Blog

Congatulations to our iPod Shuffle winner!

Well done to Marg Payne of AMR Design in Sherborne St John, Basingstoke, for winning our iPod Shuffle competition. Marg has already told us that she is thrilled because it is the first competition she has won and she has chosen Pink so that her husband doesn't run off with it!

Thanks to everybody for following our news and Marg, there is now a super slick and super tiny iPod Shuffle on its way to you!

Announcing the new Textile Conservation Centre legacy website

Five Mile is delighted to announce the launch of the new Textile Conservation Centre website. This project is a working collaboration between the Textile Conservation Centre (TCC) and Five Mile, who were delighted to have had the opportunity to donate our time and services in support of this worthy charitable organisation, an organisation that has been supporting our conservation heritage for over 30 years.

Be Inspired

It's not often that the Five Mile team escape from the office but the local Basingstoke Business Link event Be Inspired '09 took place on Thursday and it was an excellent opportunity to leave the code looking after itself, whilst we enjoyed a well earned day away from the screens.

Keep on moving

Last week I heard someone use the expression ‘The cobbler's kids have no shoes’. Having only just recently redesigned the Five Mile website I confess to feeling relieved that we have managed to find the time to avoid the common trap of not moving the website forward. In fact, our current redesign started life as nothing more than a one day 'light' refresh but soon turned into a 3 day redesign and re-write - not bad going.

Microsoft, you cannot be serious!

Ok, so Outlook 2010 is set to inherit the same Microsoft Word rendering engine as used in Outlook 2007 and frankly, the one in Outlook 2007 is rubbish. For those of you who don't design and build HTML emails, this is very bad news because trying to get even the simplest of designs working in Outlook 2007, can quite simply take hours of fudging around. This is because the Word HTML rendering engine is fundamentally 'broken', failing to support many of the HTML and CSS standards that have now been in place for quite some time.

My mate TextMate?

I have been using BBEdit for nearly all my code work, every day, for the past 9 years. I have it configured just the way I like to work; I have my own custom shortcuts as well as being familiar with the factory default shortcuts that I haven't needed to tweak. I love BBEdit's search and replace, the text manipulation features and I really like the way it works when editing remote files.

The idea of switching to a new text editor after all this time is slightly daunting, especially with tight production deadlines to meet.

Projects don't have to bite

Our recent work designing and developing a new site for MedNous presented some interesting challenges. Apart from the regular challenges, such as porting sizable amounts of custom content from an old and very very bespoke CMS, there was one thing that forced us to stop and think - time.

No surprises there then - isn't every project out there due yesterday?

There will be bugs

On Tuesday I posted about some recent frustrations we have experienced with a few projects where IE6 support has been necessary. There are some interesting debates that have been running for some time now about 'supporting' IE6 and these have hotted up again with the release of IE8.

Hopefully the release of IE8 will in some way help speed the demise of IE6 but the truth is that we are still involved with building sites that receive enough traffic from IE6 users to not be in a position that these users can be ignored.

In the Cloud(s)

Last week we came back down to earth. We have been enjoying a crescendo of busyness including site designs, some more tricky Drupal development, the completion of www.mednous.com and plenty of learning. All of this peaked when we attended DrupalCon DC at the start of the month but last week was very different.

Last week our heads left the clouds and we returned to earth with a great big Microsoft 'thud'.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 - It's out.

IE8 is out and that means that I'm taking a break from the DrupalCon related posts that I have been (slowly) putting together to jot down some thoughts on what this means.

Putting aside the glossy new features and interface tweaks there is really only one thing that it should be judged by.

Why We Loved DrupalCon

DrupalCon DC has come to an end and after four days of intense sessions, BoF's and code sprints we are back at the office and reflecting on everything that happened.

Drupalcon DC 2009

We are really excited about the next four days. Five Mile is in Washington DC for the first DrupalCon of 2009 which officially kicks off tomorrow. The schedule is finalised, packed full of sessions that will likely clash with one another so that Dom and I can flip quarters for which one we get to go to.