WordPress Training
Posted on | August 30, 2010 | Comments Off
Just got a freshly pressed WordPress website, but cannot get your developer to provide support for love nor money? Then get in touch.
OurLocality takes first baby steps
Posted on | August 23, 2010 | Comments Off
After some toing and a bit of froing, OurLocality was launched last week. You didn’t hear the fanfares? Alas there were none. The idea behind Our Locality is a simple one: connecting all things local.
To kick off with, we migrated Sustaining Dunbar onto the platform and created a number of project sites, such as BeGreen Dunbar & District. The old site in a matter of months had become decidedly cramped and it was difficult to reconcile sometimes competing demands. Only a week has passed, but everything seems to be working surprisingly well and all excited by the new possibilities.
A clutch of new sites have also been created, but we’ve yet to open up access to the masses. We’re happy to set anyone up who asks, nicely of course.
Next up are thematic and geographic networks.
Configuring Multisite WordPress
Posted on | May 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Step one
If you are going to use svn make sure you have it. On Debian,
# apt-get update
# apt-get install subversion
# apt-get install libapache2-svn
(http://www.howtoforge.com/debian_subversion_websvn for more svn info.)
Then get yourself the latest WP
(http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion)
Navigate to your working directory (root)
# svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .
Then create your database and user.
Navigate to your installation and supply the database info.
You’ll probably be asked to create wp-config.php manually.
Login to see it is working as expected.
Create and chmod the uploads directory to 777
You may need to chown -R ftp-name * to use ftp.
Now add to wp-config.php
/** The Go Multi Site. */
define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true ) ;
And under tools, a new option appears: Network.
Follow the instructions to set up with subdomains or folders (mapping domains to blogs apparently unconstrained by which option now).
Update your .htaccess and wp-config.php files.
You are done.
Sustaining Dunbar Migrating to Google Apps
Posted on | April 3, 2010 | Comments Off
There are around a dozen email users at Sustaining Dunbar. Staff and volunteers have been using a variety of email clients and email providers to keep in touch. Some were already users of consumer Gmail accounts, Google Calendars and Google Docs, while others used a range of email applications or just webmail.
Each migration presented new problems and issues, uncovering some of the idiosyncrasies of Google Apps.
The Jekyll and Hyde problem occurs when existing users are already using their new Google Apps email address to access consumer Google services like Gmail. On setting up the new Google Apps accounts, we learnt quickly that it was best to first decouple such user’s current email address from the old Google account.
Then their was the problem of migrating web only email users to their Google Apps. We used the handy IMAP gmail-backup tool for this, as this is supported by consumer Gmail. Thousands of emails and complex labels were transferred with minimum errors and fuss.
Then there were Windows Mail users, which we transferred by first exporting the emls and underlying folder structure to Thunderbird. Then we flattened the hierarchy and reduced the number of items in each folder – some had several thousands of emails. We then created an IMAP connection with Google Apps and then simply copied the folders over (remembering to be online or the copy won’t do anything at all!). This is slow, so it might be easier to swap the settings in prefs.js to make a POP account IMAP, though synchronisation speed is unlikely to be improved.
For migrating Google Docs, we used Gladinet’s handy tool to link up to Gmail and Google Apps and simply dragged and dropped, not the fastest transfer – but it worked without error.
For small uncomplicated (few folders, few emails) email accounts based on Outlook or Thunderbird, the the Google Email Uploader is quite handy. In the past this has worked well on larger accounts, but it doesn’t match the IMAP job which clusters conversations well and creates labels to boot, without errors.
Work in progress
Posted on | October 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Some recent projects that we have been been working on:
Migrating to Google Apps @ Sustaining Dunbar
Linda Fleming
Map facilities at Sustaining Dunbar
Templelands Self Catering Holiday Flat
Website Self Sufficiency
Posted on | September 18, 2009 | Comments Off
Our aim is to help you become more self sufficient and get more from a small budget.
Whether you are looking at being be more productive or collaborate more effectively or simply want to create a conversation with your customers/audience. Or perhaps you are looking to better integrate your systems.
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Ecomonkey
Posted on | November 11, 2007 | No Comments
One of our major projects went beta last month. Ecomonkey.co.uk our green rewards website is a first, probably. And it’s not any old green shopping website, nor any old green rewards programme.
Deceptively simple on the surface, it’s nevertheless unique and really very clever under the bonnet.
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