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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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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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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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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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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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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Like many technically minded people, I subscribe to a variety of IT focussed information sources (RSS Feeds, Newsletters etc); one such newsletter being “Powertip of the day” from Powershell.com.

A recent “Powertip of the day” demonstrated how it was possible to query an online earthquake activity data resource, using PowerShell.  In truth, I didn’t have too much success with this particular example (the data wasn’t up-to-date), but crucially, it set me thinking that this could be an excellent resource for a Geography department, especially when using Firefly.

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At St Mary’s Shaftesbury we use Firefly for our VLE.  I won’t give you a sales pitch on Firefly, but suffice to say, that after a bit of a journey from Moodle through SharePoint we have rested at Firefly – quite simply, at this point in time (history has taught me that things can change!), this product, the company and their approach to IT, is nothing short of excellent.  I like Firefly; I like the chaps and chapesses at Firefly!

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