NS News & Views

By Clive Norman
List all 38 articles

| Tags: Website DevOps Caching CSS JavaScript

Recently, I had the privilege of designing and building the Wylye Valley Art Trail website.  The 2015 trail consists of 75 venues, and in-excess of 300 artists – I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a reasonable size!

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| Tags: Blog Website Rambling SysAdmin DevOps

Recently, a very good friend of mine (@richieclarkie) decided to return to the IT industry after a 15 year absence.

Clearly a 15 year hiatus, is significant in any industry, but especially pertaining to IT, it is arguably exceptional.

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| Tags: JavaScript UniFi SysAdmin DevOps

Several years ago, we migrated from a Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure to a UniFi setup.

UniFi (from Ubiquiti Networks) offer a pretty remarkable WiFi solution, especially when it comes down to cost.  I shan’t go into the in’s and out’s of UniFi, as apart from anything else, I can’t claim to be an expert in the technology.  In many ways, it just works!

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| Tags: iSAMS MIS JavaScript SSRS PowerShell

During the summer of 2014, we migrated the St Mary’s Shaftesbury MIS (Management Information System) from Schoolbase to iSAMS.

Please note, that the reasons for instigating this major system change, and the processes involved (political & technical), are not covered in this blog post.

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| Tags: Website Script CMS JavaScript

Most software developers at some point, will almost certainly encounter the need to hack together a solution.

To quote Wikipedia, the term hack, for the purposes of this blog post is:

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| Tags: Razor Website JavaScript CSS C# Caching

A key benefit of working with the web (or more specifically http) is it’s native ability to cache.  This can be ‘tuned’ to make websites extremely fast and slick, especially after initial page load.

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| Tags: Website CMS SASS

Ok…I get the whole CSS pre-processor movement; I don’t need convincing of why it is so good.  However, what I do need, is a justification to invest time into learning yet another technology!

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| Tags: Schoolbase MIS Crystal Reports

At St Mary’s Shaftesbury, one of the many additional functions we have built, to work alongside our Schoolbase MIS (Management Information System), is the automation of a weekly ‘Rewards and Sanctions’ report.

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| Tags: Blog Website JavaScript CMS

I must confess to have slightly struggled with the title of this blog post, as I didn’t wish to be responsible for encouraging unnecessary complaints and animosity between clients and web designers!

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| Tags: VLE Firefly Rambling

Recently, I had the privileged of being asked to give a ‘show and tell’ style presentation, at the Firefly Developer’s Day, held at Radley College.

In truth, I received this invitation with a mixture of pride and anxiety – visions springing to mind of the Michael Bay ‘meltdown during his presentation at CES 2014!

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