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Spam and the benefits of using Gmail

Spam emails are a nuisance for anyone using email for their business. Dealing with a constant stream of unwanted mail can seem like a never-ending battle. We are often receiving requests from clients wanting to reduce the amount of spam filling up their inbox, and we find ourselves more and…

Pearl Bay has gone live!

We are very happy to announce that the Pearl Bay website has gone live! Meet Pearl - a lovingly restored VW Camper van, available for wedding and event hire. Pearl provides a memorable way to travel on your special day, as well as adding a unique touch to other events and…

How to view the source of an HTML email

Creating HTML emails is a bit of an art form, although as anyone who's had the joy of creating an HTML email knows, it's a rather semantically ugly form of art.Making an email work across the multitude of different devices and email clients requires an awful lot of tricks and…

New design for Facebook’s newsfeed

Facebook are going to start rolling out a new design for their famous news feed.You may be most familiar with the design below:Or you may have spent the last year / few months looking at this:Personally I never got the design above - when it started appearing for Tom last…

A lesson in usability: sometimes less is more

I was talking to someone the other day who isn't particularly Internet savvy and was trying to set up a Skype account.This person doesn't use the Internet or email too often, but when they do they generally get on OK because they read things carefully, apply common sense and aren't…

Spam email pretending to be from Amazon

I've just had an email apparently from Amazon telling me that my account has been suspended.The email reads:Amazon Customer, [my email address]Your Amazon account has been temporarly suspended for security reasons.After our Security Department made a close checking of your account we discovered that on your account were present unusual…

How to Analyse a website for speed

How quickly a website works is vitally important to its success. There are a million reasons why a website could be running slowly, but the following suggestions might put you on the path to diagnosing the bottleneck. Firstly, you might find it useful to install a Chrome extension/plugin called yslow, which…

Implementing caching to speed up a flickr API implementation

Western Design Architects came to us with an extremely slow site. And I mean sllooowww!The site gets all it's images from Flickr - a great idea meaning WDA only need to upload their photos in 1 place for exposure in 2, they can utilise Flickr apps for getting their latest…

The responsibility of being a programmer

Visitors to the NHS website on Sunday evening were sent to an infected website.I read an article on Wednesday about how visitors to the NHS website on Sunday evening found themselves being sent to web pages hosting malware or - at best - ads which the visitors didn't intend to…

Tips for Installing a 123-reg (GlobalSign) Domain SSL certificate on an Amazon EC2 Instance Running Apache 2.*

This process caused me a couple of issues when I came to do it just now, so I hope the following notes might prove helpful to someone (or possibly me next time I come to do this and have forgotten everything I just did!). In no particular order: 1. Once…

Vimeo launch their new accessible player

It's been 14 months in the making but Vimeo have revealed their new player which they've built from the ground up.Whilst they say it might look largely the same, the player has been completely rebuilt to be fully responsive and to suit as many of the vast array of devices…

Upgrading a Server on Amazon EC2

Changing an EC2 instance type is not as straight forward as you might think, so I'm writing this post in note form as a reference for next time I come to do it. If it can also be of help to anyone else out there trying to get to grips with…