By Jordan Hall 12th December 2013
You might have heard of Bitcoin in the news. It's had a great deal of worldwide media attention in recent weeks. But what exactly is Bitcoin and how can it help your business and e-commerce website? Bitcoin is both a new digital currency and a payment system. It is a secure and very inexpensive method to handle payments online or in person. Bitcoin offers many advantages to businesses thinking about accepting them on their e-commerce website, s...
By Kirsty Gasston 2nd April 2013
Ecommerce is continuing to grow, with more and more shoppers purchasing on the web rather than going in-store. Selling your products online shouldn’t start and finish with your ecommerce website, though. It is also important to create Google Product Feeds so that your products will be listed in Google’s Shopping listings. Big name online sellers such as Amazon and Play also offer companies the ability to sell their products through their cha...
By Kirsty Gasston 25th March 2013
There are so many ways to access the internet and view websites now – computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones – and figures show that over 10% of internet browsing worldwide is now done via a mobile browser. Of course users expect websites to display and function correctly across all of their devices. So what do we do as web designers to make sure that this is the case? We design sites to be responsive. Media queries are used to recognise th...
By Jordan Hall 26th September 2011
A boom in Internet businesses could open hundreds of thousands of jobs in Britain within five years, a Google chief has claimed. Philipp Schindler, the London based vice-president of Google Europe, predicted that despite the economic downturn 365,000 jobs could be on the cards by 2015 as more online firms emerge and grow. Daily Mail article Could new Internet businesses such as e-commerce websites start a new wave of employment in the UK, gene...
By Jordan Hall 26th July 2011
The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions. There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This i...
By Jordan Hall 3rd May 2011
A variety of Internet firms have stated that online video streaming records have been broken over the course of the UK's recent royal wedding. "The royal wedding has broken records for the biggest ever live streaming audience online, according to a internet firms. ... The BBC website meanwhile wobbled under the strain this morning as huge numbers of Britons accessed its coverage. Visitors were intermittently greeted with an error message sayin...
By Jordan Hall 19th April 2011
The inventor of the web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed. He been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype. Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow. "If it fail...
By Jordan Hall 2nd July 2010
Wait... hold on. Firstly, what are MyISAM and InnoDB? MyISAM and InnoDB are the two commonly used MySQL engines for database tables. MyISAM is the default database engine for new tables created in MySQL 4 and 5. So, why would I want to use one over the other? Good question. Perhaps it is best answered by going through the differences between the two database engines. InnoDB is a more modern database engine than MyISAM, so some could say MyIS...
By Jordan Hall 28th May 2010
HTML 5 introduces several new tags which focus of defining the content of a page in a machine readable fashion. In today's websites, if a computer program attempts to pick out a particular part of a page, such as the main article, the sidebar or the top navigation, it would have difficulty. This is because every website structures its HTML differently, and most modern websites use <p>, <div> and <span> tags to surround their co...
By Jordan Hall 28th April 2010
I previously posted on how Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system and the advantages this will bring to mobile web developers. Nokia has now released their first mobile device based on the open-source version of Symbian, the Nokia N8 phone. It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February. The Foundation - which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung am...
By Jordan Hall 22nd April 2010
A recent automated update to McAfee Anti-virus software caused the software to mistaken detect a key Windows system program as malicious and move it out of its proper location to a McAfee anti-virus quarantine. Due to the critical nature of the quarantined system program, 'svchost.com', affected computers failed to start correctly and were sent into a rebooting loop. According to Microsoft, the affected file 'is a generic host process name for ...
By Jordan Hall 7th April 2010
WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains. WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten whi...