Made Media » technology

AngelShares

Chris Unitt — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:51:01 +0000

We’re very proud to launch the website for AngelShares.

To explain the idea:

AngelShares is a new way in which you, as an individual, can help to fund exciting new arts and creative projects. It’s based on the concept of Crowdfunding, which uses online media and social networks to raise support for projects and ideas.

Importantly, Angel Shares is the only arts crowd-funding site that enables registered charities to reclaim Gift Aid on donations, adding an extra 25% to eligible gifts.

The process is simple:

• Browse through the projects and the benefits they offer
• Pick one (or more) that you like
• Register and add credits to your AngelShares account
• Allocate your AngelShares to the project(s) of your choice

As well as people donating to individual projects, we hope that people will come to use that site on a regular basis, supporting the arts by giving regularly and building a portfolio of projects

AngelShares was founded by Sarah Gee from Indigo Ltd. Sarah is an arts marketer and fundraiser with over 20 years of experience who’s already raised over £50million for arts projects. We know she has some ambitious plans for AngelShares and we’re looking forward to seeing the site take off.

It’s already off to a strong start, launching with projects from Belgrade Theatre, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Ikon Gallery, Light House Media Centre and Craftspace. Artists and arts organisations are now able to add their own projects, promote them via project updates and raise the funds they need.

You can also follow Angel Shares on Twitter and on Facebook.

Volunteers Wanted for Usability Study

jake — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:32:34 +0000

Made Media is looking for volunteers for web-based usability research on Monday 30 March between 12 noon and 9pm in central Birmingham. The session would last for one hour and volunteers will be given a gift voucher up to the value of Â£75 to be used during research for their participation.

If you are interested, please call 0844 581 1374 to register your interest. The closing date for registration is Wednesday 25 March. The selected participates will be contacted on Thursday 26 March to confirm availability and timings.

Hello Digital

jake — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:10:00 +0000

Say Hello to the Midlands first digital festival, Hello Digital. A weekend of robotics, illuminations, animations, digital film, music and games for people of all ages.

Website by Made Media in partnership with friends Maverick, Fluid & Stef Lewandowski.

DNS Outage – Blue Tuesday

jake — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:03:16 +0000

We had a serious network outage last night. Although all of our servers were fine, Domain Name Service – which was outside our direct control – became unavailable for many of our websites. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers, and if you were affected, you can click through for a more detailed description of what happened, and what we’re doing to prevent it from happening again.

What happened?

The DNS servers for many of our domain names became unavailable last night. We outsource DNS to a specialist company in the US who also have redundant servers in Europe. For some reason these didn’t work. We resolved the problem early this morning by setting up and migrating to our own DNS service. We intend to make this a permanent solution so that we do not rely on a third party in the future.

What is DNS?

When you type a domain name into your browser, your computer actually uses an online directory service to identify which server is hosting the website. Sometimes you may notice a small pause while this happens, but generally the process is completely transparent. Each domain name lists one or more DNS servers in their domain record, and this is the server which provides the directory information to the rest of the Internet for that domain name. At Made Media we use a specialist company for our DNS records. DNS can get slightly complex and we thought it best to outsource to a company that deals solely with DNS.

What happens when DNS fails?

Although all of our servers were fully operational, when the DNS service went down, browsers were no longer able to identify our servers from your domain names, and this caused many websites to appear to be off-line. Many of our clients manage their own DNS records, or use an IT company to do it, and their websites continued to be available.

I thought DNS had fail-over redundancy built in?

That’s right. Generally domain names list two or more DNS servers, and if the first fails then the second one kicks in. This didn’t happen last night and we’re still trying to find out why. The truth is – we’re feeling a little let down.

So what are you doing about it?

We finally fixed the problem early this morning by setting up our own DNS service. We are currently solidifying this approach as a long-term solution, and setting up a secondary redundant service too. This way we will take complete control of DNS. Whilst in theory it’s best to leave hosting and network issues to specialist companies, in practice we find that this inevitably leads to us letting down our clients. Over the past few years we’ve found that we’ve been able to deliver much more reliable service, by bringing as much infrastructure in-house as possible. That’s why an incident of this scale is unprecedented for us.

What about my SLA?

Technically our network retained 100% uptime last night, but we’re not going to hide behind that. If your website was unavailable last night we are happy to refund one month’s hosting to you. Just let us know. We guarantee 99.9% uptime per month and generally achieve 100%. We believe that as a result of last night’s outage some customers will have 98% uptime this month, and that is not acceptable to us.

New Generation Arts

jake — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:23:59 +0000

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

jake — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:54:01 +0000

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

jake — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:05:15 +0000

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

Many thanks to Cecilia Fleming

Convert Anything to Anything…

jake — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:20:15 +0000

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

Made Media Ltd — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 08:19:55 +0000

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

Made Media Ltd — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 18:11:28 +0000

On Wednesday 11th April weâ€™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. Itâ€™ll be fast-paced, breathless, and, hopefully, a whole lot of fun. Itâ€™s already looking like itâ€™s going to be packed but if youâ€™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, thatâ€™s a mightily impressive line-up for such an informal event and itâ€™s quite an honour to be given one of the slots to talk about Diarised for the first time in public.

Weâ€™re looking forward to it.