News

Insights

Development insights, client advice and news from Go Tripod


<p>Back in 2018 we talked about <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/we-work-remotely-why-and-how/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">how we make software development work remotely</a>, and about our tentative efforts to embrace <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/a-caring-community/">Cornwall&#8217;s software development</a> community. Four years ago is a long time ago by any stretch, but in these difficult times it seems like an eternity. How have we at Go Tripod been affected and how have we changed?</p>



<h2 id="h-us">Us</h2>



<p>The biggest (non-software!) development has been our shift to a four day <a href="https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/">week</a>. For the past year we&#8217;ve trimmed the normal working week down by adding Friday on to the weekend, a 50% increase in free time. And there are no compromises &#8211; salary remains the same and the increased leisure time hasn&#8217;t come at a price.</p>



<p>Our clients have always had support requirements that mean we need cover outside of our own business hours, and this change hasn&#8217;t affected that. Someone is always on call to deal with urgent requests. </p>



<p>We continue to work remotely, investing in equipment and people rather than office space. Slack is our main point of contact, and we use <a href="https://whereby.com/">Whereby</a> for conference calling.</p>



<h2>You</h2>



<p>We&#8217;ve recently been working with Unlocking Potential, an organisation based in the new <a href="https://fibrehub.uk/">Fibre Hub</a> down in Pool, to try and see how our services can better&#8230; well, serve, companies in Cornwall who are looking to undergo digital transformations. The use of software in this process is key, and we&#8217;re engaging with a number of small businesses who are developing cloud-based software to power the next phase of their business.</p>



<h2>Us &amp; You</h2>



<p>The past few years have shown many people what&#8217;s important in their lives, and we&#8217;re no different. We&#8217;re refocusing on our strengths, and remembering why we started working in Cornwall in the first place. If you&#8217;re looking for a partner to develop web-based software for your Cornish SME, you&#8217;re in the right place. We&#8217;ll help you develop your idea, explore funding options, and bring your software project to fruition. And if you just need some advice, we can act as your <abbr title="Chief Technical Officers">CTO</abbr> on an ad-hoc basis, so you have expert advice on-tap. Sound good? <a href="/contact/">Get in touch</a>!</p>


On software development in Cornwall in 2022


<p>We recently built a tool to visit every page in a website and collect the resulting data into a JSON file, a process known as web <strong>crawling</strong> and <strong>scraping</strong>. The JSON file was then used to create a search feature on the site, no amendments were needed to the code that powered the site itself. Here&#8217;s how we did it, and why we&#8217;ve open sourced the code to do it.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-decision-making-process">The decision making process</h2>



<p>There are a lot of solutions for crawling/spidering/scraping websites. A lot. And so obviously we decided to write our own so that it may become the <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/">universal standard</a>! Actually, no. We built what we needed to get the job done well using an open source <a href="http://go-colly.org/">scraping framework called Colly</a>. But why couldn&#8217;t we just use something that already existed, one of the many tools designed for this purpose?</p>



<p>Firstly, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for crawling. Every website is different. No matter which tool is used, you will have to specify what information you need, from which pages, and how you&#8217;d like it presented. Secondly, while we&#8217;re not adverse to using SAAS solutions, in this case we wanted to be able to control our costs and run the crawler on our schedule without worrying about spiraling costs. These two issues mean that we need an easily configurable tool that we can run without jumping through too many hoops.</p>



<p>We&#8217;d already had experience with scraping tools that could be configured with a GUI and so strongly favoured something which would let us capture our configuration as code &#8211; therefore allowing us to store it under source control.</p>



<h2 id="h-colly-web-crawling-and-scraping-in-go">Colly &#8211; Web Crawling and Scraping in Go</h2>



<p>After much research, Colly ticked our boxes: we could run it ourselves, we could configure it with code, and it was simple to set up and understand. Let&#8217;s take a look at an example, which is written in Go as you might expect:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code line-numbers"><code>c := colly.NewCollector(
    colly.AllowedDomains("gotripod.com"),
)

c.OnRequest(func(r *colly.Request) {
    fmt.Println("Visiting", r.URL.String())
})

c.Visit("https://gotripod.com/")</code></pre>



<p>This has three distinct parts:</p>



<ol><li>We create a &#8220;collector&#8221;. It is only allowed to visit gotripod.com</li><li>On each request, it should print the current URL</li><li>Visit the Go Tripod homepage, starting the site crawling process</li></ol>



<p>All this will do is hit the GT homepage and stop, because we haven&#8217;t told it what to do afterwards. And since we&#8217;re writing a <em>crawler</em> and not a <em>visitor</em>, we need to tell it where to crawl to next. After creating the collector, we can add the following code:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>c.OnHTML("html", func(e *colly.HTMLElement) {
    e.ForEach("a&#91;href]", func(_ int, el *colly.HTMLElement) {
        e.Request.Visit(el.Attr("href"))
    })
}</code></pre>



<p>When Colly&#8217;s collector detects that the requested URL is an HTML page, it&#8217;ll trigger this callback and loop through every <code>&lt;a&gt; </code>element with an <code>href</code> attribute. It&#8217;ll then visit the URL in the <code>href</code>. That&#8217;s really all we need to <em>crawl</em> through a website with Colly! This example code doesn&#8217;t do much, so let&#8217;s have a look at how we can <em>scrape</em> information from the page.</p>



<p>The <code>OnHTML</code> method takes two parameters, a selector and a callback. That selector is anything supported by <a href="https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery">goquery</a> and if you&#8217;re comfortable with CSS selectors then you&#8217;ll be good. This selector specifies the element(s) that will be passed as the second argument to OnHTML, which has a type of <a href="https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gocolly/colly#HTMLElement">colly.HTMLElement</a>. With the methods on that type you can further focus down your selection:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>c.OnHTML("article", func(e *colly.HTMLElement) {
    exportArticle(
        e.ChildText("news__meta"), e.ChildText("news__title")
    )
}</code></pre>



<p>Every time Colly sees an article element on the current page it&#8217;ll pass it to the callback, where we use the ChildText method to select metadata and title for export. Colly has <a href="https://github.com/gocolly/colly/tree/master/_examples">loads of examples</a> which go into further depth, so we&#8217;ll leave our quick overview here.</p>



<h2 id="h-all-aboard">All aboard!</h2>



<p>Having been suitably impressed by Colly&#8217;s simplicity, we completed our project without fuss. It&#8217;s not the first time we&#8217;ve written a crawler and so we wanted to see if we could easily use Colly in future projects without rewriting the same code. We wondered if we could extend Colly&#8217;s use of selectors so that we could just reconfigure the crawler to run on a completely different project. It turned out we could!</p>



<p>Super Simple Scraper takes a JSON configuration file and pushes it into Colly&#8217;s crawl engine. Out pops a JSONL file. Let&#8217;s take a look at a configuration snippet. Web crawling and scraping ahoy!</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>"html": {
    "selectors": {
        "title": "title",
        "h1": "h1",
        "url": "{{ .Request.URL }}"
    }
}</code></pre>



<p>This is the configuration used when scraping HTML pages. We specify that there should be a selector called &#8220;title&#8221; which grabs the contents of the title tag. Likewise a selector called &#8220;h1&#8221; that grabs the combined contents of all the h1 tags on the page. The last selector is a templated selector which grabs the URL of the page. </p>



<p>We&#8217;ve provided a Docker image to run SSScraper, which means that you can run it with a single command:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>docker run -it -v pwd:/go/src/app -e "CONFIG=$(cat ./path/to/your/config.json | jq -r tostring)" gotripod/ssscraper:main</code></pre>



<h2 id="h-ss-scraper-provides-results">SS Scraper provides results</h2>



<p>And that&#8217;ll produce a JSONL file, where the selector names are used as the JSON keys:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>{"h1":"Want the internet to work for you? Got an idea for a project?","title":"Contact Go Tripod | website \u0026 web application development in Falmouth, Cornwall","url":"https://gotripod.com/contact/"}
{"h1":"Topic: Git Got an idea for a project?","title":"Git Archives - Go Tripod","url":"https://gotripod.com/topics/git/"}</code></pre>



<p>That&#8217;s some Super Simple Scraping! The &#8220;title&#8221; and &#8220;h1&#8221; selectors are straightforward, but there&#8217;s some interesting stuff happening in the &#8220;url&#8221; selector. Let&#8217;s break that down to understand it a bit more.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re using Go&#8217;s text/templates package, and passing in the current request as a value. The selector {{ .Request.URL }} therefore becomes: &#8220;give me the value of the URL field on the Request variable&#8221;. </p>



<p>Templates also have access to <a href="https://masterminds.github.io/sprig/">sprig</a> helpers, which means you can get fancy with something like:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>{{ .Request.URL.Path | regexFind \"\/(insights|work)\/\" | replace \"/\" \"\" }}</code></pre>



<p>That would return either &#8220;insights&#8221;, &#8220;work&#8221;, or an empty string, depending on which appeared in the URL of the current page.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote><p>Why JSONL? Because we can then import it straight into <a href="https://typesense.org/">Typesense</a> to search it!</p></blockquote></figure>



<h2>Custom software for custom requirements</h2>



<p>SS Scraper doesn&#8217;t do anything that someone familiar with Go couldn&#8217;t do, but it does mean that we can quickly deploy a crawler/scraper on a completely new project without having to write code. We can have different config files for different projects rather than having to start afresh each time. <a href="https://github.com/gotripod/ssscraper/">SS Scraper is open source</a> on GitHub, and if you&#8217;d like us to help you deploy a crawler or scraper for your site, please <a href="https://gotripod.com/contact/">get in touch</a>.</p>


Web Crawling and Scraping Made Super Simple

<p>Automotive industry manufacturer <a href="https://gotripod.com/work/sanden/">Sanden</a> recently asked us to import a new set of data into <a href="https://sandenaftermarket.com/">their site</a>, which we built on WordPress several years ago. While we knew this was going to be a one-off custom WordPress data import, there were a few things to consider when deciding how to implement it.</p>
<ul>
<li>The import would take a while to run, and we needed to see some kind of progress indicator</li>
<li>Because the import time will exceed the allowed request timeout, we&#8217;ll need to process the import in the background</li>
<li>If anything went wrong during the import we&#8217;d need a log</li>
<li>It&#8217;d be good to do a &#8220;dry run&#8221; to check for problems without writing to the database</li>
</ul>
<p>This was one of those situations where WordPress is a little bit more of a hindrance than another system might be. Because the structure of the WordPress database is one-size-fits-all, it can be a bit tricky to do the kind of SQL INSERT you might do with other systems, and so we needed to jump through a few hoops. With the requirements asking for a dry run toggle, a progress indicator and a log display, it made sense to build a custom WordPress data import plugin which would show up in the WP admin and let us build a user interface. It could also use the WordPress authentication mechanism to restrict access to authorised users.</p>
<p>Rather than reinvent the wheel, we used <a href="https://actionscheduler.org/">Action Scheduler</a> as the backbone for our import processing. It also provided hooks to allow us to generate log files. It comes with its own dashboard to allow you to diagnose any issues, which we used during development of our plugin. Once that had been selected, the core of the import process was very simple &#8211; checking that records didn&#8217;t already exist and using the <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/">ACF</a> API to create them where missing.</p>
<p>As well as these benefits, building a custom WordPress plugin gave us a means to logically separate our code. We could package it up in a zip file for easy installation and updates, making testing a breeze.</p>


Custom WordPress data import – solving business problems with plugins


<p>&#8220;Software dependency management&#8221; just sounds so glam, doesn&#8217;t it? If we rephrase it to say &#8220;do less, get more&#8221; it starts to sparkle a little. Let&#8217;s take a look at this essential topic and some rules that Go Tripod follow in our <a href="https://gotripod.com/work/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">projects</a>.</p>



<p>A &#8220;dependency&#8221; refers to a unit of code that the rest of your code relies on. The most common way of incorporating it is to use the package manager associated with your language of choice. And so; in Ruby you might add a <a href="https://rubygems.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gem</a> to your project, Rust uses <a href="https://crates.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">crates,</a> JavaScript has <a href="https://npmjs.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">npm</a>. Easy peasy.</p>



<p>Except <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mAFiPVs3tM" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">it isn&#8217;t</a>. It&#8217;s telling that searching for the title of this post on Google turns up the Wikipedia page for &#8220;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dependency hell</a>&#8220;. Adding dependencies is one thing but we&#8217;re talking software dependency <em>management</em> here, and that involves not only keeping them up to date, but making sure you actually need those dependencies you&#8217;re adding.</p>



<h2>Rule 1 of software dependency management: do you need it?</h2>



<p>Let&#8217;s talk about that last point first. Here we go, we&#8217;re adding a dependency:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>npm install stringconcat</code></pre>



<p>In our theoretical JavaScript project, we&#8217;re running a command to add a dependency called &#8220;stringconcat&#8221; so that we can join strings together. But do we need that? In JavaScript, we certainly don&#8217;t:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>const joinedString = 'my' + 'string';</code></pre>



<p>This is a contrived example, but back in 2016  <a href="https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a very simply library called left-pad was removed from NPM</a> and caused a great deal of consternation.</p>



<p>So before you run that command willy-nilly, think: do you need it? Or can you just write it yourself?</p>



<h2>Rule 2: is it any good?</h2>



<p>Before adding the dependency, you need to make sure if it&#8217;s of sufficient quality. This doesn&#8217;t just mean that it has the features you need, or that you need to do an in-depth source code analysis, but you do need to perform some due diligence:</p>



<p><strong>How popular is your dependency? Are there more popular alternatives?</strong></p>



<p>Popularity doesn&#8217;t guarantee quality, but it&#8217;s a good indicator that the community relies on it. That should mean that people are willing to maintain it.</p>



<p><strong>How many maintainers does it have?</strong></p>



<p>Is there only one person working on this code? What happens if they get really busy?</p>



<p><strong>Are there lots of open issues or pull requests?</strong></p>



<p>If the code&#8217;s on GitHub, take a look at the issues and pull requests. Does it seem like these are neglected, or is the project team responsive and present?</p>



<p>There&#8217;s no hard and fast rule for assessing the health of a project, but thinking along these lines should allow you to get a feel for whether code&#8217;s going to be well maintained.</p>



<h2>Rule 3: do you <em>still</em> need it?</h2>



<p>We might find that our code evolves. We might find that <a href="https://caniuse.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>platforms</em> evolve</a>. In <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/padStart" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">those cases</a> we need to keep on top of our dependencies to make sure that we&#8217;re not bringing anything in unnecessarily. Particularly in cases where native implementations become available, we should use that to get a speed boost for free.</p>



<h2>Rule 4 of software dependency management: keep up to date!</h2>



<p>Rules 1 &amp; 2 are mere preludes to the killer pain of dependency management: updates. Let&#8217;s look at an example using Ruby on Rails 6, which introduced Action Cable to integrate WebSockets into your application. You try and upgrade Rails as follows:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>bundle update rails</code></pre>



<p>And see the dreaded:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>Bundler could not find compatible versions for gem "actionpack"
&lt;INSERT ENDLESS MESSAGES&gt;</code></pre>



<p>This is the reality of dependency hell. A gem relies on actionpack 5.x, so when you try and upgrade actionpack to 6.x you can&#8217;t, because of that one gem. So, you update that gem, but you can&#8217;t, because either it hasn&#8217;t been updated for Rails 6 or it in turn depends on <em>another</em> gem which is tied to Rails 5. Repeat this all the way down the dependency tree or until you have removed all of your hair and nails, whatever comes first.</p>



<p>There is no foolproof way around this, but the easiest way is to follow the other rules: keep your dependencies limited to ones that you really need and ones which are well maintained. Secondly, don&#8217;t pin to some random broken git revision, and don&#8217;t use your own forks of code. You&#8217;re asking for trouble. Thirdly, make updating your dependencies routine. Do it regularly and you&#8217;ll avoid having to wade through dependency hell and migration instructions in changelogs. Not only will your hair and nails thank you, but your project will too.</p>




Software dependency management – a primer

<p>At Go Tripod, we&#8217;ve been in the business of software development for a long time. Although Go Tripod was officially formed in 2009, we&#8217;ve got blog posts going back to 2007 which describe the technologies we were interested in at the time. My <a href="https://colinramsay.co.uk">personal blog</a> goes back to 2003! Here&#8217;s a quick list of the things we&#8217;ve been into during that time:</p>
<ul>
<li>ASP.NET (with MVC using Castle Project or SubSonic)</li>
<li>PHP &amp; WordPress</li>
<li>Obj-C</li>
<li>Adobe Flex &amp; Flash</li>
<li>Ruby &amp; Ruby on Rails</li>
<li>JavaScript (React, React Native, Ext JS &amp; Sencha Mobile)</li>
</ul>
<p>That&#8217;s a whole host of disparate technologies. Can&#8217;t we just settle on one thing?</p>
<h2>Backend Dealings</h2>
<p>ASP.NET is still a thing today, just as it was when we wrote about it in 2007. But in 2007, the web was changing rapidly. ASP.NET was clunky, relying on something called ViewState, a giant blob of data that got transferred on every page request. While it enabled rapid application development, the result wasn&#8217;t always maintainable or conducive to quick loading. I was an <a href="https://colinramsay.co.uk/ruby%20on%20rails/2005/04/06/ruby-on-rails-a-dabble.html">early fan of Ruby on Rails</a> and its organised approach to development (known as MVC), and it seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to the complexity of ASP.NET. We still use Ruby on Rails for our backend systems today, 14 years after we first started researching it.</p>
<p>On the way to 2019 though, we continued evaluating new software. Microsoft got on the bandwagon with the mostly-excellent ASP.NET MVC framework, but the Rails community was cranking out loads of great libraries to support an excellent foundation. PHP did the same, with frameworks like CakePHP but, at the time it was released, PHP had a reputation for being a bit of a mess.</p>
<h2>Front &amp; Centre</h2>
<p>The same applies on the frontend, though to a lesser extent. JavaScript&#8217;s always been the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca">lingua franca</a> of the web, powering rich interactions in the browser. But to get round some of its quirkiness, we had <a href="http://prototypejs.org/">PrototypeJS</a> in 2005, <a href="http://prototypejs.org/">MooTools</a> in 2006, and <a href="http://jquery.com/">jQuery</a> in 2007.</p>
<blockquote><p>jQuery inspired me to create <a href="https://colinramsay.co.uk/css/projects/c%23/fizzler/2008/10/19/fizzler-a-css-selector-engine-for-c-sharp.html">Fizzler, a selector engine for C#</a> in 2008. It was improved and redesigned by <a href="http://www.raboof.com/projects/fizzler/">Atif Aziz</a>, and he still maintains it today.</p></blockquote>
<p>A big one for me was the release of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext_JS">Ext JS</a> in 2007/2008, and I went on to author and co-author <a href="https://www.packtpub.com/books/info/authors/colin-ramsay">several books</a> on this rich framework.</p>
<p>In 2013, <a href="https://reactjs.org/">ReactJS was released</a> and was as much of a game-changer for frontend development as Ruby on Rails had been for backend. We jumped on it, and its sibling for apps, <a href="https://facebook.github.io/react-native/">React Native</a>, to let us build complex user interfaces in a way that was maintainable and testable.</p>
<h2>Why tho?</h2>
<p>What makes us continually search for a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_a_better_mousetrap,_and_the_world_will_beat_a_path_to_your_door">better mousetrap</a>? Looking at the bigger picture gives a clear reason: the difference in developer experience between jQuery in 2007 and React in 2019 is huge. A better developer experience means that we can provide an end product that is better tested and is more usable. The gap between ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails is a bit more muddled; we could use ASP.NET MVC now, which is a much better product. But Ruby on Rails wins out, because it&#8217;s simpler to use and has a huge lead in community-provided libraries to help us turn out top-notch projects.</p>
<h2>But&#8230;</h2>
<p>There&#8217;s an outlier here. Something that has remained constant, like a comforting blanket. WordPress was released in 2003 and remains incredibly popular, powering over half the world&#8217;s websites. It&#8217;s not perfect, but it&#8217;s developed in the open and has a massive support community. We&#8217;ve used it for years and hope to keep on doing so for years to come. The recent release of Gutenburg gives us the chance to let users build amazing page layouts with ease, and using partners such as WPEngine means we can keep things secure and backed up without any worries.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>The world of software moves quickly, but the goals remain the same: make great experiences for our clients and their customers. The technology should fade away into the background, but we know it&#8217;s there, quietly powering and empowering.</p>


Evolving our technologies and learning how to learn

<p><a href="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89.jpg" data-size="1942x1310"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-461" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89-1024x691.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="691" srcset="https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89-1024x691.jpg 1024w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89-300x202.jpg 300w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89-768x518.jpg 768w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/photo-1519635694260-6af6fc200c89.jpg 1942w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a></p>
<p>As 2018 hurtles away from us in the rear-view mirror, 2019 leaps upon us with its loving embrace. It&#8217;s time for us to look back, and forward, and take stock of where Go Tripod has been and where it&#8217;s going.</p>
<h2>Double Down on Software</h2>
<p>Last year we focused on the things we do well. We started off by <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/a-new-look-for-go-tripod/">launching our new website</a> which saw us double our visits and increase our visitor count. We added a host of <a href="https://gotripod.com/work/">case studies</a> (with many more to come!) and, by becoming the <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/jack-trades-master-one/">master of one trade</a>, we let those new visitors know exactly what we&#8217;re about. We made inroads into working with the larger <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/a-caring-community/">Cornish software community</a>, something that was long coming, and we finally settled on a range of <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/how-we-host/">hosting options that provide security</a> and peace of mind for our clients. We worked with WordPress a lot, improving <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/ensuring-security-wordpress-websites/">security</a>, <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/enqueue-defer-scripts-wordpress/">performance</a>, and our general <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/managing-change-requests-within-the-development-process/">development process</a>.</p>
<h2>Kick On</h2>
<p>2018 felt like a year of consolidation, of certainty, and of improvement. In 2019, we&#8217;ll continue to review all aspects of our business, but we&#8217;ll be looking to do more research into techniques to take us to the next level. We&#8217;re working with a range of clients, new and old:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.keysafetv.com/">Keysafe Tenant Vetting</a> to revamp their platform for a changing marketplace</li>
<li><a href="http://www.aftermarket-sanden-europe.com">Sanden International</a> to provide a new product catalogue infrastructure</li>
<li><a href="http://creativeengland.co.uk/investment/epic">The EPIC fund</a> to work on digital health products for Cornish business</li>
</ul>
<p>There are some exciting technologies coming to maturity that we&#8217;d like to leverage. <a href="https://firebase.google.com/">Google Firebase</a> has the <a href="https://firebase.google.com/products/firestore/">Firestore</a> real-time database in beta, allowing us to provide resilient offline-capable databases to our projects. Facebook continues to develop the React library, with exciting new features such as <a href="https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-overview.html">Hooks</a> and <a href="https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/13206">Suspense</a> coming soon, and those will help us improve performance when we create complex user interfaces. WordPress has released their long-anticipated version 5.0, and we&#8217;ll be looking to see how the new <a href="https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/">Gutenberg</a> editor can improve the experience for our clients.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re also implementing some of the ideas raised during our <a href="https://gotripod.com/insights/how-we-host/">hosting research</a> and moving <a href="https://gotripod.com/work/tdk/">TDK-Lambda</a>&#8216;s infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. This will provide greater resilience for their database and application, as well as opening up exciting options for future development.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re really excited about 2019. If you&#8217;d like to hear what we could offer you in the year to come, please <a href="https://gotripod.com/contact/">get in touch</a>!</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>


A Happy Go Tripod New Year

<p>We&#8217;ve recently been extending our reach into the local area by approaching organisations that help connect businesses together. The first of these is <a href="https://www.falmouth.co.uk/shopsandbusinesses/go-tripod/">Falmouth&#8217;s Business Improvement Distract (BID)</a>, who help boost the town by investing in marketing, business support, events and a variety of improvement mechanisms. The second is <a href="https://www.softwarecornwall.org/member/gotripod/">Software Cornwall</a>, who connect and support Cornwall’s digital techology community. These are the first two in a series of partnerships we&#8217;re entering into in order to better understand the needs of the local community.</p>


A Caring Software Community

<p>Ten years ago, just before Go Tripod was formed, I was an independent contractor with a strong eye on my bottom line, so <a href="https://colinramsay.co.uk/personal/projects/php/freshbooks/plastiscenic/2008/11/27/freshbooks-invoice-widget.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I created a way to track my income</a> at-a-glance. This was extremely useful at the time, as it helped a young Colin make sure he had enough pennies at the end of each month, and we now use a much more advanced version at GT to make sure we&#8217;re bringing in some good dollar every year.</p>
<h2>The business challenge</h2>
<p>We&#8217;d like to be able to quickly get information on our current financial performance, including monthly tallies and current debtors and creditors. This data should be available in a frictionless manner &#8211; without needing to log in to accounting software, crunch numbers or run reports.</p>
<h2>The solution (In a nutshell)</h2>
<p>In my decade-old solution, I was using Freshbooks for accounting. At GT we now use Xero, a cloud-based accounting program that makes the whole process of invoicing, filing returns and tracking payments much easier. We worked out a way to pull our financial information out of Xero and have it posted into Slack, the chat service that our team uses each day. We wrote a chatbot, called Yus, which we can use to request vital information about how well Go Tripod is performing. Yus will also give us a breakdown of bills that we need to pay and invoices that are outstanding.</p>
<h2>The solution (The software side)</h2>
<p>We built Yus using a combination of <a href="https://botkit.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Botkit</a> and <a href="https://xeroapi.github.io/xero-node/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">xero-node</a>. It runs on <a href="https://www.heroku.com/home" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Heroku</a>. Here&#8217;s a sample of what it can do:</p>
<p><div id="attachment_426" style="width: 680px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2018/06/yus-1.gif" data-size="670x368"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-426" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-426 size-full" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2018/06/yus-1.gif" alt="Invoking '@yus invoicing this month' in Slack" width="670" height="368" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-426" class="wp-caption-text">Yus giving us invoicing figures</p></div></p>
<p>We can send Yus simple phrases and it&#8217;ll respond accordingly. This time round it&#8217;s decided to exaggerate somewhat 🤑</p>
<p><div id="attachment_427" style="width: 680px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2018/06/yus-2.gif" data-size="670x368"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-427" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-427 size-full" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2018/06/yus-2.gif" alt="Invoking '@yus who owes us' in Slack" width="670" height="368" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-427" class="wp-caption-text">Yus shows us which clients have outstanding invoices over 30 days old</p></div></p>
<p>In this case we get a list of clients who we might otherwise not have chased for payment until our bookkeeper flagged this up. Now, Yus can help us liaise with our clients to make sure invoices don&#8217;t slip through the cracks.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Transparency is key. Low friction transparency is even better. By using chatbot software we can listen to the heartbeat of Go Tripod and take immediate steps to perform course corrections. Fancy building some clever technology to improve your business? <a href="https://gotripod.com/contact/">Get in touch</a>.</p>
<h2>A little word about Yus</h2>
<p>The name &#8220;Yus&#8221; comes from two letters in the Cyrillic script: Little yus (Ѧ ѧ) and big yus (Ѫ ѫ). We use this character to represent a tiny tripod in our email footers.</p>


Using chatbot software to improve transparency – introducing Yus

<p>An early temptation when setting up a development shop is to diversify: to provide logo design, SEO assistance, print work, marketing. The ability to sell yourself to clients as a one stop shop is compelling, with the idea being that you can capture more work and provide a better experience for customers.</p>
<p>At Go Tripod, we don&#8217;t work that way.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re software developers and web experts. We like focus. By being up front and telling clients that we concentrate on what we do best, we can avoid spreading ourselves too thinly. The flip side of being a one stop shop is that there&#8217;s a lack of group knowledge about software best practices, such as using source control, automated testing, or keeping up to speed with the latest tools.</p>
<p>What happens when our clients do need other services? Then we hit our network. We can reach out to those who are using our approach: focusing on what they do best. That means that we can call upon the outstanding people in a particular field, bringing in specialists where needed. We&#8217;ll use Teamwork to bring everyone together to make sure the lines of communication remain clear, and in doing so can create projects that are greater than the sum of their parts.</p>
<p>We know code, and we know the web. <a href="https://gotripod.com/contact/">Let us show you</a>.</p>


Jack of all trades? Or master of one?

<p>One of the problems with being a small, independent software development agency is that we&#8217;re usually so busy on client projects that we don&#8217;t often get much time to devote to our own business needs.</p>
<p>To this end our own website has languished as a glorified holding page for quite some time. But no longer!</p>
<p>Today, with some helpful input and invaluable guidance from creative gurus <a href="https://curiousways.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Curious Ways</a>, we&#8217;ve been able to launch a <a href="https://gotripod.com/">new look Go Tripod website</a>.</p>
<p>In the true spirit of agile development, this initial launch covers the bare minimum content and functionality we deemed necessary. This includes a homepage that briefly outlines our business offerings, a contact page and all our previous blog posts. We&#8217;ll be extending our new website to include case studies, portfolio pieces and more information on our services in good time. So, watch this space.</p>
<p>In the process of redesigning our website, we&#8217;ve also rebranded our company and plan to roll these changes out to our various social media accounts and other corporate channels over the next few days.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re the same company on the inside, but with a fresh new look on the outside.</p>


A new look for Go Tripod

<p>A warm welcome to our latest team member, Matthew Dixon!</p>
<p>Matthew joins us as Lead Front-End Developer, and will be working to translate responsive designs into wonderful web experiences. His HTML5, CSS3 and WordPress experience will combine with our new hosting partner, <a href="https://wpengine.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WP Engine</a>, to work with both new and existing customers!</p>


Welcome to our new WordPress, HTML5 and CSS hero Matthew Dixon

<p>Colin&#8217;s started <a href="http://colinramsay.co.uk/2015/03/27/react-native-simple-native-module.html">playing around</a> with the new <a href="http://facebook.github.io/react-native/">React Native</a> from Facebook, a way of building native-speed applications for iOS using JavaScript. It&#8217;s a completely new approach and we&#8217;re really excited about it &#8211; follow Colin&#8217;s experiments over at his <a href="http://colinramsay.co.uk/2015/03/27/react-native-simple-native-module.html">personal blog</a>.</p>


We Like React Native

<p>Change is good, or so they say. In our case, we wanted to do some spring cleaning and strip back our website into something a bit more <em>us</em>. A bit more <em>2014</em>.</p>
<p>So here it is. We took a variety of new approaches when compared to our old site, and in this post I&#8217;m going to walk through the ways in which we deployed our snazzy yet performant new site in just a couple of days.</p>
<h2 id="standontheshoulders">Stand On The Shoulders</h2>
<p>Often we&#8217;ll advocate a client starts a new website from a pre-built HTML template &#8211; it gets us up and running quickly and enables them to visualise what the final site&#8217;s going to look like early on. It reduces cost for the client in a pragmatic way and gives us a solid HTML foundation to build on.</p>
<p>With our template selected, we selected two strong foundations: Github Pages and <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>. This enables us to take advantage of the speed of Github&#8217;s platform and keep our entire site in a git repository with Jekyll&#8217;s powerful static site generator.</p>
<p>We are massive fans and advocates of Github and use it everyday when we build software for our Clients. We use it to maintain sensible software source control, backups and management of everything around software development. Yes, its a wee bit geeky, we admit it and its not something we would encourage everyone to do, but we thought, what the heck &#8211; lets do this just because we can.</p>
<p>Working with Jekyll makes life super-simple, much more so than our previous WordPress platform, and all our blogposts are stored a simple markdown files.</p>
<p>We pulled apart our stock template and fitted Jekyll around it. With our freshly written content, we were already getting close to a beta version.</p>
<h2 id="polish">Polish</h2>
<p>Our new site began with one of those parallax scrolling effects which are currently in vogue, a bit like this one on the <a href="http://prinzhorn.github.io/skrollr/">skrollr demonstration page</a>. I&#8217;ve always had a problem with this effect, it seemed sticky when scrolling the page, so when I found the same issue with our site, I took a dive into the root cause.</p>
<p>A superb <a href="http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/scrolling/">HTML5 Rocks article</a> on the performance of scrolling along with this excellent advice on how <a href="http://addyosmani.com/blog/devtools-visually-re-engineering-css-for-faster-paint-times/">CSS affects painting performance</a> by Addy Osmani gave me a couple of glaring candidates.</p>
<p>Our background images, which slipped past as you scrolled, were all set as background-attachment: fixed. Removing this gave us a slightly more &#8220;ordinary&#8221; feel but a much slicker experience &#8211; the browser no longer felt like it was struggling. Large fixed position elements and backgrounds are something which browsers are still struggling with in certain situations.</p>
<h2 id="cleanup">Clean up</h2>
<p>Next I looked at the stuff we had left from our original HTML template. Our particular template came with a load of extra JavaScript stuff (such as the rather excellent, but unnecessary <a href="http://isotope.metafizzy.co/">Isotope</a>) which needed to be removed. The HTML needed to be tidied and the CSS needed to be minimised. I had a quick look at <a href="http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/">Google&#8217;s Pagespeed Insights</a> and <a href="http://tools.pingdom.com/">Pingdom&#8217;s Website Speed Tests</a>.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-124 size-full" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2014/04/googlevspingdom.png" alt="" width="580" height="154" srcset="https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/googlevspingdom.png 580w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/googlevspingdom-300x80.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px" /></p>
<p>Ok, but not great. Time to go to work.</p>
<h3 id="removetheextrajs">Remove the extra JS</h3>
<p>Pretty straightforward this one &#8211; removed 422 lines of JavaScript, some of which wasn&#8217;t being executed. I also want to minimise the number of HTTP downloads we&#8217;re doing for JavaScript and try to minimise the payload for those HTTP requests. I knocked up a quick shell script to do this:</p>
<pre><code class="language-powershell"># Remove existing build artifacts
rm ./assets/js/build.*

# Combine all of our JS files into build.js, maintaining the include order
cat ./assets/js/jquery.js ./assets/js/jquery.sticky.js ./assets/js/jquery.quote.rotator.min.js ./assets/js/neatshow.js ./assets/js/common.js &gt; ./assets/js/build.js

# Use yui compressor to make a mini version
java -jar ~/Downloads/yuicompressor-2.4.8.jar --verbose -o ./assets/js/build.min.js ./assets/js/build.js</code></pre>
<p>With that, I now only include build.min.js from our master template and we&#8217;ve achieved our goal.</p>
<h3 id="optimisecss">Optimise CSS</h3>
<p>I&#8217;m a fan of the <a href="http://sass-lang.com/">SASS SCSS syntax</a> for authoring CSS, and though the new site doesn&#8217;t fully utilise it yet, I&#8217;d like to do so in the future. For now, we&#8217;ll just use its ability to import other SCSS files and its compressor to produce a minified CSS file. So as well as our main site CSS, our styles.scss file includes some imports:</p>
<pre><code class="language-css">@import "font-awesome";
@import "google-fonts";
@import "syntax";</code></pre>
<p>Then I compile it into a compressed CSS file with:</p>
<pre><code class="language-powershell">sass assets/scss/style.scss assets/css/style.css --style compressed</code></pre>
<p>Again, we&#8217;ve got a single compressed file which we now include from our master template.</p>
<h3 id="optimiseourimages">Optimise our images</h3>
<p>If you&#8217;re a Mac user, take a look at <a href="http://imageoptim.com/">ImageOptim</a> which bundles some great optimisation tools with a very simple UI to compress your image. By running our PNG and JPEG images through ImageOptim you get about a 10% saving on PNG images, so it&#8217;s worth a try.</p>
<p>Now let&#8217;s have a look at what our changes have done for the site.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-126 size-full" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2014/04/googlevspingdom-after.png" alt="" width="580" height="154" srcset="https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/googlevspingdom-after.png 580w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/googlevspingdom-after-300x80.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px" /></p>
<p>Much better!</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>We&#8217;re not hitting 100% on the scores above, there&#8217;s a little bit more we could potentially do. Because we opted to host with Github Pages, we&#8217;re limited in our control of server-side caching options. In an ideal world we could tweak this to give repeat visitors better performance. However, I&#8217;m pleased that we&#8217;ve managed to polish our original template to the point where it&#8217;s pretty shiny, and it gives us a great platform to take the website into the future!</p>


The Go Tripod Website – A New Hope

<p>You have probably heard about the SSL Heartbleed threat by now. In case you have not, here is a summary.</p>
<h2>What is SSL?</h2>
<p>SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a protocol that websites use to encrypt and protect data between you and them. This happens in the background whenever you use, for example, online banking.</p>
<h2>So what is Heartbleed?</h2>
<p>Heartbleed is a programming error (or bug as the trade people call it) which provides a vulnerability to allow a person to intercept encrypted SSL traffic. You can read a more in-depth discussion here <a href="http://email.fusionexpress.co.uk/t/r-l-xftrjt-l-s/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://heartbleed.com</a></p>
<h2>Am I at risk?</h2>
<p>Yes and no. If you are a client of Go Tripod and we have developed an application for you, we have already taken measures and checked out all of our clients applications. We are all good.</p>
<p>However, other services and applications on the Internet maybe at risk. Those services providers should be checking their own services and resolving the problem. Be cautious in the meantime and contact those companies if you have any concerns.</p>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>Go Tripod will continuely monitor and keep a look out for threats and issues. Ensuring you can relax with your drink on a sunny beach in the comfort of knowing we have your back.</p>
<p>We have the tools and the ability to check other platforms, if you know of anyone that you think might benefit from this, <a href="http://gotripod.forwardtomyfriend.com/r-l-2AD73FFF-xftrjt-l-g" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pass on this email </a>or <a href="mailto:support@gotripod.com?subject=Help!%20I%20may%20need%20my%20SSL%20checking%20out" target="_blank" rel="noopener">get in touch with us</a>.</p>


SSL Heartbleed Bug

<p>It&#8217;s been a great year for Go Tripod and early plans for 2012 look to be just as exciting for our colleagues and for our clients.</p>
<p>First off, I’m pleased to say that our team is expanding again. We have just hired a new office manager, Sophie Yule. As our client base continues to grow, Sophie has joined the Cornwall team to assist us in ensuring our services are delivered as efficiently as possible.</p>
<p>Secondly, to allow for our growth down in Cornwall we have moved to new premises in the centre of Truro. Our new offices are located on St George&#8217;s Road, opposite The (famously excellent) Cheese Shop.</p>
<p>To celebrate, the team got together at <a href="http://www.thecovemaenporth.co.uk/">The Cove, in Maenporth</a>, near Falmouth in Cornwall to have a great meal and one or two drinks.</p>
<p><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-132 size-full" src="https://content.gotripod.com/images/2011/12/Screen-Shot-2011-12-16-at-09.21.07.png" alt="" width="816" height="498" srcset="https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Screen-Shot-2011-12-16-at-09.21.07.png 816w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Screen-Shot-2011-12-16-at-09.21.07-300x183.png 300w, https://content.gotripod.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Screen-Shot-2011-12-16-at-09.21.07-768x469.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 816px) 100vw, 816px" /></p>
<p>So, on into 2012. The new year will bring with it a new website design for gotripod.com – allowing for easier scalability as we evolve on into the future. The new design will still incorporate the best bits of the current WordPress functionality, but if you notice anything that doesn’t appear to be working or any other bugs after the new design is launched please let us know.</p>
<p>Finally, we wish all our blog readers, clients and colleagues a very happy Christmas and all the best for 2012.</p>


A Go Tripod Christmas

<p>We have just rolled out an update to Stubmatic. Although on the surface stubmatic looks the same we have made some major changes to the underlying logic in preparation for some future enhancements that we are working on.</p>
<p>For now one of the biggest changes you will notice is we have updated the way events are published. We have changed the terminology from &#8220;published&#8221; to &#8220;listed&#8221; and events can now be listed and delisted from your box office at any time. For example, previously when an event was cancelled or sold out it remained on your box office, you can now optionally de-list these.</p>
<p>In addition to this we have made several fixes and tweaks to the system, including:</p>
<ol>
<li>Sold out events now correctly show as available if more tickets are added</li>
<li>Layout tweaks to assist navigation.</li>
<li>For new events created from today: Have made it clearer and simplified which email address PayPal payments are being sent to.</li>
</ol>
<p>We are centralising product blogs back to our main blog so all updates to Stubmatic will be posted here from now on.</p>


Stubmatic Update [31 Oct 2011]

<p>By the way, did we mention that <a href="https://twitter.com/gotripod" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Go Tripod has its own Twitter account</a>?  Oh, it seems what with moving into our new office in Truro and working away on client projects that we might have forgotten to tell anyone.</p>
<p>However, you probably do know that we are quite active in the Twittersphere with our respective individual accounts.  And for those who choose not to tweet and be tweeted at (or if you just missed some), we thought we would occasionally use this blog to collect some of our “tweets of note” from recent weeks.</p>
<p>So here are some great tweets, retweets and links we thought would be worth sharing again.</p>
<div style="height: 70px;"><strong><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Simon" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Simon-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/simonashley/status/1363768466472960">@simonashley</a></strong>:  RT @<a href="http://twitter.com/freshbooks">freshbooks</a> The Future of Freelance &#8211; What do clients want? &#8211; <a href="http://bit.ly/9R4oKY">http://bit.ly/9R4oKY</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Jon" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Jon-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/miletbaker/status/29659381143"><strong>@miletbaker</strong></a>:  Just trying out Sparrow the new lightweight Gmail app for OS X and it is Awesome <a href="http://bit.ly/apuLWX">http://bit.ly/apuLWX</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Colin" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Colin-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/colinramsay"><strong>@colinramsay</strong></a>:  RT @<a title="ben goldacre" href="http://twitter.com/#%21/bengoldacre">bengoldacre</a> Times online readership 50,000, Guardian 37 million: also &#8220;future of journalism&#8221; etc from @<a href="http://twitter.com/arusbridger">arusbridger</a> <a href="http://dlvr.it/8BrF9">http://dlvr.it/8BrF9</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Jon" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Jon-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/miletbaker/status/1627451650215938"><strong>@miletbaker</strong></a>:  Good Video on the darker side of positive thinking (i.e. The Secret) by @<a href="http://twitter.com/theRSAorg">theRSAorg</a> <a href="http://youtu.be/u5um8QWWRvo">http://youtu.be/u5um8QWWRvo</a> /via @<a href="http://twitter.com/iOlly">iOlly</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Go Tripod" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/avatar-150x150.png" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/gotripod/status/27228211554"><strong>@gotripod</strong></a>:  Check out Cloud Backup for Sage 50 by our friends at @<a href="http://twitter.com/internetware">internetware</a> &#8211; free until 30th Nov too! <a href="http://is.gd/g01V5">http://is.gd/g01V5</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Go Tripod" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/me_on_halloween-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/myyada/status/1668798608310272"><strong>@myyada</strong></a>:  I&#8217;m enjoying looking at this: <a href="http://maps.thinkbroadband.com/">http://maps.thinkbroadband.com/</a> via @<a href="http://twitter.com/tomkiss">tomkiss</a> @<a href="http://twitter.com/jemimakiss">jemimakiss</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Simon" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Simon-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/simonashley/status/1243164421652480"><strong>@simonashley</strong></a>:  Ever wondered what colours to use with an image? <a href="http://www.pictaculous.com/">http://www.pictaculous.com/</a></div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Colin" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Colin-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/colinramsay/status/1943011856486400"><strong>@colinramsay</strong></a>:  <a href="http://thinkvitamin.com/mobile/new-rails-like-framework-from-37signals-for-html5-mobile-apps/">http://thinkvitamin.com/mobile/new-rails-like-framework-from-37signals-for-html5-mobile-apps/</a> exciting!</div>
<div style="height: 70px;"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="preserveDimensions" style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0;" title="Go Tripod" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/me_on_halloween-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="50" height="50" /><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/lakey/status/29658157074"><strong>@myyada</strong></a>:  RT @<a title="Chris Lake" href="http://twitter.com/#%21/lakey">lakey</a> @<a href="http://twitter.com/georgerosier">georgerosier</a>: Really interesting vid of an Augmented Reality future that isn&#8217;t all just advertising » <a href="http://bit.ly/d45Em5">http://bit.ly/d45Em5</a></div>


Introducing the Go Tripod Twitter account

<p>The second edition of the book written by <a href="http://www.vinylfox.com/">Shea Frederick</a>, <a href="http://blog.cutterscrossing.com/">Steve &#8220;Cutter&#8221; Blades</a>, Nigel White and myself is now available for purchase. <a href="https://www.packtpub.com/learning-ext-js-3-2-for-building-dynamic-desktop-style-user-interfaces/book">Learning Ext JS covers version 3.2+ of the Ext JS JavaScript framework</a> and will give developers who are new to the framework a head-start in creating high-quality rich applications.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.packtpub.com/learning-ext-js-3-2-for-building-dynamic-desktop-style-user-interfaces/book">The second edition</a> updates the existing content for the latest Ext JS version, and adds new chapters to cover the newest components available in Ext JS 3.2. Go Tripod have been working with Ext JS to create exciting web applications for a number of enterprise customers and our Ext JS consultancy service is proving increasingly popular.</p>
<p>Working on <a href="https://www.packtpub.com/learning-ext-js-3-2-for-building-dynamic-desktop-style-user-interfaces/book">Learning Ext JS</a> was a pleasure and a privilege for me and I&#8217;d like to thank Packt, my co-authors, and the developers of Ext JS. Hopefully our customers will continue to be eager for applications in this excellent framework &#8211; I&#8217;m looking forward to continue working with it in future!</p>
