

/app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/layer/filter.phtml

to

/app/design/frontend/base/THEMENAME/template/catalog/layer/filter.phtml

Then add the nofollow shown below.

<a href="<?php echo $this->urlEscape($_item->getUrl()) ?>" rel="nofollow"><?php echo $_item->getLabel() ?></a>

You might also wish to  do the same in the Category List toolbar to the sort order and Grid/List links. Not exactly rocket science, but it’s a painless win…

Looking for a friendly Magento developer to create your ecommerce store? We’re based just outside of Bath and will quickly and efficiently create custom Magento themes, integrate with payment gateways such as Paypal and Sagepay, perform the scary Magento upgrades for you and much more. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch on 01380 830224.

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iCal syncing with MobileMe will break for OS X 10.5 users shortly…

Posted on March 7, 2011

If you use iCal and MobileMe to synchronise calendar events, you may shortly be in for a rude awakening. Apple have announced that everyone will have to upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar service on the 05/05/2011.

If you’re using OS X 10.6, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you run OS X 10.5, you should upgrade to OS X 10.6 as soon as you can. If you have a PowerPC G4 or G5 Mac, you are probably in deep trouble, as you cannot upgrade to 10.6. You also need to be running iOS 4.1 or later if you have an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

I’m still trying to collate exactly what’s going to break under 10.5, but it looks like at the very minimum automatic calendar synchronisation will stop working. Hopefully you will still be able to manually sync, but Apple are being particularly unhelpful at this point.

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