Hi All, I’m Carwyn Balch, the latest addition to the Coolbox web development team. Although studying as an electronics engineer, I quickly turned both technology journalist and programmer, founding a popular technology publication and at the same time writing, studying and developing many Content Management applications. This is my first post and I’d like to give you an overview of web development frameworks and share some of my experiences of using them.
NHS work featured in Figaro Digital
by Rob : Thursday 14 January 2010
The NHS ‘Save the Tin Man!’ campaign has been featured as a case study in the latest edition of industry magazine, Figaro Digital.
Nice to see our faces in a magazine, although becoming “the face of the campaign” has gone to Andy’s head a little if you ask me!
Santa Hamper Competition
by Rob : Monday 07 December 2009
Santa goes to town
Those of you on our current Christmas card list should have received this year’s fold-it-yourself origami style greeting this morning*. “Why have one fold when you can have nine?” we thought, although if you had trouble following the “simple instructions” you might not agree!
Finished!
by Nick : Tuesday 10 November 2009
Rob and I looking a lot better than we both feel!
We made it! Here’s nice cheesy a photo of Rob and I at the finish line of the Cardiff Half Marathon this year looking surprisingly sprightly. We made it round the course 2:12hrs and 2:18hrs and raised over £1000 collectively for our chosen charities Myeloma UK and The Welbodi Partnership. A big thank you to everyone who sponsored us. Same again next year Rob?
P.S. Mine was the 2:12hrs in case anyone was wondering ;-)
3…2…1…Save the Tin Man!
by Rob : Thursday 22 October 2009
Recognise anyone?!
We’ve been sworn to secrecy until now, so we’ve been bursting to tell you that we’ve been working on a very exciting project for NHS Blood and Transplant of late.
The Strongest Link (almost)
by Nick : Wednesday 26 August 2009
Coolbox Home Page as seen by Site Overlay
We’ve been using the Site Overlay tool within Google Analytics recently to help us learn more about how users are interacting with our site and which areas are most popular with readers (and which aren’t). Of course, statistics about most visited pages have been available for longer than I’d care to mention, but Site Overlay really brings them to life within a visual context, as the screenshot illustrates.
Photomarathon
by Hannah : Friday 14 August 2009
my entry number + colourful
With my old SLR camera dusted off I made my way to Wales Millennium Centre to join the other 400 odd entrants to take part in this year’s Photomarathon. But what is a Photomarathon? I hear you cry…
Marathon Men (well, Half Marathon)
by Nick : Thursday 30 July 2009
Recognise the portly pair above? Well, Rob and I have decided to take on a new challenge outside of work, to run the Cardiff Half Marathon this October with the aim of getting fit and raising some money for charity.
In Search of the Perfect Product
by Andy : Tuesday 21 July 2009…Well the perfect product module that is.
Myself and Rob have recently been rebuilding the backend of our CMS (Content Management System). We were finding that we were making lots of changes to the core files each time we wrote a site for a client, and since the big benefits of using a CMS for us is confidence in the integrity of the code (as we can run unit tests against the core files), as well as speed of writing a new site by using existing modules.
Therefore, we decided we needed to go back to the start and make each of the modules as generic as we possibly could to cope with every eventuality. For the most part this is proving fairly straight forward. For a news module for example you will want a title, the date it is published, and the story, whilst with a Frequently Asked Questions module you will want a question and an answer.
But the products module wasn’t so easy…
Disposable Servers in the “Cloud”
by Rob Tuley : Thursday 16 July 2009Recently we’ve been having a server hosting review, and as a result moved some of our hosting into the “cloud”. I always think “cloud computing” is a somewhat mysterious term, but to me it essentially means abstraction of hardware from function. If I rent a dedicated server I am renting a physical linux box with XXX RAM & XXX processor, in a “cloud” environment I rent an “instance” which has XXX RAM & XXX processor. Sounds similar? Well, it is. And the cloud “instance” functions pretty much the same as a physical linux box.
So what’s all the fuss about with this “cloud computing” marlarky? Well, the cloud has several very powerful features that you wouldn’t get with a normal dedicated server. Several cloud services are available, here I will be talking about features of Amazon EC2 service (but Rackspace also do an alternative although with a much less mature API).