We specialise in dynamic websites, online stores and E-newsletters.

We’ve just launched toughquestions.org for Bob Eckhard, and london language learning for Stefan Anstis - two smaller sized projects to keep our eye in - it was quite a joy to build some static simple web sites (laced with Google Analytics and some basic Search Engine Optimisation) for a change - Stefan’s design was provided by up-and-coming musician and designer Bobby Cole at catch22media. There’s been a lot more going on than meets the eye but most of the other projects are in-house or not ready for publishing yet.

We’ve just completed our first implementation using Multimap’s latest javascript API. Primarily it provides the familiar ’slippy’ (draggable) map interface gracing the latest version of Multimap’s web site and that featured on Google maps. The advantages of using Multimap’s Javascript API over other providers are the following:

1. You can pick up the phone and get support from a human being in this country!
2. You get a guaranteed service, no possible future changes to the terms and conditions for the duration of your contract
3. A really powerful suite of geocoding management and distance calculation tools.
4. The service is fully documented, which on the whole is pretty comprehensive.

You pay for this privilege, but you are paying for access to Multimap’s 12 years of online mapping experience. Our latest implementation can be seen on the Aspire Property web site  where we have integrated the Multimap API with Aspire’s current web site and web design.

It features:

• automatically zooming ’slippy’ maps to fit your search criteria
• a full location search by property price, property type
• location branch details highlighted with branch icons and info
• custom property detail pop up windows
• integrated local information, including schools, train stations and tube stations

There are loads more improvements and features the Multimap API will let us do and we’re hoping to be let loose on more clients to implement them in the future.

We’ve previously used Google Maps to create a similar ’store-locator’ product however now Multimap have introduced this new API we can now utilise their advanced spatial (and non spatial) filtering and searching systems rather than having to build them bespoke for each implementation and then integrate with the Google Maps API.

We’ve been working with the Get Bike team for almost 2 years now and after drastically reducing their Google Adwords spend and increasing their ranking in the main Google results we are making good progress (have a look at CBT London in Google: that’s number one of about 1 million and that’s just one term.)

Internally they now have an intranet based Booking Calendar to book in the thousands of people they help through their Compulsory Basic Motorbike Training each year. As part of our gradual roll out we have just released the Online Booking Element which checks their intranet for booking availability and allows pupils to reserve a space on the web site.

Rather than re-invent the calendar system, we have used Yahoo’s excellent calendar plug-in too - part of the set of user interface tools Yahoo have kindly released to the developer community. We also use Ajax technologies so that the office based system automatically updates itself whenever a new online or office based booking is made. As you can see from the booking system we are going for a gradual release - it’s not fully automated yet, because the pupil must be able to provide their licence to take the course, although we are hoping to move that way soon.

Once a booking is made online and confirmed or in the office then Get Bike’s internal 3rd party accounting system is automatically updated with the pupils details and their payment information.

It looks that we will seriously save admin time, decrease the mistakes in the paper based system and allow people to book out of hours: this truly fits with our vision for Online Business.

Next up it’s time to make the Get Bike site look as nice as it performs.

Watchmouse, who we use to monitor our client’s web sites (and obviously our servers) introduced some interesting statistics over the summer. They monitor our web sites from checkpoint’s all over the world and notify us within seconds by email if any of the monitoring stations detect a significant slow down. They also have some great Apple Mac desktop widgets which allow us to see at any time the health of all our web sites and servers. From approximately 60 web sites on 5 servers I think we’ve only experienced one hour of downtime combined over the entire last year: that’s better than 99.9% of the time.

It’s also very reassuring when they email you back to tell you the site’s are back up too! Although judging from the research they have conducted analysing the average performance of all the web sites they monitor we don’t have to worry about this so much. They say Open Source web sites are more reliable and load faster than Windows-based websites, and they all say the web server we use outperforms those on Microsoft based web servers. They say that in this country big business tends to prefer Microsoft based solutions, but that in fact they would be better off using Linux/Apache solutions - it’s no surprise it’s the kind of technology that powers the major internet companies web sites around the world.

You can leverage that performance and up-time by ensuring you deliver your next web site using this technology too.

You can read the full article here, and don’t forget to sign up for Watchmouse to check your websites too - and when you need to switch to Linux, get in touch.

Multimap have a new web site, and are slowly transitioning their users across to it, if you haven’t seen it aleady then it’s well worth a look - follow the “try our new site” link under the logo. The new Multimap site, the first new iteration since I left is wonderful, it’s slick, it’s left brain, it looks and feels like a Mac application or a modern 2007 web application, it’s more than a web site. The maps can be as big as you want them - my 17″ widescreen Imac was filled with Bartholemews map data, I can click and drag and pull maps around, I can save locations to access later.

The route planning has also had a major overhaul and is now cleverly split into 3 panels - an overview of the entire route, a smaller map of the starting location and a similar one of the end point. The interface in all of the sections is simply lovely, clean, and easy to use.

The exciting thing from my point of view is that we are now starting to see the site working like a true mapping application, it’s more than a web site. I can easily use the bits I want to, hide the bits I don’t, save the things I want to return to, print out the results and send them to my friends. Interestingly you’ll probably use it in a completely different manner to me, you’ll have a completely different experience and hopefully you’ll love it just as much.

In fact when Simon demo’d the site to us in a meeting last Friday I discovered so much more to the site than first meets the eye, and also there’s so much more to come, as if the Ebay mash up, point saving, and worldwide integration wasn’t enough!

They’re still transitioning to the new site so at the moment you’ll have to select the “try our new web site” under the logo (and can return to the old site at any time).

As always with Multimap and when you’re dealing with new technology and 10million users it’s sometimes a little slow or there are small glitches but overall Simon Lewis, and the team at LBi have done a fantastic job. More interestingly all the functionality on the web site, is available to Multimap business customers using their API, so if your business has an old fashioned store locator, maybe it’s time to get in touch and upgrade it to the new Multimap system, take advantage of all the fantastic new features and more importantly that beautifully slick user experience. If Apple Mac made maps this is what it would be like.

We’re pleased to announce probably our most significant development to date: the Homebase.co.uk store locator. This service uses the Multimap service to provide ‘find you nearest’ store functionality for the UK and Eire on the Homebase web site. We turned the implementation round in a few contracted days to deliver this fully functioning store finder. Do you need to show your customers where your stores are on your web site, or need your store finder upgrading or enhancing then get in touch.

We’ve also upgraded the Carparks4u.com web site which now uses the Multimap API (XML based) to deliver it’s mapping which provides enhanced functionality such as data piracy prevention, enhanced search engine optimisation, click tracking and reporting. If you need a php based application to do this - then we’ve already written the code so maybe we can help, and if you need further integration with your internal systems then we’ve already done the hard work so we can concentrate on the cool bits.

It was very refreshing to hear the death knell of the brand last night at Iain Curruthers’ book launch, Great Brand Stories: Dyson. Iain had chosen his venue wisely - we were surrounded by the creative output of the psychotherapeutic department at the Regents Park Conference Center - and there were a pleasing number of people from Dyson’s team present for Iain’s independent investigation of their brand.

His talk, and ideas seemed more appropriate to stimulate a lively discussion rather than a book launch and I was itching to discuss his ideas further, although unfortunately we weren’t given the opportunity. It just felt so honest and refreshing to hear and read that despite the marketeers James Dyson remained true to his cause and his ethos. He wanted to know how things worked and wanted his marketing efforts to reflect this and not some vacuous marketing ‘position’. Iain rounded things off by asking ‘When someone spends two hundred pounds on a Dyson how much of that are they paying for the Dyson and how much are they happy to pay for the story of the great British inventor.’

Well according to the Dyson marketeers in the room the Americans are lapping up the concept of the latter. Although apparently Mr Dyson is resisting their attempts to make him wear glasses and a white coat. You can buy the book here from Amazon and read all about the final throws of brand at Iain’s new web site www.encounterbusiness.com. It’s another fully content managed web site built by Asymmetry, this time based on the fabulous wordpress blogging platform.

After the book launch it was off to Unique Digital’s pub, yes that’s right, Unique’s management team own a pub! I must thank the Unique management team for collecting all the faces new and old together at The Albion for a great party.

The PHP London user group put on an amazing day conference on Friday. It was fantastically well run, had a great set of talks and was only £50. Most people I know would laugh at a conference that cheap and would say it wouldn’t be worth attending. Well the organisers proved them totally wrong, I would have paid the £50 purely to hear Rasmus Lerdorf speak about the current status of PHP - he’s the guy credited with inventing the language and responsible for it’s future direction. What could be more valuable than hearing on it’s progress straight from the horses mouth? Not only did we have Rasmus (and the free lunch) but 4 other exciting talks. For those who php doesn’t mean anything too - well it’s the langauge that we (and major companies like Yahoo) use to create rich, involving dynamic web sites.
The day was run at the Keyworth Center which is part of the South Bank University which provided just enough space in the lecture room for the fully packed conference - about 260 delegates.

Cal Evans - My First Mash Up

First up was Cal Evans with a simple overview of how to create a mash-up - in this case combining a feed from UPS and a feed from Google maps into a web site where users can track the location and the path their parcel has taken to get to them. Pretty simple stuff, and it was great to be given a few pointers on how to make it even simpler, from an expert such as Cal. We do something similar for New Wine, but Cal showed us a few modules from Zend which would make the process even less painful.

Simon Laws: Web services - drop it into Apache and away you go!

Simon showed us he highlights of an excellent new initiative from IBM and others which allows companies to split their complex systems into their components and then access them as stand-alone systems. This is surely the future of web development - you can use this system to create feeds with API’s similar to the Google mapping feed, or the Flickr photo feed. Imagine how flexible your systems would be if your organisation could take it’s Contact’s information from it’s database and package that as one stand-alone system, which could then be hooked into any other diverse internal systems (say email) or external systems such as Google Maps (or Google Search). This was of thinking is just starting to make it through to the main stream and I’m sure that it’s another concept (like web communities) which after mentioning to our customers, and allowing them some time to consider it will come back to us and say, about that .. feed, can we have one please. The SCA system discussed by Simon will allow us to do just that, although from the post talk discussions it seems that it’s not quite ready yet - it will be soon, and I think it’s the future of web development, at least for Big and Medium size organisations.

Kevlin Henney - Objects of Desire

Even with the traditional post-lunch sleep slot, Kelvin managed to enthuse and excite us all about Object Oriented Programming techniques. His interesting lecture style and dynamic personality meant few of us could fail to pick up on his evangelism of OO programming styles. I loved his closing notes about test-based design principals - he managed to explain very visually the fact that you don’t want to have your bugs and errors caught when you system is live and viewable to the public - his examples were photo’s from airports and train stations of notice boards with error messages. I think the collective favourite was taken in Paddington when a screen showed a train from Aachen labelled “error: not a train”. Interesting his take on PHP 5’s handling of OO was that it had “interesting attributes”. I tried not to take this as an excuse not to use OO.

Rasmus Lerdorf - Fast and Rich Web Applications with PHP 5

I was really intrigued to know what Rasmus would be like and what he would talk about and after he managed to break his computer (reonfiguring the kernel of his Mac) and take too long to set everything up I thought he was going to be an uber-geek. But he wasn’t, and he explained his ethos for creating php: he hated programming and it just got in the way of creating things - I think this summarises php in a nutshell - it’s used to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and effective manner. It does this perfectly. I may be at odds with the php purists of PHP London but those facets are what drew me to PHP in the first place and why we can use it so effectively in our business. If you can think of it then you can probably do it in PHP. The set of his slides are available on the php site.

Once he got his computer going he went on to tell us simply and practically how to make PHP faster, more scalable, more secure and simpler. It was perfect, just what the audience needed to hear to ensure that we call become better more effective deliverers of the code that he invented.

Bill Gaver - Designing for the Curious Home

I don’t think anyone knew what to expect in the final Friday afternoon slot - but what a treat from Bill. His thesis was that technological development should be so much more than just creating pink ipods (or I guess yet another community web site) but to really push the boundaries of what we do and how we interact with technology. I think we were the perfect audience to be encouraged to think out of the box, and his creations, although pretty worthless commercially managed to inspire and if nothing else make us all chuckle.

My favourite was the Drift Table, Goldsmith’s delivered it to a volunteer, didn’t explain how it worked or what it was and said.. enjoy… And then after a few months they sent an independent documentary team to interview the guy and see what he’d done with it. The lucky recipient called it his hot air ballon. The table had a little glass window in the center which showed aerial imagery of the UK. He found that if we put weights on the corners it made the images move (drift) in that direction. It was also oriented using diigital compasses to the orientation of his house. To start with he loved his hot air balloon table, and used to enjoy floating around his neughbourhood looking at things from a new perspective. Then he got frustrated that he couldn’t really control the drifting and wanted to use it like a playstation and then after he relaxed about it (and got better at controlling the rate of drift with strategically placed rocks). He started going on tours of the country with his A-Z, going to look at places he knew were desirable to live in, or phoning up his friends and telling them about some local knowledge he’d aquired about their neighbourhood. He even got to the point of inviting his friends round and taking them on tours of the coutryside and decided it was so much more interesting than TV! I think this was the most successful of their experiments and also the one closest to my mapping heart.

Overall an “out of the box” ending to a great conference.

Thanks to the fact that the latest web browsers support Open Standards in certain places it means that we can develop simple little tools to make our lives easier. The OpenSearch standard allows us to create a little piece of code which tells your web browser to add a new search engine to the little search box in the top right hand corner (which normally defaults to searching Google). Well if you have Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 then opening this file will add the ability to search the php website directly from your browser (php is the code we use to make interesting web sites).

If you’re not so technically minded this file will let you do the same on the Multimap web site - give it a go, you can easily uninstall them if you don’t like them and you never know it may make your life just that little bit easier. We created these two this morning but there are a whole host of other ones at the Mycroft web site.

The internet doesn’t need much more of an explanation than this really:

Some call it web 2.0 but it’s more than that. The proof’s in the pudding.. went to www.clagnut.com (ex-colleague’s site) -> saw eleganthack.com link -> followed it -> saw this video from Kansas summarising what we (all) do online and what the web really is about -> opened up our blogging software (wordpress) -> copied the code from youtube.com into this site -> wrote this -> 5 minutes -> no techie knowledge required.

It took me back to when I was giving a training course at Multimap on XML to some of the client services team. I asked the question what happens when web pages are written in XML that any machine, program or person can interact with.. it was a rhetorical question, not any more: we’re nearly there.