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.
Because Web Scripts involve two computers talking to each other, they are potentially hard to debug. We’ve found that it pays to test the scripts from a web browser before writing any code. We iron out our exact understanding of what parameters the script needs and what it returns before doing it from within our application. There’s an [...]
A large part of our Documas application concerns ordinary Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operations on a MySQL database. Really Documas is a hybrid application, part document management and part CRUD. Documas centres around a database model called Study. Studies are typically clinical trials that have dozens of properties reflecting their type and their progress. People such as administrators, lawyers, pharmacologists, [...]
REST is a set of ideas that promise to simplify communication between applications. If you have not come across REST before, there is an entertaining description here. Conventionally applications use something like Remote Procedure Calls to call on each other for services, but every single call tends to have different parameters and return values making [...]
We’ve built a web application, Documas, on the solid foundation of the Alfresco Document Management system. In this article we’ll explain why and how we did it. Using Alfresco from another web application Alfresco is a solid platform for managing documents and the events that happen to them during their lifecycle, but the ‘Web Client’ user interface is [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Patient Experience videos on our new YouTube channel
How to photograph a plastic bag in 9 steps
Generating pdf newsletters automatically from WordPress: how to include a few pages and resolve memory limit errors
Debugging web scripts with the Firefox REST Client
Analysing web content semantics with AlchemyAPI: Part One – The Semantic Web
Using Ruby on Rails with Alfresco
Employing Alfresco web scripts to answer RESTful calls
Opening up Alfresco to other web applications
PDF manipulation and editing via the command line with pdftk
Google font API makes embedded web fonts easy, were it not for a bug
A Five Step Process to Create a Successful Clinical Trials Marketing Strategy
What’s in a Name? The meaning of Propheris