Sweet-Apple wins new website development for Bristol Copywriters

Posted on November 3, 2010

We were recently appointed to redevelop the website of top copywriting agency S!M. Based in Bristol, they specialise in editorial for the Men’s market. We got Indesign files, fonts and a smattering of images and turned the job around in record time, came in under budget and generally aced it.

Particular challenges were the multiple column layout and heavy use of typography. I’d have preferred to have gone down the root of using CSS3 columns for these areas, but that will have to wait for a version of IE that supports it.

Got an idea for a website, but don’t know where to turn to for professional, efficient and cost effective web development services? Call us on 01380 830224

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Faster web development with Textmate

Posted on October 29, 2010

When you’re a freelance web developer it’s important to be able to work quickly and accurately. If you’re working to a fixed price quote there’s a great motivation to get work done as efficiently as possible. Because of this I’m always on the look-out for tools that can make me work more accurately and reduce repitition.

I’ve used Textmate and Netbeans for many years – Netbeans as a full fledged IDE for version control and code debugger, Textmate for quickly banging out the html. Recently I’ve been moving more and more away from Textmate, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been pulled back by some of the compelling features.

Firstly, the TextMate Zend Coding bundle is awesome. Zen Coding let’s you write css style syntax, hit a hot key, typically Apple + E, and expand it out into fulling formed html. It’s a hand saver.

Secondly, the integration with the OS X Command line enables you to pass entire documents or snippest of html through Tidy. Hit Shift + Command + H and you’ll magically get clean validated code. Beats flying back and force to the Web Developer Toolbar.

Lastly, if you paste text straight into Textmate from Word for example it doesn’t recognise and convert any html entities. But hit Ctrl + Command + 7 and your selection will get scrubbed nice and clean.

Remembering the shortcuts is always a hassle, but with the multitude of Textmate bundles out there, you’re sure to find one that makes your day to day programming life more pleasant.

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Refurb 21″ iMac for 749 pounds – saving 22%

Posted on October 23, 2010

Just a quick heads up – the Apple Refurb Store has a very nice deal on 21.5″ iMacs for £749 inc VAT. Please remember this is for the previous generation model, so you have a Core2 chip rather than the i3 chip used in the newer machines, but frankly the saving far outweighs the marginal speed boost the latest model offers. They won’t last long, so be quick if you want one…

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iPhone repairs in Bath and Bristol

Posted on October 18, 2010

Over the last couple of months we’ve been having an increasing number of people contacting us about repairing their damaged iPhone. The most common problem is unsurprisingly a shattered screen. Unfortunately this is one of the most time consuming repairs to complete, as it involves completely dismantling the front panel, plus using a heat-gun to soften the adhesive that bonds the glass digitiser to the front panel frame.

It’s easier to repair a broken glass screen if the damage is up near the top of the phone, around the speaker. If it’s shattered around the bottom button, life gets somewhat more problematic. Why? Because to remove the front panel you need to use a strong suction cup to pull the front panel off. To do this you have to pull at the bottom edge of the screen and rotate the front panel around the top edge. When the glass is shattered you can’t get a good seal to form a powerful vacuum.

However, judicious application of “gaffer tape” over the shattered screen can give you a smooth enough surface to get a decent amount of suction to pull the damage screen out.

In Bath, Bristol, Wiltshire or Somerset? Got an iPhone with a broken screen or display that isn’t working? We can quickly and cost-effectively repair your iPhone. Why not give us a call on 01380 830224 to get a quotation.

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Configuring APC correctly to optimise Magento performance

Posted on October 10, 2010

Magento is a wonderful way of quickly and inexpensively creating an ecommerce website, but it does have some major downsides. The complexity of theming it is well know, as is the extremely mediocre performance on typically web hosting. There are any number of methods of speeding things up, but on the face of it the most straightforward method is to enable the Magento cache to use APC.  Switching the caching mechanism from using the filesystem (which stores cached data in /var/cache) to use APC (which caches in memory) should lead to a doubling in the number of pages served per second.

However, when I was running some tests I was actually seeing a decrease in performance with APC enabled in comparison to the default setup. This was odd, as in the past I’ve used APC with custom web applications that I have created and have never seen performance decrease. APC comes with a useful monitoring console which you can use to view the current state of the cache (shown below).

image showing healthy APC stats when running Magento

In an ideal world you will have a very high percentage of cache hits, very little memory fragmentation and a reasonable number of free MB. In my case APC only had 32MB RAM available, which meant that the Cache was constantly “churning”. As a minimum you should have 64MB memory available to APC when running Magento, otherwise performance will drop, rather than increase.

Having problems with slow performance on your Magento web site? Need some help squeezing some extra speed out of it? Why not get in touch?

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