Archives
Categories
Posts in the “Bloggering About” category
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.
Moving In & Moving On
We’ve moved!
It feels as though the dust has only just settled since our last move from Hessle, and here we are on the move again. This time we’re just around the corner, so we’re still in Brough. I’ll update the contact page on the website shortly once we’ve got a GPS reference and decent shot of the outside of the building.
Moving Office from Jim Wardlaw on Vimeo.
We are now upstairs at The Picture Box on Station Road. Jim had the presence of mind to rig up his iPhone on coat stand and grab some time lapse footage of us setting up the gear on Thursday. The last few things were cleared out of the old place on Friday morning, and with no phone line in until this morning we were left at a loose end on Friday afternoon. Fortunately our new location is midway between (and a not even a stone’s throw from) two of Brough’s three hostelries, so we took the opportunity to give Dan a good send off. After seven years and at least as many beers we wish him all the best in his new job.
WordPress Schema
WordPress is a pretty cool blogging application, and the current version 2.7 is leap ahead from the old version I was used to using. It made sense to use the functionality provided by WordPress to drive the back end of the blog on our website, but in order to fully integrate it into the rest of the site we built the public-facing front end from scratch. During the development, the newer version of WordPress was released, so at the last minute prior to lanch we had to refactor the code to work with the revised database structure implemented in WordPress 2.7.
In order to make life simpler, and as an aid to getting my head around the project, I drew out the the WordPress database schema using OmniGraffle - a wonderful tool for producing elegant diagrams and flowcharts very quickly. Having the database schema laid out on a sheet of paper for reference during the development was a real help. The table and column names were always to hand and joining tables was breeze with all the relationships clearly identified.
You can download the PDF of the WordPress v2.7 schema diagram here.
A step in the right direction
Turns out the MySQL database behind latest version of WordPress has a significantly altered table structure to our older test installation. The whole tags/categories/taxonomy thing looks a whole lot more elegant in WordPress v2.7, which is good news. The bad news is that it broke our custom front end, but after a bit of tinkering this morning the problems seem to be resolved, so we’re back on track.Hello world!
So the Art & Soul blog is finally up and running ready for the launch of our new web site. The test installation of WordPress has been replaced with a squeaky clean copy of the latest version. And all in time for Christmas too!
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…