23 Jan 2012

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We are hiring! Full time Office Manager.

by Tom H.

We are a fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building great web based products.

As we grow we need a hard working person full time to ensure the smooth running of the office.

You will be working in a great location (Bristol, harbourside) in a fantastic office with a friendly team.

Administration

To ensure office procedure / practices are maintained up to date and adhered to
To review and maintain administration procedures within the office
Provide PA support to the Directors (eg: taking minutes of meetings; overseeing report production)
Ensure that any new or updated system procedures are communicated to staff and adhered to
Ensure all project information is collected and recorded in respect to contracts
Assist in managing the directors’ resource diary, ensuring it is accurate, modifications are made, financial elements are correct, etc

Financial

Ensure the invoicing is up to date and complete to agreed timescales.
Ensure that all payments received are banked at the earliest opportunity.
Ensure staff are paid and pension payments made on time
Ensure regulatory payment dates are met and payments made (eg VAT/PAYE/NI)
Record and update financial information in internal financial management system

Staff Management

Manage office staff, including monitoring performance, workload and ensuring appraisals procedure takes place
Assist with recruitment and induction and training of new office staff
Ensure all office staff stay abreast of changes in company policies and procedures

Human Resources

Accurately record and monitor all holiday allocation
Track and monitor employee sickness
Maintain up to date HR records & contracts of employment
Keep abreast of HR regulatory environment

Health and Safety

Maintain a safe office environment and ensure staff are aware of their responsibilities and the H & S procedures
Maintain and up date H & S policy and regulation

Facilities

Ensure the office and office equipment are maintained and authorise repairs when necessary
Keep office supplied with all sundry supplies, including stationery and domestic suppplies

Sales

Deal with all customers enquires or forward to appropriate person for attention
Assist managers in written communication via social media

Person Specification

Experience of Word processing and spreadsheets. Apple Mac experience preferable.
Experience of similar role, involving managing a busy office, managing a team, reviewing administration practices / procedures, implementing changes, training staff, etc.
Understanding of HR procedures (e.g. interviewing, basic employment law, etc) would be beneficial
Excellent attention to detail
Excellent organisational skills and ability to meet deadlines
Ability to work under pressure
Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
Friendly, enthusiastic and professional manner.

Remuneration:

16 – 18k per annum based on experience.
Pension scheme.

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to info@simpleweb.co.uk

15 Jan 2012

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The First Rusic Hack Day was amazing

by Mark P.

Yesterday was the first Rusic Hackday. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The skills that we saw blew our minds, with themes being created that we did even think were possible.

The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

And the entries were:

In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

@iamkeir – Rusicursive

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to :) Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

@daleanthony - Best Recipes

Lovely design and use of Masonry

A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

@jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

I want that breakfast

Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

@tholder – Mountain biking locations

Lovely Google map integration

A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

@adambu1988 – 360k

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

@jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

Liking of Comments.

These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

@scottifydotcom – FootoFan

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

@benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

The lovely action hover bar

A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. :) Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

And the winners were:

Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

Best Idea - 360k

We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. ;) So instead:

Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

13 Jan 2012

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We are hiring! Ruby/Rails Developer

by Tom H.

We are looking for another skilled web developer to join our talented and enthusiastic team.

We are a fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building awesome web based products. We have an agile approach to development and are looking for a skilled and enthusiastic developer to join us on our journey.

We currently have two exciting SaaS based products (Rusic and ContactZilla) that we are looking to accelerate the development of and take to a wide market. You will play an active role in their development and be an integral part of the companies success.

The tech we are using for our products includes Ruby/Rails, PHP (Zend), JS/CoffeeScript, Node.js, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, Chef/Vagrant and cloud based services and more! So, you will need to be looking for a position that is challenging where you want to stay at the cutting edge and not shy away from a challenge!

We also undertake some more traditional application and website development work for our clients. Solutions involve WordPress, Drupal, Magento and custom builds but we try to spread work out throughout the team and rotate projects to keep the mind fresh!

We work normal office hours but it’s quite common for the team to be hacking away on something cool gone home time… you will need to be of the same developer mentality. Whilst we all work hard, we like to rewards ourselves when we hit our targets, this is normally in the form of some random fun activity out of the office.

We’re looking for a unique web application developer that understands the importance of good engineering solutions above all else, takes pride in what they deliver and enjoys being an active part of a hard working and smart team.

Personal traits:

Sense of humor
Passionate about your work
Strong communication skills
Smart and humble
Equal willingness to learn and teach

Responsibilities:

Participate in the planning, analysis, design, development and deployment of products, features and enhancements
Build high-performance, scalable applications and APIs
Create clean, maintainable and well tested code

Requirements:

Excellent debugging and problem solving skills
Proficient in at least two of the following languages/platforms (and an eagerness to learn new languages!): Ruby (Rails), PHP (Zend Framework), Node.js, Javascript/CoffeeScript, Objective C
A strong command of HTML, Javascript and CSS, familiarity with Less would be good
Experience with MVC development frameworks, test driven development and agile development processes
An understanding of database theory with experience of MySQL. Any experience of NoSQL alternatives is a bonus!
Good understanding of the entire development process, including testing, build, deploy and maintenance
Strong communication skills

Remuneration:

Salary negotiable based on experience.
Company share options.
Pension scheme.

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to info@simpleweb.co.uk

4 Jan 2012

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Drupal vs WordPress: Which to use?

by Christos

They are both content management systems. One was built specifically for bloggers (which is a pretty large market segment) and the other was built for any arbitrary type of content (which although it is an even bigger market, the ambiguity of it negatively affects awareness of what Drupal can do).

Nonetheless, should large and arbitrary be better than specific? You could convert Drupal into a WordPress blog by just defining your blog post type in Drupal’s database. A commenting system is already there for all types of content. It also has user registrations out of the box with an even more advanced user roles system than WordPress. So why not use it?

If all you want to do is blog, then WordPress is an already customised Drupal installation for you. It will give you all the stats you need and some plugins for the peripheral features you need for your blog.

However if your blog is less than half of your website’s content, then the time you will spend tweaking WordPress is more than the time you will spent tweaking Drupal. The time spent adding new types of content into Drupal is linear, and in most cases it is faster than doing it with plain PHP. It’s main benefit is that it allows non-programmers to edit vast amounts of arbitrary types of content without hassling the developer.

Well, is that good? It depends. If you don’t want the hassle of customer support for content updates to their website, that’s the way to go. However website maintenance might be your milk and bread. That’s arguable though, WordPress can still be configured with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields so that its users have the same level of control over the content.

Both systems have a relatively steep learning curve, I have no side by side comparison but you can assume that you will waste time on both systems to learn about them.

WordPress is a bit better when it comes to version control, as more things will most likely be in PHP files. However Drupal is much more heavily reliant on the database, which makes multiple developers working together on it a big pain. To this day this remains my personal biggest annoyance with Drupal, how would you get a large team of developers to work on the same website?

3 Jan 2012

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WordPress Custom Post Types – Changing Slug

by Tom H.

It’s surely too early in the New Year for WordPress to be causing grief? Apparently not :)

We just had a simple request from a client, “Can we change the URLs for our custom post type pages” – no problem I thought!

However, this one has taken me longer than expected. It should have been a simple case of changing the Slug parameter when registering a custom post type.

So:

    $args = array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'menu_icon' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/iconbacourse.png',
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'old-slug'),
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'menu_position' => null,
        'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail')
      );

    register_post_type( 'myposttype' , $args );

Becomes:

    $args = array(
        'labels' => $labels,
        'public' => true,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'menu_icon' => get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/iconbacourse.png',
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'new-slug'),
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'menu_position' => null,
        'supports' => array('title','editor','thumbnail')
      );

    register_post_type( 'myposttype' , $args );

This should mean posts that were at /old-slug/page-name are now at /new-slug/page-name

Doing this, meant the old Urls were redirecting to the correct location, but I was getting a 404! The solution was upsettingly simple, go in to WP Admin, Settings, Permalinks and re-save your permalink structure.

Hope this might help someone, and happy WordPressing in 2012 ;)