I was recently working in a clients office where they have very little IT Support and they had a new member of staff on board without a PC. The person that setup the IT infrastructure at the beginning had left a hard drive with an image and a CD to copy the image to any new machine that was added to the network. Sounds simple so I said I would help out. It took some time but eventually the image copied across and I disconnected the slave drive and booted the machine. I joined the machine to the SBS2003 domain and got a warning about another machine on the network with the same name(oops, the image had been built with a machine name currently in use!). Next thing I know is that the user of the first machine using this name can no longer login to the network and now…
There was a time not so long ago, when website developers were treated with almost as much reverence as pilots and surgeons. After all, without a website, your business was just not a player, non-existent, invisible to the world. No one had any idea as to what they did, or how they did it, just that they were able, as if by magic, to put our business into cyberspace in full view of a global audience. There were pictures and there were words too. It was marvellous. Who will ever forget the day our website went live. But, as is life, we wanted more. A new product range, a change in pricing perhaps, or maybe even some customer feedback comments. Suddenly things got a little tricky. We were told that there was no development time available for at least two weeks, or the site would have to be rewritten…
I was contacted over the christmas and new year by Actually Digital to help out one of their clients who had been let down by another developer. The brief was clear and simple, to develop a custom Wordpress theme from a design they had provided and to turn it around within 24 hours. I took up the challenge for two reasons: I have been doing more and more work with Wordpress recently so I was keen to take on any work that could keep my momentum going in this area. I respect what the site owner is doing and the causes he is supporting over the coming months If you would like to know more about Mark Bowness and his mission to give up alcohol for twelve months in order to develop his spirit, mind and body you can watch his introductory YouTube video below and…
I have been doing a little bit of Wordpress work recently and as a result I have been working on custom themes for Wordpress. In one particular theme I required that jQuery be loaded into the template and stumbled across the following <strong>wp_enqueue_script</strong> function built into wordpress. The function essentially adds a safe method of including scripts in Wordpress generated pages. <strong>Usage:</strong> I first needed to locate the following line in my head.php file: [code language="php"]<?php wp_head(); ?>[/code] Then before the call to this function I can add my call to the <strong>wp_enqueue_script</strong><strong> </strong>function so that we end up with the following: [code language="php"]<?php wp_enqueue_script("jquery"); ?> <?php wp_head(); ?>[/code] What this does is includes the Wordpress instance of jQuery however it is arguable about the efficiency of this method over loading it direct from Google servers since if everyone used this method users would…
While working on my customisations to Tim Geyssens MailEngine I was looking for an accurate method of automatically creating a plain-text version of the HTML emails that were being sent out by the…
Some months back Tim Geyssens was kind enough to send me the source for his MailEngine addition to Umbraco before he released it on his blog. I made some customisations to the source to allow users to select templates and changed the filtering options slightly but other than that it worked jut fine for what I needed. There was however one problem that became apparent when this was used in production. Sometimes, and apparently randomly the sending of mail would freeze when going to more than say 150 recipients. After a long time trying to track down the reason I stumbled across a post linking to the 'SmtpClient does not gracefully close the underlying TCP/IP connection' issue on the Microsoft Connect website. I guessed it couldn't do any harm to set the MaxTimeout property of the SmtpClient to 1 so I tried it and it seemed to work -…
I have recently been working on my professional profile on-line and have published my Prolific Notion Facebook page under my trading name of Prolific Notion. I would of course appreciate any followers that might be interested in my work or my services so head on over there now and become a fan! I don't think I can get my vanity url until I have a least 1000 followers so I have a way to go yet.…
For me every day is a school day and every day I learn something new. Today the light shined brightly for me when I discovered a great time saving shortcut in Visual Studio to implement an Abstract…
A few weeks back I released my second package for the Umbraco CMS imaginatively called Media Sorter for Umbraco (does what it says on the tin!).The package essentially adds a new context menu item to…
Today Prolific Notion became an Approved Sage Pay partner!After referring two customers already and carrying out integration work for two separate sites I made the decision to become a Sage Pay…