Code deployment via Subversion

October 15, 2009

I’m a huge fan of Subversion (aka svn) becuase it’s a robust and easy to use version control system and, well to be honest, I never really got on all that well with CVS. After 2 years developing on Macs, I’m now back using a PC to build the BeGrand.net site. On the Mac eveything [...]

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Remember the Milk on your desktop

October 14, 2009

I’m a  big fan of RememberTheMilk to keep my to-do lists organised. It’s intuitive, easy to use and takes no time at all to setup. I also use the iPhone app (which is free if you have a pro account). This has the advantage of being location aware, so if you use the Getting Things [...]

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PHP and PATH variables in Windows

October 14, 2009

Just in case anyone else encounters the same issue as I did installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Windows XP, here’s a quick tip to save a bit of frustration and time.
Setting up my local development machine I wanted to mirror the staging environment which I’d setup manually rather than using a stack like WAMP, [...]

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Design for Sign-Up – Lazy Registration in Drupal

October 14, 2009

One of our key challenges in building BeGrand.net is that we have ambitious targets set for the number of Registered Users on the site. In a perfect world, everyone who visits your website would immediately be amazed at the cornucopia of wonders it offers and would willingly crawl over metaphorical broken glass to sign up [...]

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Balsamiq Mockups – better than Moleskine!

October 12, 2009
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Until about a week ago I was convinced that the best wireframing setup possible was a Moleskine Large Squared Notebook and a decent Pen, the rationale being that it was quicker, more intuitive and more efficient than any software for this task. That was until I was introduced to Balsamiq Mockups (hat tip: Mark [...]

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Short Code Kerfuffle

October 12, 2009

Arrived nice and early this morning to find Rik tearing his hair out about a weird bug in the Thesis theme that we’re using for the BeGrand.net blog. Basically, it was all working fine on a local machine, but when the theme was uploaded to our live server the settings in the custom_functions.php were being [...]

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Hello world!

October 9, 2009

So, we are building an online community / social network / information resource for Grandparents, which will be at www.begrand.net. The purpose of this blog is to document the development process, partly for our own selfish needs, but also because we think it might be useful and interesting for others. We live in hope. If [...]

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