Alex Burrows's blog

I have been recently been working for an agency in Windsor on a huge project for a massive Japanese automotive company working on their website. The website serves all the companies UK dealerships. The solution was of course Drupal and domain access working off AWS. The website was underperforming and load time was not something to be desired.

When working on a big site and constantly updating code committing and pushing to git and deploying to staging you need to be able to update the site easily. Well you have git to aide you with this but to make life easier with updates Drupal has a fantastic tool called Drush ( http://www.drush.ws) I have been using this tool for over a year now and will never look back on it. I can run many commands from it which also can make the site perform faster as its being done via the command line.

In order to get into the regulars (police) I require 6/6 vision unaided. Due to my poor vision I opted for laser eye surgery and looked at two places.
The first was called Ultralase and the second Optegra, I had previously enquired with Optimax but they kept hassling me and so I took them off the list.

Just started to play with the first non-development release of Drupal 7, and since I last played with it back in June in it's early stages there have been some incredible improvements from what I can see already and after some more thorough testing I may start to develop onto the Drupal 7 platform, currently only building on Drupal 6 platform.

Checking my email, i noticed an email from HSBC. Firstly I don't bank with them so knew straight away its a phishing email.

I thought I would read the email, if it's to trick me it's got to be good and well spelt. The fact that an HTML page of the form I must fill out was attached, made me view the code afterwards, after some tracing I traced the IP back to a Mexican company.

Anyway for your enjoyment here is said email:

When I attend meetings I usually turn up with a notepad and pen to make notes, and I would get lost on each clients project from the notes I had. I decided to purchase an iPad 32GB wifi + 3G as I felt there must be a better way to organise my work and not have loads of notepads for each project.

Did it work?

I now use my iPad for making notes, yes notes, onto it. I bought an app called Penultimate and a iPad stylus made by Boxwave.

When choosing which CMS you want to work with there is always questions you have to ask yourself.

One of the top questions is the community surrounding it, I have used quite a few CMS's, and a really important question is how is the community towards the product. What is so rewarding is giving something back to the community.

Recently I freelanced in a school to sort their website out, the aim was originally to train them on Dreamweaver CS5.

Now Dreamweaver is a package for webdevelopers or people who have a basic understanding of HTML not for someone who has never touched a website. So why a school has been told to purchase this expensive package, granted its not too bad for a school as they get the educational license. But still you sometimes wonder why a school gets told this sort of information.

One of the websites I have been working on a bit recently is the re-build of Canterbury City FC website, which is due to go live in the next few days.

The website is built entirely on the Drupal platform, and gives the football club the ability to easily manage and update their content on the site. Early feedback on Drupal and how easy it is to use has been very positive.

The website features:

• News - rotating news on homepage that links to inner news pages
• Gallery
• Fixtures / Results
• Squad Profiles

One of my favourite restaurants has moved to Drupal.

http://www.frankieandbennys.com