Our insights

Time moves on. Technology moves on. Your business is growing and adapting to the ever-changing world we work in and sooner or later you’re going to be faced with some serious discussions and decisions to make around aging or legacy software systems and infrastructure. In this article we’ll take a look at the impact of...

Still working with a paper-based system? You’re doing your customers and your business a disservice! The transition from paper to digital is not just a trend, but a necessity. Often referred to as Paperless Migration, digitising your paper trail can lead to increased efficiency, reduced clutter, and enhanced security. As well as the obvious internal...

Everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, a language model optimised for conversations. In a shameless attempt to ride the gravy train, I asked ChatGPT for some help in writing a blog post. Me: I need to write a blog post ASAP. Can you help? ChatGPT: Sure, I’d be happy to help! What would you like the blog...

Back in 2018 we talked about how we make software development work remotely, and about our tentative efforts to embrace Cornwall’s software development 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...

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Automotive industry manufacturer Sanden recently asked us to import a new set of data into their site, 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. The import would...

“Software dependency management” just sounds so glam, doesn’t it? If we rephrase it to say “do less, get more” it starts to sparkle a little. Let’s take a look at this essential topic and some rules that Go Tripod follow in our projects. A “dependency” refers to a unit of code that the rest of...

At Go Tripod, we’ve been in the business of software development for a long time. Although Go Tripod was officially formed in 2009, we’ve got blog posts going back to 2007 which describe the technologies we were interested in at the time. My personal blog goes back to 2003! Here’s a quick list of the...

Just interested in the code? Cut to the chase. GitHub and GitLab are competing services providing source control products based on Git. Source control enables us to keep track of all of the code changes we make to a project so that we can roll them back in the event of a problem. Seeing the...

As part of our drive to double-down on software and provide a great experience for our customers, we’ve been reviewing our hosting infrastructure. We recently talked about how our WordPress clients enjoy security and redundancy, and we want to continue to provide that same great experience for the various web apps that we host. In...

We’ve recently been extending our reach into the local area by approaching organisations that help connect businesses together. The first of these is Falmouth’s Business Improvement Distract (BID), who help boost the town by investing in marketing, business support, events and a variety of improvement mechanisms. The second is Software Cornwall, who connect and support...

We recently posted about the font loading solution we use on our websites. Further to implementing this technique we noticed that, on this very site, some of the fonts weren’t quite rendering correctly. Look at the examples below. The font rendering issues were slight but there was a definite problem with uneven character weighting in the Google...

As developers, we have a seemingly endless supply of tools at our disposal thanks to the hard work and generosity of the wider development community who, by and large, share their hard work in the hope of making their peers’ lives that little bit easier. At Go Tripod we’re always on the lookout for new...

Ten years ago, just before Go Tripod was formed, I was an independent contractor with a strong eye on my bottom line, so I created a way to track my income 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...

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. At Go Tripod,...

We’re in the early days of planning out a web design-and-build project with a new client. A key part of this process is the creation of a site map. The Site Map In its simplest form, a site map is a pictorial representation of the pages required of a website. With smaller websites this list...

Back in February I wrote about a font-loading technique I’d implemented on a new project, but there was a problem with it – the script ran on every page load meaning the browser cache was never used to serve the fonts. There are many variations on the same theme with some using session cookies to...

Go Tripod is based at Tremough Innovation Centre in Penryn, Cornwall, but our team members work remotely from locations of their choosing. By giving our staff the freedom to create their own environment, they’re able to work smarter and in the way they prefer. How do we make sure that everyone’s on the same page,...