By Ashley Peake 24th September 2015
A lot of people are now upgrading from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 due to the free upgrade that Microsoft are offering. I have now completed this upgrade over 20 times on various PCs and laptops and I've found that 90% of the time everything works as expected, however I have seen a handful of issues crop up and here is one you may come across if you use Microsoft Outlook. (0x800CCC13): 'Cannot Connect to the network. Verify your network c...
By Mark Jones 19th June 2015
Inversion of Control (IoC) In the previous article (part 2), we talked about using Dependency Injection and Programming to an Interface to make your code more modular. However, we realised that we still had an issue with confusion and complexity whenever we needed to instantiate a class that requires a lot of arguments to be passed to it. Also if any of the classes arguments needed changing, then we would have to go through all our code and mod...
In recent years, open source software has become more frequently used by businesses and individuals alike. Why is this, and what makes open source solutions so increasingly popular? Below I list five reasons why open source software can be good for your business. Security The security of software used in your business is very important. It is used to protect, process and store your company's intellectual property. By its nature open source softwa...
By Kirsty Gasston 12th June 2015
So by now we all know that we should be using social media for our businesses right? And hopefully you know how to engage with your audiences across Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest. But do you know how to measure the results of your activity on these social media channels? Well if not, here's a quick overview of the social media analytics that are available and how you can access them. Twitter You can see detailed reports on the numb...
By Mark Jones 8th June 2015
Real World Example In the previous article in this series, I spoke about dependency injection using cars and engines as an example. In this article I will show you a more practical example by showing you how easy it can be for your system to switch between different database ORMs (Eloquent and PDO in this example) without having to recode everywhere that interacts with the database. Just in case you're not sure what an ORM is, ORM stands for O...
By Matt Fennell 26th May 2015
On May 19th, I was fortunate enough to be sent by Rapid Web Services to UpFront Conference 2015 at the Comedy Club in Manchester. It was a long day, starting with a train from Stafford at 7.30am, and not getting back until around Midnight. Below is a brief overview of my highlights, and what I personally took from the day: Atomic Design Brad Frost, 10:00 - 10:40 What a way to open the conference! Brad was confident and passionate; perfectly k...
By Kirsty Gasston 1st April 2015
If you're having a new website built, are adding pages to your existing website or just updating the content on the site, you need to think carefully about the approach you take to writing the content. Before you get started, take a step back and make sure that you've thought about these basics. Web users won't read your content So, probably not want you want to hear when you're setting out to write your website content, but you need to accept th...
By Matt Fennell 26th February 2015
All throughout University, and in my career as a web designer, the desktop design has come first. I’ve learned how to design for desktops, creating pixel-perfect Photoshop PSDs which look perfect for clients, but this is changing. Since 2014 there are now more mobile users than desktop users, with roughly 2 billion of us reaching for our smartphones or tablets when wanting to access the internet. These statistics have caused web designer...
By Peter Chiu 19th February 2015
Bootstrap is arguably the daddy of all the frontend frameworks currently available on the web and with the list of features as long as a one page website and with version 3 built upon mobile first principles it’s easy to see why. In this article we’re going to cover some of the main features and components as well as some lesser known built-in classes which are extremely useful. Grid System Bootstrap offers a standard 12 column grid system wh...
By Mark Jones 18th February 2015
During the course of this series we will look into the following coding methods/principles: Dependency Injection Coding to an Interface Inversion of Control Automatic Resolution I will explain what each one means, why we should use them, and how to implement each one. Dependency injection, coding to an interface, and inversion of control work well together so I will discuss those three first, and by the end of it, I will give you a full co...
By Jordan Hall 9th February 2015
I recently gave a presentation at Rapid Web Services regarding Git. It covers the background of Git, how it works internally, and some examples of daily use. The presentation also covers commonly used Git terminology and provides a frequently used command reference. 'The Fundamentals of Git' presentation is embedded below. Comments and constructive feedback are definitely welcome. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribut...
By Matt Fennell 2nd January 2015
Each year new web trends come along, some last the course and stay, whereas some only have a moment in the spotlight. I’ve now been engaged in the web world for 5 years, and have seen plenty of trends come and go. The list below is based on my opinion of what will become popular in 2015, and what previous trends will continue to reign supreme. Webgraphics Infographics have exploded onto the web, largely thanks to social media websites such ...