Author Archives: Paul Syrysko

Five rules for explaining complex ideas

By Paul Syrysko | Published: May 4, 2012

Explaining a complicated concept is an art form. It’s easy enough when you’re faced with like minded peers but when you go beyond that cosy world, things can quickly go awry. There are five basic rules you need to follow. Use these and you’ll usually communicate your intricate idea easily: assume no prior knowledge don’t [...]

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Generating pdf newsletters automatically from WordPress: how to include a few pages and resolve memory limit errors

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 6, 2010
pdf-newspaper

We’re using WordPress as a CMS for a client who was thinking of producing a newsletter, both for those without access and to promote the site itself. Rather than going through the rigmarole (and time & cost) of desktop publishing we set about finding a clever way to do this automatically.

Posted in Open Source, Web Development, Wordpress | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Analysing web content semantics with AlchemyAPI: Part One – The Semantic Web

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 1, 2010
A visual representation of the world wide web. Image: the Opte project

How do you methodically analyse the context of hundreds of web pages? It’s an issue of semantics. Tasked with looking at how a bunch of organisations are portraying themselves to their stakeholders, we soon moved to clever machine analysis thanks to semantic tools that are slowly appearing. The semantic web (sometimes called Web 3.0) is [...]

Posted in Marketing & Communications | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

PDF manipulation and editing via the command line with pdftk

By Paul Syrysko | Published: November 16, 2010
document-pile

We recently had a small job to chop and reassemble a dozen or so pdfs and then include them into a website archive. Our client needed all the first pages exchanged with new first pages that had new information on them. A laborious task manually, but PDF Toolkit came to our rescue. It’s a cross [...]

Posted in Document Management, Linux, Open Source | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Google font API makes embedded web fonts easy, were it not for a bug

By Paul Syrysko | Published: November 12, 2010
Website for NUH Trust. Framework allows staff to load and edit content easily.

We’ve just been updating the design of one of our client’s sites and, as ever, fonts are a focus. Earlier this year, Google released a set of beautiful typefaces for use in web environments. It’s a simple matter of calling the font library from Google via a stylesheet header. Unless your choice includes Droid Bold. [...]

Posted in Design, Open Source, Web Development, Wordpress | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

The origins of cat herding, from television ads through Warren Bennis to Poul Anderson

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 15, 2010
herding-cats

The phrase herding cats comes from a tv ad for an IT company and if few people know that, even fewer know that the term was lifted from a rather obscure management self-help book. Herding cats is now a ubiquitous phrase that has come into management-speak to describe tasks that are tricky because things are [...]

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Jonathan Franzen’s I Am Spartacus moment could have been avoided with a decent doc management system

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 6, 2010
Franzen-Kindle

Jonathan Franzen’s UK imprint of his latest novel, Freedom, was sent to the pulper at a rumoured cost of over forty thousand pounds after finding out that the wrong version had been printed. The moment where Franzen realised disaster had struck was caught on camera, as it happened in the middle of recording a reading [...]

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Print large pdfs over multiple pages easily in Linux with pdfposter

By Paul Syrysko | Published: March 25, 2010
pdfposter-eng-drawing

Engineering and architectural drawings come in colossal sizes and most design offices have large plotters or roll printers to let them push out paper copies with ease. We have a printer that will take A3 rolls but since use is fairly sparse, I needed a way to expand a strangely sized pdf across multiple A3 [...]

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Rapid development of a document management solution

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 11, 2009
document

We’re on a quick development path to deliver some fairly simple document management solutions. It’s an all too common requirement: “we’ve got a bunch of documents in building one which need seeing and signing by various bods in buildings two, three, four and five as well as here in building one. We all use different [...]

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Google Docs as a collaborative space: the pros and cons

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 10, 2009
googledocs

We’ve been using Google Docs together with Chat and Mail for a while now and it’s useful enough (we’re still using it which must count for something). But it’s not perfect. Here’s my list of pros and cons (which will change over time, I’m sure) On the Upside for Google Docs It’s very easy and [...]

Posted in Collaboration | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

  • Welcome to Propheris Limited

    We are a communications technology company focused on the health sector.

    Our deep knowledge of digital channels enable us to craft interfaces and traffic information efficiently and effectively.

    We engage people with with database interfaces, making the sum work more effectively than the parts.