Millwood Online - Blog

Sinatra: Building an ActiveRecord and Postgres application

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:08:00 -0000

As you may already know Sinatra is a great Ruby framework for building small web apps and APIs. Although it's very different to Ruby on Rails, there are sometimes cases where the choice of which framework to use can be hard. Is the app small enough for Sinatra? is the app big enough for Rails? When this is the case one option would be to use Sinatra with some Ruby on Rails components such as ActiveRecord. This would then make the upgrade path from Sinatra to Ruby on Rails smoother if ever needed.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Twitter chooses Drupal for their official blog

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:53:59 -0000

Know what this means? Die hard Drupalists do.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Heroku comes to Europe

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:52:14 -0000

Yesterday Heroku announced the launch of a hosting region in Europe. Much like their US based service the Europe one is also running on AWS, but this time it runs from Ireland.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Drupal 7 performance gains with Views cache

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:11:42 -0000

The Views module is the most powerful tool for a Drupal developer, and so much loved that from Drupal 8 the Views module has made it's way into Drupal core. As for Drupal 7, Views is still a contributed module and not all that famous for it's performance. This blog post will look at a few ways to improve the performance of your Views in Drupal 7 by using caching.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

How to SEO: microdata, rich snippets and schema.org

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:54:58 -0000

Many search engines are now making use of rich data on the web page to display more information in the search results. From an SEO point of view add this rich data will make your content more desirable to click, but will also future proof you for any other ways to search engines choose to handle the data. Google looks to favour Microdata over the other rich data formats of RDFa and Microformats. Although a mixture is more than expectable. This post will focus on Microdata and using Schema.org with a few additions of other formats.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Deploy PHP to Heroku

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:37:53 -0000

Heroku is famous as a Ruby hosting platform, supporting frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Sinatra. They also advertise that they support, Java, Python, Clojure, Scala, Node.js and Play. Although what is rarely mentioned within the documentation is that Heroku supports PHP.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Sinatra Vs Ruby on Rails

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:34:03 -0000

After working with Sinatra and Ruby on Rails for some time it has become clear that although based on some of the same foundations (Ruby and Rack) they are very different frameworks, and have very different uses. Sometimes it is hard to choose between the frameworks when the application is on the borderline of the two, but generally the complexity and size of the application will depict the framework needed.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

How to SEO: 10 top tips in 2013

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:54:26 -0000

Getting to be the number one search engine result is very hard, but getting on the first one or two pages for you niche isn't that hard. It just requires a little bit of work, a few simple steps and some trial and error. Here are 10 SEO tips that in 2013 offer great search engine optimisation results, and obtains great visibility on Google.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Drupal's not the only option

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:15:18 -0000

Last week Phase2 launched their new site and blogged about it. As a company that is mainly focussed on Drupal, they made sure to add few paragraphs on the fact that their new site is not Drupal, and that they decided to use Wordpress.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

Responsive break points

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:04:40 -0000

Last week I tweeted about media queries, and that break points (the number of pixels when the media query takes effect) should be when the design breaks. This got a few questions, comments and remarks, so maybe a blog post is required.

Read the full post on Millwood Online