Category Archives: Miscellaneous

VPS Wiki

I have recently started work on what is currently called “VPS Wiki”.

The aim of the Wiki is to provide a centralised location for information about using Linux, performing general sysadmin duties, as well as some programming basics. I think the site will naturally change in time – It might lean more strongly towards a particular topic. If that happens, then I will rename the site – I thought “VPS Wiki” was a good starting point, especially given my recent venture.

Some people might think “What’s the point in this – can’t people just google for the answer?”. However, Because technology is rapidly changing, I find that it can be difficult to find relevant, up-to-date solutions to problems that I encounter. I think having a central database of of useful content could be very handy.

I’d really appreciate any contributions towards the wiki – at the moment, you need an account to edit/create pages. You can check the Wiki out here.

Customer Portal Development

So far, it’s been a pretty busy summer. I have spent some time transferring the Modern Glass website over from Drupal to WordPress – mostly for ease-of-use in terms of updating. Along with it have come some speed increases, and SEO optimisations.

This was not a major undertaking – however, the Customer Portal which came with it was getting close to being!

  

The system was created to allow customers to easily access  and comment on quotes. At Modern Glass, once a quote has been entered into the main computer system, it is saved as a PDF. The Customer Portal which I have created allows the PDF and design files to be uploaded to the site, where the files are turned into thumbnails. Once the quote and all of it’s attatchments are uploaded, the user will recieve an email to tell them that a quote has been added to their account. When they click on the link to view the quote, the time and date at which the quote was viewed is recorded and sent by email to Modern Glass. The customer has the option of adding a comment to the quote – this comment can be replied to by a member of staff.

There are other interesting projects going on this summer – including an automated booking system allowing customers to charter a yacht! I update this blog with my progress.

My plans for rsync

If all goes well with my A-Levels, I will be going to either Cardiff university to study for a BSc Computer Science, or Aberysywyth University for an MEng in Software Engineering – During which time, I will (hopefully) be producing lot of work! At the moment, I do not own an external hard drive… and finances are pretty tight, so I wont be able to invest in one until I have some spare cash. If this does not happen before going to uni, I have decided to rsync all of my work to the home server which I talked about in my last post.

Hopefully, as a client machine on the universities network (which should be plugged into the JANET backbone), I will have a pretty fast upload speed. If this is the case, then I should be able to upload files to my home server at around 850KB/s – and since rsync will only copy new/modified files, this should mean that I only have the one time-consuming backup… the rest should just take a minute or two.

I will let you know how I get on with that… I’m sure that you will all be sitting on the edges of your seats!