Category Archives: Technology

Walking the walk with Drupal Commerce

When a fair chunk of your household income is dependent on an eCommerce solution, any decision to make changes should not be taken lightly. bump_delivery_final1 (2)The online gifts business my wife established in 2008 has grown steadily through the recession of the last 4 years and the eCommerce website I built for it originally has been surprisingly and thankfully very robust. It was built using Joomla with the Virtuemart shopping cart module on a $3/month hosting package from Siteground.  There has only been one small outage on the hosting service during this time and only occasional minor issues with the website itself.  We have very much taken a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it’ approach.

However, as the business has grown, ambitions have expanded and the online world evolved in new directions such as mobile and social media, the limitations of the Virtuemart solution, in particular, have become more and more apparent. Also, as eCommerce development is central to what I offer in my fledgling consultancy business – Webwiser, I feel it would be hypocritical for me to recommend a solution to fellow business owners and entrepreneurs that I wouldn’t be prepared to stake my own livelihood on.

I first started experimenting with Drupal Commerce in late 2011 and since then there have been some significant developments … Continue reading →

Artificial photosynthesis – an A* idea

photosynthesis

Spending time this year helping my eldest daughter revise for her biology, physics and chemistry GCSEs has rekindled my interest in basic scientific principles.

One that crosses over all disciplines and came up repeatedly in the revision notes is photosynthesis. It is such a fundamental process in our daily lives and sits at the heart of the climate change challenges we are facing increasingly as our CO2 emissions continue to climb to ever more unpredictable and potentially dangerous levels.

This week a new report highlights that European forests are reaching saturation point as efficient CO2 sinks and calls on governments and forestry commissions to recognise the issue and take appropriate action. This is yet another scenario that highlights the complexity of climate change science but also prompts some to take a pessimistic view on the future, particularly on matters where politics are involved.

One recent view that created a lot of commentary and debate is that of Professor Stephen Emmott whose short but blunt book 10 Billion has clearly polarised opinion.  I was inclined to take notice of his views as the area of research his laboratory focuses on is artificial photosynthesis and the more I understand about this, the more it looks like one of the better potential answers to climate change challenges.

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7th anniversary on WordPress – Not itching yet!

sevenyears

hmm – so I’ve been using WordPress.com for 7 years now. How time flies!

This is definitely the longest I have spent associated with any content technology and clearly I am not alone. This recent post illustrates that of all sites that run on a content management system, 54% of them are on WordPress.

These are the top five reasons why WordPress.com remains the ‘best fit’ for my personal CMS needs …

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Sustainable transport initiatives – 'must go faster'

A few months into the Department for Transport funded project I have been working on over the last year or so I met with a senior business figure from the Solent region who has worked for some big companies on the UK south coast.

When I explained what the Hampshire councils were doing to encourage transport related behaviour change and achieve a targeted shift away from car usage within the next three years he was surprisingly skeptical and believed the campaigns would go the way of previous such efforts and focus far too much on cycling as the main answer to the issues.

Now that I have an insight into what’s happening in Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) projects around the UK, one thing has become very clear. A lot of taxpayer’s money is being pumped into these initiatives with an emphasis on them being measurable and ultimately self-sustaining but, as far as I have seen so far, there are no real big or radical ideas being implemented now or in the foreseeable future and I’m really not convinced the activities will make much difference in the larger scheme of things.

Am I surprised? Not really. Does it matter? I think it does. Any answers? I can think of a few …

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Warning: Physical Memory Dump – WCMS conflicts detected

Image blatantly nicked from Columbia Pictures to illustrate a point

Image blatantly nicked from Columbia Pictures to illustrate a point

There have been times over the last 18 months while working on projects associated with my fledgling consultancy business when the input of new information has conflicted badly with stuff I know from experience, particularly concerning web content management systems.

In some cases a physical memory dump and reboot or a quick zap from an MiB style memory eraser would have been welcome in order to take fresh look at things and experience that buzz of discovering something new and exciting.

In a post titled ‘Ten hopes for the Tens’  back at the end of 2009  I expressed a ‘hope’ that “Web Content Management continues to thrive and prosper and evolve in many exciting new directions”

Four years into the decade I am still trying out new breeds of WCMS on a regular basis and cross referencing them with evaluations and results from previous projects to see if, how and where they could have been a better fit.

Some of the solutions that have come onto my radar over the last 12 months are Apostrophe, Concrete5, Pyro, Weebly and Squarespace and testing them out has raised these main conflicts …

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