Railo Update
If your not interested in techie stuff then this maybe of no interest to you at all but for some and very much ourselves, our department that manages our servers and hosting company is updating its Railo from version 3.1.1.000 final => 3.1.2.001 which may not seem like a major jump or nothing special but as 3.1.1 has been out for some time this new release has some lovely new fixes and more compatibility with ColdFusion tags & <cfscript> tags.
Find out more at: http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/download/history/
Hosting is changing
For the past couple of months we have been working with our hosting team (Host Media UK) to come up with ideas for new ways to host websites easier for a different levels of users. So we thought we would list of our ideas as we know a few of our followings like to comment, email or even phone us with their thoughts and as always happy to hear them!
Our thoughts (Above image our little icon to show we are thinking)
- Lowering global service costs:
All companies like to offer competitive prices but the issue is when you offer low cost services that do make the company money the level of service goes down. Our hosting starts at £5 per year, pretty cheap! and we have a level of service which most find above and beyond! So what can we do about costs? The only answer we had to improve our services is to offer a better £0 free hosting plan, and more of them for each service. So we have released our Railo free hosting package which allows for 100MB hosting space and 1GB of bandwidth. Now each service has a type of free service.
Conclusion on this: Well a happy one, as this won't draw much resources from our systems our gets our visited interested in our services before handing over any of their pennies. - FAQs:
Providing more FAQ's to our sites to increase support from the ones we have at the moments and the support tickets. The only issue we had was, would people get over loaded with results to a simple question. Like the "Bing" adverts say about search results, as you being overloaded? Personally we just use Google and we are fine! so would taking a page out of Google's book be the right way of doing things. Getting a good amount of results for a question but make sure the correct data is shown in the summaries and the information in the article is easy to follow and not overloaded with too much tech talk.
Conclusion on this: We have started to make a list of the FAQ's that come to the team to try and narrow down the ones that standard replies cover. For example; How do I change my password? A: Login to cPanel and click on the icon titled 'Change Password'.
More thoughts being published soon, just working on the typing up of notes!
Webmail Clients
If your not at your own computer or at your smart phone, you maybe have used a webmail client such as: Horde, Squirrel Mail or Round Cube, these are the 3 main ones we recommend to our clients and are installed on our servers.
We wanted to have a little blog post about each of them as we do like writing our little articles.
Horde
A simple webmail client but not simple in features and compatibility with browsers, using a frame based coding for refreshing parts of the screen without reloading the entire page allows for the client to update the inbox (New Mail No.) gives it a nice touch but in the modern age users tend to look at design as an important part of an application.
If it looks good they will use it!
Squirrel Mail
Much like horde this webmail client does not get top marks for design but it again like horde gives a lot to the end user with a simple but effective layout gives it a easy to use feel and a feeling like it's not going to break if you start doing a lot of work with it.
Round Cube
Now the one that has a lot to show, Round Cube is much different from the other two mail clients, using javascript, newer web technology and really more on the end user having a computer with something other than Internet Explorer 6 gives the new web users a much cleaner, fun mail client to play with.
Taking the layout / design from a desktop mail application it keeps like you are using a app! Which for us web guys we love to have that feeling, and with Round Cube you have mail load up faster than the other two webmail clients even though the coding is heavier. Either that or you are just so happy with the design that time does not matter any more. Could have a few more features but very cool web application for reading your mail.
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Our favorite webmail client we have started to use in the studio when our Mail client manage is unavailable for any reason is Round Cube, a great piece of online software / application which makes great use of javascript technology.
With HTML5 & CSS3 becoming more popular we are interested to see if a webmail client will be released using newer technology.
smurl.be API Development
Over the past few days the team has been developing the new API for smurl.be to be used on desktop & web based application for free.
The response:
<url>
<fullurl>http://www.yourdomain.com/</fullurl>
<shorturl>eb268</shorturl>
<shorturlfull>http://smurl.be/?eb268</shorturlfull>
<date>30/April/2010</date>
<code>200</code>
<api_version>1.0</api_version>
</url>
You will be able to post either a FORM or URL variables to the API to get an XML return response. This will be a major add-on to the powerful URL shortener and more updates will follow. Anyone wanting to keep updated with the smurl.be project please follow us on Twitter to get the latest.
The API will be released early May after final tests.
We now develop using Railo 3.1
Over the past few weeks we have been working on setting up our Railo based servers to allow us to start working with a open source based scripting that using ColdFusion pages and components. This allows for lower costs in web development due to no costs on development technology such as ColdFusion.
All new websites will start to be developed using Railo but also tested on ColdFusion servers so we can allow our clients to pick either type of service.
We can use Railo for:
- Content Management Systems (CMS)
- Blogs & Forum Systems
- Contact Managers
- Social Media
- And many more custom solutions
If you would like to learn more about our development systems please contact us.