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REST or Representational State Transfer development is web development with controller functions geared around the four HTTP request types (or verbs) – POST, GET, PUT and DELETE, equating these (classically but by no means exclusively) to the CRUD operations Create, Read, Update and Delete respctively. Once you start developing in REST the advantages of this quickly become clear:

• Restricting your controller functionality in this way naturally prevents you from building bloated controllers
• It ensures that the layout of your code doesn’t become too obfuscated
• It allows you to make calls without having to specify your controller action explicitly in the request (as you do in a normal HTTP GET request).

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We’re proud to announce that as of today one of our developers, Lee Hambley has taken over maintenance of capify.org. For many people involved in Ruby on Rails development, Capistrano is a vital tool, making the whole process of maintaining production environments that much simpler, by automating and combining many of the more laborious and repetitive tasks involved.

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On the Beach Holidays (www.otbeach.com) have been named the 13th in the list of private equity backed companies with the fastest growing profits.

On the Beach have been a Setfire Media client since they made the move online.  Developing the website on a day-to-day basis, Setfire Media are an integral part of  On the Beach’s success.  See the full Buyout Track 100.

Learning lessons about the importance of UI from the iPhone

Having seen a LOT of buzz over on Twitter and Friendfeed about the forthcoming N97, I feel compelled somewhat to make a point about this subject, especially as everyone seems to be missing the point badly. I should admit now that I haven’t used an N97, but then neither it seems has anyone else apart from Robert Scoble, so I feel as well placed as anyone to comment.

Killer or Filler?

The label ‘iPhone killer’ has become so hackneyed now I’m not sure anyone believes it when it’s applied to a new product, but yet again we see it slapped onto another touch screen wannabe. There’s already a lot of positive hype about this product, which I’m sure will be fairly slick in many ways, Nokia do design some great phones. However, I remain skeptical about the ability of Nokia or Symbian to turn out an OS experience as compelling and slick as the iPhone. I recently decided to sell my iPhone 7 to upgrade to a later model.
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I must be a masochist or something. How do I know this? Because not only have I chosen to follow web standards, but I took it upon myself to become the advocate for web standards here at Setfire Media.

Having spent some time looking at standards, it occurred to me that one of the hardest aspects of the subject was just getting some basic overview of the whole thing. With that in mind, I present here the Setfire Media Simple Guide to Standards:

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With large PPC customers comes large problems! Manipulating keywords and producing new combinations is great when you have 50 keywords, when working with 50,000 keywords the PPC professional needs to make a choice between getting RSI and getting their macro on!

With very little knowledge you can brute force a lot of simple problems using macros, here is a quick introduction to macro semantics and some functions that PPC has called for!

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Those of you who use WordPress on your own websites will likely encounter this problem pretty soon.

Installing the latest Flash version 10 will disable the ability of any web platform that uses the SWFUpload library due to security reasons. To put this into context it will cripple the upload ability of WordPress, Flickr, Yahoo, zooomr – along with many more services I’m not aware of.

In WordPress you click you Add media > Add an Image, and from there click on Choose Files to Upload, only for nothing to happen.

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We have also been having a good look into remote time tracking software as we have so many staff working remotely in various businesses so that has been a huge help in making sure that those staff are doing exactly what they should be doing!

How To Create The Perfect Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

If you’ve been working in search optimisation for any length of time you’ll have heard how important it is to properly optimise your page title tag. Chances are you’ll also have heard that the meta description is also important, but on a lesser scale.

I agree wholeheartedly: getting your onpage SEO dialed in is critical. It’s much easier to rank a site that ticks all the onpage boxes, but that’s not to say it is impossible to rank a poorly optimised site through sheer brute force. However, I would rather make a job easier in the long run and so before I start trying to build links into a site I like to get the basics sorted.

Getting your titles and meta descriptions done properly is a painstaking and at times arduous task, which is something I can attest to. However, when you see the fruits of your labour, ie. ranking higher, then it can actually be a rewarding endeavour. So here we are: 18 tips to help you optimise your page title and meta description.

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So recently I had the challenge of creating a ‘has_many through’ relationship across two databases.

“Why would you do this?” you may ask. Well quite simply I am in a team building a new data management system to sit on top of a legacy system with its legacy database, we want to create something similar to https://docs.couchbase.com/server/current/learn/buckets-memory-and-storage/buckets-memory-and-storage.html. All the new code is new, shiny and streamlined and the old code is… well… crap but we have to keep both systems running concurrently so we have various tables in the legacy database we need to access from the new system. As it happens we need to access the legacy users table in a ‘has_many through’ from the new ‘orders’ table.
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As anyone who’s ever made an e-commerce system knows, money is everything. No, really if you don’t get your financial sums right then you can’t hope to build a successful online business (and may find yourself creating potential legal issues with the tax man).

So here’s a rundown of the top tips I can give for making your financial calculations that bit easier.

1. Always Work in Minor Units

I can’t stress enough how much this helps in terms of accuracy, rounding and speed. Working in major units may look better to you as you don’t have to reformat the numbers to display them but I hope I can make the case here for minor units.

a. Integer arithmetic is much much faster than floating point arithmetic.

Remember that even a single decimal place makes a number a float as far as your computer is concerned and all the processor overheads that go along with them suddenly arrive. I know it’s not a lot slower but in a complex financial system it all adds up believe me.

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