After nine months active development, FreeRangeFeedback.com was released last week.
The site allows website owners and designers to incorporate a simple, transparent, non-invasive feedback system into their sites, at no cost to them or their users.
If you'd like more information about adopting FreeRangeFeedback.com or utilising the technology in your own Web application, please get in touch.
What are the magic numbers?
I'm often asked about just how scaleable Drupal is. How many unique site visitor-visits (uniques) can Drupal sustain? How long will pages take to load? What happens to that capacity if I upgrade the server or turn on more modules?
The answers aren't simple. As Drupal and the server hardware that runs it evolve, they're constantly changing. I work off 100,000 uniques/month, logged in, 4-5 mean pages/visit, dedicated single quad-core server. The real question? Is Drupal right for you?
Beware of deleting symlinks with SVN
The remove unix command (rm) is capable of safely deleting symlinks
rm symlink
but not
rm symlink/
as including the trailing slash tries to delete the directory and therefore throws an error
rm: cannot remove `one/`: Is a directory
svn delete symlink returns an error message that makes me very nervous, saying that it can't delete a file from within the directory.
I seem to have got myself in a pickle with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). I signed up for S3 and JungleDisk, using the latter to upload thousands of files to the space that I paid for on a monthly basis.
Unfortunatly I found the rate of file transfer too slow and without a decent alpha differencing algorithm, updating my collection of files became too slow. JungleDisk then decided to start charging for their software and that tipped the balance. I decided to empty the account in order not to be charged for it any longer.
One of our most prolific clients, XMOS have just launched their new community website, Xlinkers. Designed as a portal to help XMOS customers and technology enthusiasts alike share knowledge, experiences and code for the remarkable XS1 Development Kit (XDK), I think we're going to see great things from this phpBB + Drupal forum.
After thinking long and hard about what makes company "News", I've decided to change tac. Over the coming months I'm going to keep a blog here. It'll be short and to the point, so if you're interested in following what's going on in Lightenna day-to-day, this is the place to find out.
Last week I went down to London to meet with Nick Piper from Big Kid. The London based agency, whose exclusive client list includes NHS, Universal, BBC and Channel 4, have chosen Drupal as their preferred platform for a raft of new sites.
I'm not able to talk about their current projects during development, but watch this space for some high profile high quality Drupal websites going live soon!
Last week I gave a talk as part of the Skillswap series of lectures. All the slides are online here. Thanks to everybody who came down, especially all those closet database experts who asked some searching questions.
The series is organised by Bristol Skillswap and if you find yourself in the Bristol area on a Skillswap night, I really recommend it. I've yet to go and not learn something useful!
We're proud to show off Ecomonkey.co.uk, Philip Immirzi's new environmentally sound shopping channel. Ecomonkey is an online shop where buyers are rewarded for eco-friendly purchases.
This Drupal site was developed by Lightenna and delivered in Winter 2007, on time and on budget.
I've been grappling with Actionscript (Flash) intregration recently, largely for synchronising the dynamic elements here. In AS2, here's how it's done.
Actionscript code
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
ExternalInterface.addCallback( "methodName", this, method );
function method() {
trace("called from javascript");
}
Javascript code
function callAS() {
swf.methodName();
}
Javascript code