See clearly with Avisen

Avisen helps business to get a clear, real-time picture of their data. This website was built in partnership with our friends at Fuse Studio

New Generation Arts

The New Generation Arts (NGA) Festival, organised by Birmingham City University, is a 16 day programme of innovative regional art shows to be held on the 5th-20th June in Birmingham. Go and check out the website we built for it.

Busy, Busy, Busy, Freelancers Required

New Year, New Projects, New Deadlines.
We’re pre-empting a crunch by soliciting CVs from freelancers with the following skills:

Graphic/Web Designers

With a particular focus on designing website house-styles in Photoshop or Fireworks and Flash movie layouts. HTML skills not a must, but experience of doing lots of professional web layouts at a relatively high level is.

HTML/CSS Developers

People who can take a photoshop visual and turn it into valid HTML and CSS. You must understand accessibility, Flash Replacement, SiFR and Common JavaScript libraries, even if you’re not necessarily a programming whiz. Attention to detail is crucial, as is an ability to pull off layouts that don’t necessarily make sense.

.Net Specialists

We have lots of experience delivering stunning web applications within the LAMP environment, but we’re increasingly asked to work our magic on .Net projects. We’re looking for solid .Net programmers with staying power, who can work from our specifications and UI designs.

All freelance opportunities have the potential to turn into long-term relationships or careers if you are that way inclined.

email CVs with links to: jobs@mademedia.co.uk

But first, please remember the following golden rules:

• We want to hear from genuine freelancers only. You must know your daily rate. You must know when you are available. You must demonstrate a portfolio of high-level work (for the HTML/CSS position we’ll consider hobbyist stuff as long as you have the chops).

• Thou must not be a recruitment consultant.

• Please, please, please read what we’re looking for, and only respond if that honestly sounds like you.

We’ll try to reply to everyone properly, but we are very busy (that’s why we need freelance help). Have no fear, if your CV makes it into our inbox, it will be read and you will be considered. If you don’t hear back for a while it might mean we just ran out of time, or you might just have sent us a load of nonsense. You’ll know which one in your heart.
If you can be of any help to us we will most definitely be in touch.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Oi, Diarized now available in Brazillian Portuguese

http://www.diarised.com/pt/

Many thanks to Cecilia Fleming

Convert Anything to Anything…

This is one of those fugly but totally-indispensable free web-services that you’re reluctant to blog about in case the secret gets out and the poor sods are forced to start charging for their processor cycles…

Media Convert will convert anything to anything from Flash Video to Nokia Ring Tones to Lotus 1-2-3. (Maybe you can’t convert a Flash Video to Lotus 1-2-3 format but you get the idea…)

Best of all? I don’t have to Remote Desktop into a Windows Machine to open up my clients’ dodgy Access databases anymore because this tool will convert them to Excel files in a jiffy.

Don’t all rush at once.

Give your web app international appeal

You may have noticed that Diarised is now available in Spanish as well as English. More languages are on the way and this is now pretty easy thanks to the 'internationalisation' of your little meeting application.

Steve, our lead developer, has just had his first article published on Think Vitamin where he talks about the work involved.

Give your web app international appeal is the first in a two-part series offering fairly technical guidance on how to internationalise web apps generally. It's a good read if you're into that kind of thing. Watch out for part two coming soon.

Oh, and if you would like to see Diarised in your language then let us know. If you (or someone you know) can do the translation then we'll add the code and make it happen. It's a simple process - we just send you a text file which you can translate and send us back.

UPDATE: Part two is now online.

Geeking Out in Oxford

On Wednesday 11th April we’re giving a short presentation, The Making of Diarised, at Oxford Geek Night. Our proposal suggests:

A 100 mile an hour run through the development of Diarised.com, the lessons we learned, the highs and lows, the use of microformats, internationalisation, and the launch day experience of making the Daring Fireball linked list...

So not much to pack in then? We really are going to try and cover the lot in just five minutes. It’ll be fast-paced, breathless, and, hopefully, a whole lot of fun. It’s already looking like it’s going to be packed but if you’re quick you may yet be able to reserve a place. Entry is free and a number of us will be on hand to answer questions and generally geek out afterwards.

The keynote speakers for the night are Jon Hicks, talking about web typography and what's hot in the typography world for 2007 and James Webster from Amazon UK presenting Amazon's suite of powerful web services. With several other mini-presentations, that’s a mightily impressive line-up for such an informal event and it’s quite an honour to be given one of the slots to talk about Diarised for the first time in public.

We’re looking forward to it.

Partial Downtime. TAO.

Everbody’s favourite Linux server Tao was down for ten minutes today between 13:40 and 13:50.
Websites and Email on that domain were effected. It’s back up now, and we’re investigating the cause of the problem.

Datacentre Downtime

Made Media customers experienced 50 minutes of unplanned downtime today between 1pm and 2pm. This affected all websites and email hosted by us. We’re always making a big deal about how reliable our hosting service is, so an explanation is due.

Ironically, the power outage was caused by a fault in the Uninterruptible Power Supply at our datacentre. This is the bit of kit that is supposed to ensure that we keep serving in the case of a power outage. Engineers at the data centre have switched to standard mains power whilst they investigate the issue and bring the UPS back online. They are not expecting any further power outages when they bring it back into the loop.

The issue affected the whole of our floor at the data centre. Happily once the power was restored all of our servers all just woke up and started serving again. We’ve checked for database corruption on all domains and everything is A OK.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused—that’s the first 50 minutes of unplanned downtime in more than twelve months.

iPhone announced - for real

The Apple iPhone has finally been announced and, incredibly, it looks like it might just live up to the [massive] hype.

Engadget has a pretty comprehensive write up but, in short, this looks like a fantastic device. In addition to a terrific looking phone interface, it's also an iPod with an on-screen controller. Running OSX, it includes iTunes, Safari, a mail client that looks just like Mail on my Powerbook. Add to that a gesture-based touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi and half-decent battery life then it looks like a winner.

Sadly we'll have to wait until 'Quarter 4' for a European launch but you can count me in for an order as soon as they'll take my money.

UPDATE: The BBC puts edited highlights up for viewing within minutes. This is pretty impressive as it's online before Apple themselves have made the keynote generally available. When they do (soon) it'll be here.

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