February 5th, 2010 by Tim
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Yep, we’ve put another site out there and this time it’s cleaner and greener.
The Feed in Tariff microsite built for IPS UK Ltd provides information about the clean energy cashback scheme, recently announced by the UK government. The scheme pays you to generate your own energy and feed it back into the electricity grid.
The Feed in Tariff micro-site promotes the use of photovoltaic cells to generate your own electricity. The cells are embedded into a membrane on your roof and then harness solar energy to generate electricty. It’s clean and it’s renewable unlike fossil fuels.
Being in Spain with over 300 days of sun a year, we at Zumo Internet are already tempted to give it a go. But don’t just take our word for it, there is also a Feed in Tariff factsheet for download at the site that we produced to help explain the benefits.
January 19th, 2010 by Tim
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Today, my G5 (Leopard) started displaying the Set Up Assistant everytime it booted. Even after completing setup it was impossible to access the GUI. It was held in a continuous.
If you get caught in the Leopard Setup Assistant Loop Bug, here is the way to get your Mac booting again with no loss of data.
- Boot into Safe Mode by holding down the shift key just after you hear the first boot sound. This takes an eternity so be patient.
- Don’t log in to any account. Instead press the back arrow key once (this will highlight an account).
- Then click the restart button.
- Now just wait while your Mac performs some updates and then reboots as normal again.
Even Macs break occasionally / rarely.
January 15th, 2010 by Tim
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I’ve been working with jQuery to spice up my interfaces for over 12 months now and figured it’s time to share some of the little techniques I’ve developed on the way.
The first is something I use quite alot when I am giving users the ability to administer lists of items in bulk. That including a checkbox that when checked sets the state of all the checkboxes beside a list of items to “checked”. Naturally unchecking it will uncheck all checkboxes. I’m sure you get the picture here’s the code based on two scenarios depending on your preference. But firstly you need to include the jQuery library in the head of your document (I grab mine straight from Google’s repository to save my bandwidth):
» Read more: Select and Unselect All Checkboxes with jQuery
January 2nd, 2010 by Tim
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Our latest launch is a a property web site for Homes Deluxe who specialise in La Zagaleta properties and villas. Diseno ideas in Marbella came up with a unique design for the display of this exclusive market and we built a cms, hand coded XHTML and CSS to produce a very distinct site with some amazing properties for sale in La Zagaleta and the surrounding area.
If you are looking for a property website in spain, get in touch.
November 27th, 2009 by Tim
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Recently whilst building a CakePHP app on a shiny new server I noticed some unexpected behaviour when using an alphaNumeric rule to validate a model. Whatever I passed into the model returned false. That is to say that even a valid alphanumeric string threw up an exception. (if you haven’t already dived into CakePHP, you should – it’s a rapid development framework based on MVC.)
The issue seems to be tied to PHP 5.1.2 and the way regular expressions are handled, however it seems the it may appear in other configurations too. Before I get to a workaround, note I haven’t levelled the “bug” word at either PHP nor CakePHP – for all I know it could be a difference of opinion on how something should be handled. What I do know is that I would rather harness CakePHP’s flexibility to create custom model rules than try upgrading my current live server PHP installation.
Here is an example of how you should be able to implement the alphaNumeric rule using validation in CakePHP based on a simpliefied model called “User”:
class User extends AppModel
{
var $name = 'User';
var $helpers = array('Form');
var $validate = array(
'username' => array(
'loginRule-1' => array(
'rule' => 'alphaNumeric',
'last' => true,
'message' => 'Only letters and numbers allowed'
));
}
The rule in bold italics above is the one that doesn’t always work. However this can be easily rectified with a custom rule built on a regular expression seeking out valid alphanumeric strings.
To achieve this the alphaNumeric rule just needs to be replaced with this:
"rule" => array('custom', '/^[a-z0-9]*$/i'),
Problem solved.
November 26th, 2009 by Tim
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iDent Communications is a PR & copy-writing company based in Arroyo de La Miel, Southern Spain. They are also the latest launch by Zumo Internet, my web development business.
The site is made to match iDent’s philosophy. Simple, clear and effective.
November 2nd, 2009 by Tim
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It’s the day of the dead here in Spain and to celebrate I have redesigned (long overdue) the site Zumo Internet, my business, that offers web design in Spain. I started Zumo Internet just over a year and a half ago after I left Higher Sites (a very good web design company in Somerset).
I thought my first year would be hairy to say the least, but hard work has paid off and Zumo Internet has grown more than I expected. Not only do we have web design clients in Spain, but we have also completed some major projects for sites such as Orange UK, The British Sign Language Homework Support Site and coming up this month a project for the UK Post Office.
The new site is an example of what we can do for our clients. It’s written in valid XHTML, includes some subtle bells and whistles and showcases some of our portfolio and our new branding. If your looking to hone your Spanish skills, look out for our welcome message at different times of the day.
All in all, 2009 has been a huge success and I’d like to thank my staff (Sarah), all the clients who have supported me and the media agencies I have worked with for helping Zumo Internet become a web development agency dedicated to producing quality web content regardless of the size and budget of the project.
Thank you.
October 14th, 2009 by Tim
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I stumbled across this whilst importing 1.1TB of data from a server to Amazon S3 (more on that another day). What I wanted to achieve was to be able to ssh into my remote server, issue a command to push over 200,000 mp3’s up to Amazon and to be able to exit the shell and keep the process running.
The answer lies in a command line tool called screen.
Screen allows you to start a process on a virtual screen, then detach that screen and do something else (including log out). You can also reattach your screen after logging out and logging in again.
If you dont have the screen command on your remote linux box, first install it either from source or using your favourite package manager. Then login into your remote box and run your desired command prefixed with “screen”. For example:
screen top
Now to detach the screen use CTRL+a followed by d. This will detach your screen and you can go about any other business, including quitting your remote session.
Reattaching you screen at any time is as simple as running the command:
screen -r
You can detach and reatach your screen as much as you want until your running process is finished or you kill it, at which point your virtual screen is killed too.
September 30th, 2009 by Tim
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We are happy to announce the launch of our latest client project, Blucars, a web site for a high end sports car sales company in Marbella, Spain.
The site was built in cooperation with local design agency, Diseño Ideas, who provided the designs. We cut the HTML, crafted a bespoke CMS using PHP and MySQL and hooked it all up to an attractive front end. We also added our usual blend of jQuery with a new twist for some special effects.
September 22nd, 2009 by Tim
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Over at my Web Development Agency in Spain we’ve been busy again and we are pretty chuffed with the results. Once again working with TMax Media we have built and just launched BSL Homework Support a website that offers resources, and assessments for anyone interested in learning sign language.
We cut the XHTML, wrote the CSS and used PHP and MySQL to power the online purchasing and content retrieval system. The site features thousands of video clips that we deliver using jQuery and some elegant third party applications such as Shadowbox and JWPlayer.
If you are looking for something special for your next web project, or you’re a media agency looking for a reliable and talented web development service, please email info@zumointernet.com and we’ll let you know what we can do to you.
