Posts about Everything

At Label Media we’re always advising our clients about the importance of quality content on a website, in terms of improving the user experience and because of the positive effects it can have on search engine rankings. In this article I’d like to focus solely on your website and show you how you can apply it to your own site.

We’ve been talking about it since last year, so many of our existing clients may already be aware that we’re preparing the next major update to our LabelEd platform, but we’ve not really discussed in detail what it’s all about.

Two recent projects go live this week, "Bic Smile" cross-media promotion, broadcast in Ireland and a brand new content managed website for Liverpool's Shaftesbury Youth Club on Label Media's platform LabelEd.

Selenium is a great tool for automating browser based testing of web applications. This post is regarding the installation and configuration of Selenium with the excellent Jenkins Continuous Integration server.

Just letting our readers know we'll be at the Leeds Media Marketplace in March 18th 2011 at Elland Road football ground.

Please feel free to pop along for a chat at our stand, the event itself is free to attend plus there will be a few speakers.

There’s a lot of bad code about. We’ve all seen our fair share of it, and we frequently still do when we inherit projects from elsewhere.
We work with a lot of PHP, which has quite a reputation for bodgy hacked together, frankly horrible code - not entirely undeservedly, but that’s not the fault of the language - at least not anymore. The really low barrier to entry is both a blessing and a curse, but it’s surely our mission, as members of the PHP community to help raise that bar in terms of the standard of output. Some of the worst code happens when it’s author(s) haven’t stopped to think and analyse.

So far in my series of articles on design patterns in PHP we’ve looked at a creational pattern, a structural pattern and a behavioral pattern. Today I’ll be taking a closer look at another behavioral pattern - the observer. The observer pattern (also known as the Subscribe/Publish Pattern) is used to notify one object, the observer, about a change of state from another object, the subject.

I’ve got a fairly vanilla install of Snow Leopard (10.6) and use the default installations of PHP, MySQL, Apache, et al. Installing the Sphinx open source search engine and the PECL extension wasn’t too much of a pain, but would have been easier had i had the following notes to hand. :-p

Software as a Service, otherwise known as SaaS, is an alternative to the standard delivery method of software. Basically, instead of handing over a “finished” product in it’s entirety, SaaS applications are operated and maintained by a service provider and usually accessed remotely by clients, such as through a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc). It’s an area that’s seen rapid growth over the last few years - a trend which looks set to continue and accelerate.