Secure access to a webpage, without the need for a logon, can often be viewed as a bit of a holy grail solution.

Recently, I introduced a frictionless (logon free) way of providing secure(ish) access to some very basic web services.

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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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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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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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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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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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One of my favourite blog posts is “I’m a phony. Are you?” by Scott Hanselman.  I was on holiday in France when I read this post, and it gave me a wonderful sense of relief - I highly encourage you to read it.

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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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Recently St Mary’s Shaftesbury had a new website built (I would like to register, that whilst I was actively involved in the project management, I did not design this website).

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