Following the journey of one company's quest to be the best web agency in the British political sector.
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SMSToMailbox Android App →
SMSToMailbox does what it says on the tin - backs up your SMS messages to your Gmail (or other IMAP) mailbox. You can even use your Gmail on your computer to remotely send and receive SMS and MMS messages. Ideal if you like to keep the phone charging in one room and your computer is in another or if you are at work and need to keep texting discreet.
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On Facebook’s Place App
Facebook are launching a Foursquare-style app that allows Facebook users to “check-in” to physical locations, sometimes automatically. The feature will allow friends to see where you are wit the intention being to develop a range of games or social apps that take advantage of location-based information. For example, advertisers can provide discounts for check-ins against products and services. You can also imagine check-in parties given Facebook’s past with spontaneous party organisers.
My prediction around Facebook Places is that it will be a massive success. Geo-location is the next big thing around mobile apps, a market that’s already set to surpass the desktop for web-browsing activity. 2010 is the year all about the app and people will be attracted to the cleverness of geolocation.
It will take some pretty horrific horror stories about Places privacy going wrong to really derail Facebook’s growth in this area. The operation is already more than aware how damaging privacy concerns can be following recent media coverage and subsequent changes to the usability of privacy settings.
As a Facebook user you will have control about what geolocation information you share and you really must be a grade-A idiot if you share your location with the entire world and then wonder why you were burgled whilst you were checked in at work or are being followed by weird stalkers.
What does Facebook Places mean for politics? Watch this space. I’m thinking campaign-trail based apps, surgery check-ins, protests and demos.
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Our New Corporate Colours
Roused Orange
H:15 S:83 B:94
R: 240 G:90 B:40
L: 59 A:57 B:58
C:0 M:80 Y:95 K:0
#F05A28
Roused Royal Purple
H:244 S:65 B:38
R:38 G:34 B:97
L:17 A:18 B:-38
C:100 M:100 Y:31 K:22
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"Meet @mikerouse — He’s #HootSuite’s first new sign-on for the Platinum package!"
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Rebuild and Reinstall Weekend
In our experience when you’ve got a popular site running on WordPress it’s possible for it to start crumbling unless you pay careful attention to it.
In our old way of working we simply installed websites, but did not put any ongoing maintenance agreements in place. Any future needs were done somewhat casually.
Now we’ve had a casualty of that way of working that strengthens and justifies our new method. A client’s blog is crumbling and we now need to take action.
- Introduce Subversion Control (SVN) to allow rollbacks and deployments to development, staging and production environments. Tighter control of the WordPress code.
- Introduce files to a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to seperate content files (images, pictures, stylesheets, etc) and scripts, which in turn improves page loading time and reduces strain on the server.
- Replace the current backup regime with our new methods, which we’re not sharing as they’re commercially sensitive and need to be kept secure.
- Introduce automated alerting of future problems by performing regular ‘heartbeat’ checks on the site.
We’re also going to refine the code and make things a bit slicker. Once complete the client will be part of “Roused” and say goodbye to the “Rouse Media” way of working.
To get to the new nirvana we’re going to rebuild the WordPress installation from scratch - using latest methods and cloud deployment techniques. Once that’s done we’ll port the template, images and audio files over. Lastly, we’ll drop in the database of content after scanning it for problems.
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
