Chris Murray

Copyright code

Monday 23 June 2008

For many of our clients it is important that their website looks up to date at all times. There are various items that can be added to a website to help with this, for example a regularly updated ‘latest news’ feed on the home page. However, one item that is often overlooked is the copyright date, which is rarely updated once a website goes live.

epiGenesys always adds an automatically updating copyright date, which means that if the copyright notice looks like this when the website goes live:

© 2008 epiGenesys

Then the following year it will automatically look like this:

© 2008-2009 epiGenesys

And the following year:

© 2008-2010 epiGenesys

The code required to implement an automatically updating copyright date is very simple, and is provided below for each of the key languages preferred by epiGenesys. For ASP.NET:

<p>&copy; 2008<% if (DateTime.Now.Year > 2008) { %>
-<%= DateTime.Now.Year.ToString() %><% } %>
<a href="http://www.epigenesys.co.uk">epiGenesys</a></p>

And for PHP:

<p>&copy; 2008<?php if (date('Y') > 2008)
echo "-".date('Y'); ?>
<a href="http://www.epigenesys.co.uk">epiGenesys</a></p>

And finally for Ruby on Rails:

<p>&copy; 2008<% if Time.now.year > 2008 %>
<%= '-' + Time.now.strftime("%Y") %><% end %>
<%= link_to 'epiGenesys', 'http://www.epigenesys.co.uk' %></p>

So that’s all there is to it. With a little touch like the above we can help to ensure that a website always looks current, without requiring any effort from the website owner.

Posted in Development | Tagged with asp.net, php, ruby on rails | No comments »

Google Apps trial

Sunday 22 June 2008

epiGenesys has recently started a trial of Google Apps as a platform for our corporate e-mail (and also calendars, instant messaging, etc). The standard (free) edition gives us hosted mailboxes with over 6 GB of storage each, and all the usual Google Mail features including webmail, IMAP and mobile access.

So far I’ve found plenty of positives, including:

• I’m a big fan of the webmail interface, especially the threaded conversations display, and I really can’t imagine how I would manage my corporate mail without it now.

• We can offload the effort and resources required to maintain our own services, leaving Google to deal with junk filtering and storage provision more effectively than we could.

• It seems that Google Docs is going to be quite useful, possibly for replacing our whiteboards with shared documents that can still be accessed when away from the office.

The main negative at the moment is having to decide if it is a good idea to rely on a third party for some of our key communications infrastructure. It feels like we’re giving up control, but Google are obviously very capable.

During the trial all our mail is being duplicated on our own systems before it is forwarded to Google, so we can easily fall back to our own services. We will continue this arrangement for another few weeks before making a decision about the migration, but at the moment I’m very impressed with the new platform.

Posted in Systems | Tagged with communication, google | 1 comment »