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In A Different League
NonLeagueNews24 has rapidly become the UK’s leading website for non-league football. The site was launched in August last year and covers the English National League System from the Blue Square Premier League down. We developed a bespoke content management system which provides the writing team with tools to publish news and match reports. The system also provides their panel of regular columnists with blogging tools. New content is automatically “tweeted” to social media site Twitter.
The site provides up to the minute fixtures and results, with a live “vidiprinter” on match days which pushes goal alerts and match updates out to the visitor’s browser in realtime. The vidiprinter functionality is based on the Meteor server, a persistent streaming HTTP (or “Comet”) server. The site consumes live data from a number of sources including XML feeds from a third party content provider, text messages from club officials via an SMS API, and manual input using the content management system.
The site currently attracts around 25,000 unique visitors a month.
Get Out Of Jail
Naturally you don’t want any tom, dick or harry with an FTP account trampling all over the system files on your web server, even if they don’t have sufficient access privileges to do any damage. So when all is as it should be, your FTP users are restricted to the directory you specify as their “home”. By default FTP accounts are locked into a “CHROOT jail“.
But sometimes you want to give a particular FTP account (e.g. the system administrator) broad access without requiring that they log in as root. So how do you break them out of jail?
As is often the case with Linux - it’s easy once you know how. As long as you do it correctly. Simply create a new directory in the user’s home directory. This directory can then be bound to the directory you wish the user to have access to so that it becomes a mount point for the subordinate file system.
So as an example, if you had a user admin whose home directory was at /home/admin, and you want the admin user to have access to /var then just follow the following simple steps.
- Create a new directory in admin’s home to server as the mount point, e.g. mkdir /home/admin/var.
- Bind the new entry point to the desired point in the file system, e.g. mount --bind /var /home/admin/var.
- Job’s a good ’un!
Again, of course, as is often the case with Linux “thar be dragons!” Should you decide the mount point in the user’s home directory is no longer required and you delete it, then I am reliably informed that the subordinate file system to which is mapped will be deleted too. The filesystem should be unmounted first using the umount command. It is also important to remember that when passing the directory paths to the mount command, the path to the filesystem precedes the path to the desired entry point. Get them the wrong way around and the file system disappears up its own wotsit - a situation that can be remedied by a server reboot (once the blind panic has subsided).
If you do want the mount to persist after reboot then that requires a modification to the etc/fstab file. But that’s a topic for another day.
It’s A Fair Cop
On Tuesday we launched a website to promote the Regional Policing Programme, a collaborative venture between the four Police forces of Yorkshire and Humberside targeting organised crime. Technically speaking the site is straightforward, comprising predominantly static text and image content. The website features a media resources page with press releases and media images available for download, along with a short video promo produced by the guys up the road at JayJay Media. The video is delivered in FLV (Flash Video) format via the almost universal Flash Player.
The biggest challenge we faced was dealing with the large volume of content presented to us by the client. Most of it was derived from various printed documents and press releases. Our first task was to assimilate the content into a meaningful, non-linear structure which would work on the web. The visual design of the website was kept clean and uncluttered to eliminate distractions from the information-driven content. Moving forward the website is expected to grow and evolve, so it was important to provide a high degree of flexibility in the website design so that varied content can be included in the future without a major design rethink.
www.PolicingYorkshireAndTheHumber.co.uk
Accessible Website Design For HERIB
My first post for some time - phew, it’s been a busy Summer. One small job we launched back in September was a brand new website for HERIB - the Hull and East Yorkshire Institute for the Blind.
A large proportion of visitors to the HERIB site are visually impaired, so accessibility was a key consideration when designing their new website. The site is available in two colour options - the HERIB corporate blue and white, and a high visibility yellow and black. Accessibility was designed in through the use of larger font sizes and clearly defined blocks of content. The fluid layout resizes with the browser window, which helps to ensure that the page scales elegantly when users increase font sizes using browser-native text zooming.
Having the opportunity to see a screen reader in operation gave us a valuable insight into some of the accessibility problems often faced by visually impaired web users. Imagine how much extra scrolling is required when text has to be enlarged to such a size that just a few words are viewable on screen at a time. To help with navigation we included in-page links so users can easily jump back to the various navigation menus from key points within the page. These little additions are simple to implement yet they can make all the difference to some visitors.
The website also features a simple content management system (or CMS) so that HERIB staff can update the News and Events pages themselves. The CMS provides tools to upload images to include within posts. The CMS supports basic text formatting using Textile - a lightweight markup language which gives users elementary style controls without the overhead of a complex WYSIWYG system.
Shiny New Website For Seven Seas
This morning we launched the Shiny School website for Seven Seas, the UK’s largest vitamins and natural supplements supplier. The site is the focus of a campaign to promote healthy eating among children aged from 6 - 12, which is being run in association with Haliborange, one of Seven Seas’ leading cod liver oil brands.
Our development of the website was completed in just a few days using WordPress as the underlying engine and content management system. We built a completely bespoke WordPress theme from the ground up based on a design visual supplied by global agency McCann Erickson. WordPress comes off the shelf with an extensive set of functionality that can be easily extended with various plug-ins, making it a very cost effective framework for certain web applications.
With the WordPress CMS in place, the maintenance and ongoing content management was handed over to JCPR who are running the Shiny School campaign. It is hoped that the campaign will engage kids and parents, and to encourage participation the website is linked with a Shiny School YouTube channel and Shiny School Flickr group. Using tools provided by the WordPress CMS the site moderators can easily incorporate photographic and video content contributed by children and parents taking part in the activities and initiatives promoted as part of the Shiny School campaign.
Catch Up On The Buzz
Meet Buzz, our newest staff member! Buzz has come all the way from Bleep Labs in Austin, Texas. Still a bit shy, he spends most of his time in the cupboard looking after the stationery. It won’t be long before he’s answering the phone, but getting him to make a brew might be a bit of a struggle.
Another Cool Product
Here’s another quick turnaround flier for Shave Ice. This time it’s a six page third A4 flier extolling the virtues of their flagship product Hawaiian Ice® to prospective customers. The flier design follows the theme of previous materials we have produced for Shave Ice, focussing on the Hawaiian ice® brand we developed for them. The product illlustration takes centre stage on the inner spread of the leaflet demonstrating the Hawaiian Ice® profit model. The raw material costs are just 11p per serving for the flower cup and straw spoon, and 22p for the flavour syrups. With a recommended retail price of £2 each portion of Hawaiian Ice® sold represents a typical gross profit margin of 83.5% for the retailer.
Web Design For Designer Cakes
Wedding and celebration specialists The Cake Room have finally got a website. Launched this afternoon the site features a number of portfolio pages showing the diversity of cakes they offer, as well as background information about the company and an interactive map pulled in from the Google Maps API.
The site has been a while in development, simply because the folks at The Cake Room have been so busy baking and decorating the finest party cakes in East Yorkshire. As a result the design and development of their website came fairly low down their list of priorities. The absence of an online presence meant that prospective customers trying to track them down in Google were clicking through to our own site.
The case study elsewhere on our own website covering the corporate identity we designed for The Cake Room has been achieving high rankings, driving their customers to us in the search for contact details. Hopefully the website will now top ours in Google searches, and the busy bakers will be even more so as a reult!
The Cake Room web site can be visited at www.thecakeroom.co.uk. Don’t forget to tell ’em we sent ya!
Flash CoverFlow For St. Stephen’s
St. Stephen’s is Hull’s (relatively) new flagship shopping centre. They have recently launched their new website with front-end design by our good friends at Bryce Mennell.
Rear entrance to St. Stephen’s shopping centre in Hull city centre.
The website is driven by Vicinitee Retail, a content management system (CMS) used by several shopping centres and retail parks. The website design features an iTunes style CoverFlow widget which allows users to scroll through the logos of the various retail brands represented within St. Stephen’s, clicking through to the corresponding store’s web pages.
We were called in to provide the Flash expertise. The basic coverflow application was provided by a royalty free Flash component. Although the component was developed to be user-configurable it didn’t fully support dynamically generated content out of the box.
After a bit of hacking we persuaded the Flash component to accept a fully dynamic data source, proving once again that we are East Yorkshire’s go-to guys when it comes to tricky Flash problems!
We Don’t Usually Cut Corners But…
IT services and products supplier Contrac came back to us to freshen up their sales folder which we first designed for them a few years back. They wanted an informal feel based on their corporate bluey-green.
The Contrac IT Source folder and inserts - a friendly little number with pocket and inserts die-cut at a jaunty angle.
The folder is die-cut using a custom cutter with pocket at a jaunty angle to match the four die-cut inserts. The four inserts stack up in the folder pocket, with titles set across the corners and each cut slightly smaller than its sibling.
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Subscribe »Why Do We have A Blog?
There are several very good reasons why we have incorporated a blog into our web site. It’s relatively simple to do after all.
- A blog is great tool for quickly adding new content to a web site. We chose WordPress, and its ease of use means we are more likely to keep updating the site on a regular basis, whenever one of us has ten minutes to spare.
- Visitors like fresh content. Keeping the site updated will encourage people to come back again and again. It all helps when building an online presence and winning customer mindshare.
- Search engines like fresh content too. As long as we keep it relevant it all counts towards ratings.
- We’re creative types, and blogging is form of self-expression. When we’ve got something to say it won’t do to bottle it up.
- We’re good at what we do, and blogging about it is way of proving it to the world.
It all makes sense doesn’t it. Perhaps you should have a blog on your web site. Don’t think about it for too long though - give us a call…