For those of you that know me, you’ll know that I’d have a lot to say about 2014. It’s been a strange year. I won’t go into it in this blog post, but instead I’m going to look forward and welcome 2015 with wide eyes and big open arms. Come in and make yourself at home, 2015! So, here are a few things I’d like to look forward to in the new year. ...
DrupalCon 2013 is well underway now with Dries giving his keynote earlier today. There are lots of exciting things coming up with Drupal 8, and it’s a big change both technically and conceptually from the previous releases. I’ll attach the full keynote below, but here’s a quick summary for you speedy readers. There are six key initiatives in Drupal 8 which Dries quickly covered: Configuration management Mobile Blocks Multilingual Views in core Web services ...
I’ve just been going through my first ‘Instant’ book from Packt Publishing - Instant E-Commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant] by Murat Yilmaz. They kindly sent me a copy to review, so here’s a quick summary of what to expect and what’s included: This book is for web developers and designers looking at setting up an online store. You don’t need any previous experience of OpenCart to follow the walkthroughs in the book, but you will need to be reasonably confident (or at least willing to have a bash) at downloading and setting up a web application on a server or a local development environment (such as WAMP for MS Windows or MAMP for Mac). ...
Packt Publishing were kind enough to ask me if I’d like to review one of their latest OpenCart books: ‘Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant]’ by Murat Yilmaz. It’ll be the first time I’ve read a book in their ‘Instant’ series, as I’ve reviewed a couple of their regular books before, so I’ll be interested to see how it compares. Check back soon for my full review.
I was importing a relatively large Drupal database today into MAMP (via phpmyadmin) and MySQL rudely walked off, with the following error: #2006 - MySQL server has gone away Ah, a nice vague error message! It seems that the import statement (from the cache_menu table) in the database dump contains packets which are too large to import using the default MAMP settings. To fix this, I created a my.cnf file in my /Applications/MAMP/conf/ folder with the following contents:...
I’ve just started a YouTube vlog covering news, tips, reviews etc. Check it out, and if you like it, subscribe :)
Google+ The experience of any social network is only as good as the activity of the people on it, right? Quite a few of my friends have joined Google+ and experimented with a couple of posts, but it doesn’t really feel for me that it’s taken off as a social graph tool. It works pretty well within the interest graph, though, and maybe that’s because the API is currently read-only. There are a ton of tools that help you market on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook by managing accounts and automatically posting, but because these aren’t currently available for Google+, the posts and shares seem a little more genuine because people have to actually post directly. It’s a subtle issue, but it means that G+ captures a little more energy, as the posts feel more like they come from people rather than social media management applications. I guess it all depends on who you follow, though. Anyway, I’ll be trying to spend a little more time on Google+ in the coming months and getting involved in the communities that I’ve joined. ...
It seems every interaction I have with a company these days is followed by a “how did we do?” survey. It’s not like we step aside and forget the company when we’re going through the questionnaire - it’s still part of the experience. Imagine if this was true for high street shopping, and after every purchase, no matter how large or small, we were being chased out of the shop by someone begging for feedback. ...
It’s strange how influential an operating system UI can be on web design. I remember back in 2006 everyone was using Apple’s shiny table effect and it seems we may be about to see a wave of websites designed using Microsoft’s Windows 8 ‘Metro’ UI style. Do these large companies that make our most popular devices’ operating systems set the trend, or are they one step ahead? The interesting thing this time round is that the Windows 8 style we see here is designed primarily for touch....
Things have been ticking over nicely since Microsoft updated its Exchange Online services to Office 365. The other day I needed to find the spam controls (Forefront) and they weren’t where I was expecting them to be so I thought I’d post the details here in case anyone else is having trouble finding them. You’ll need to be logged in as an Office 365 admin: Login to the Office 365 Portal Click ‘Admin overview’ on the left Click ‘manage’ under ‘Exchange’ Click ‘mail control’ on the left Click the ‘configure’ link on the right under ‘Forefront Online Protection for Exchange’ That’s it....