The new grobag.com site went live today.
The biggest revelation when developing this site was when a friend recommended trying JQuery. This makes javascript so much easier and stops you having to worry about getting your scripts to run cross browser. The baby sleeping bags page makes use of the library and the built in AJAX facilities provided. Other than that, it's a fairly standard content managed site using reddot and it's new navigation manager functionality.
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.
My first post, 10 weeks after getting back from New Zealand and Australia. Why the wait? I guess a combination of being really busy catching up on some work and not being in the mood to post when I have had a free 5 minutes.
I thought I should probably pull my finger out and get back into the swing of things. Quite a bit has been going on the last few months. There are a few new sites going live over the next two weeks, first up is University Business. This is a drupal based site I've been working on with Wildfire, they'll be some new features going up on there over the coming days as well.
The birthday brain goes up very soon, the name might give you a few hints as to what it does. Drop me a mail if you'd like a beta invite :)
I'm a couple of weeks away from a six week holiday around New Zealand and Australia. I've set up a new trip blog where those of you who know myself or Becs can see what we're up to.
I've used setting up the blog as an excuse to tidy up my blog software and try and make it a bit more user friendly, add better support for posting images and beta support for Pingbacks. The list of updates I'd like to do to it is increasing all the time, but I rarely have time to play with it. Next on the list is tidying up the coding then releasing the code open source. I very much doubt that will happen before February/March.
I moved my email server from Microsoft Exchange Server to Google Apps about two weeks ago.
The advantages:
- I no longer have to worry about backing up my email server.
- I can access my email through a browser without any special setup, firewall configuration or security worries.
- I don't need to run an Exchange Server which was killing my server, adding a second server for two man company seemed a bit overkill.
- I can get an IMAP server (or POP3) so can still use Outlook if I want to.
- It's free! I have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server so that's not a big problem for me but it's definitely worth considering if you don't have the licenses.
- Search is quicker, through the web interface.
The disadvantages:
- I no longer have full control over my email, if google pack up shop do I get it all back.
- I have to trust Google to not read any sensitive information.
- I don't have as much potential storage, although 4GB of mail is a lot of mail!
- If I want shared calendars I have to use the web interface, which I don't like as much as Outlook.
All in all I'm pretty happy with the change. It's made my server a lot quicker now I can stop exchange server and speed up my acceptance/test sites, and my backups are smaller. The only thing that is really annoying is that some of my old email is trapped in exchange, I've got a local copy in Outlook but that's not an ideal solution. If you're shopping for a mail server I'd definitely consider it before rushing out and buying Exchange if you've only got a few users. There is a version of Google Apps which you can pay for but I haven't taken that version for a spin.
I've been getting an increasing amount of comment spam on this blog recently. So much that I'm spending a fair amount of time deleting it every day. After a few minutes of Googling, I've found the Akismet service, this is a web service which you can pass comments, trackbacks and pingbacks to check to see if they are valid or the dreaded comment spam. I utilised Joel.net's .NET 2 API for the service to speed up implementation and this has made it very easy. It also provides an interface to correct any errors, by either reporting any spam comments it didn't identify to their database, or reporting any false positives.
So far so good, it's already successfully blocked 5 spam comments and I uploaded the new version an hour ago! I'll report how it goes after a few more days worth of commenting.
