Peter Graves

What to do with all my stuff I no longer need?

Peter — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:38:26 +0000

I could send it to the refuse dump I guess, but recently I have been posting my stuff to the Dumfries and Galloway Freeshare group over at Yahoo! Groups! — it not all about giving, there is also an element of receiving but I have yet to receive anything as its a bit hit and miss — maybe there’s some secret handshakes or ritual I need to take part in before I get to receive anything? Ha! Regardless of giving, or receiving, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

It is described as:

The Dumfries and Galloway Freeshare group is for anyone in the Dumfries and Galloway area who has something that they no longer need but that is too good to throw away. The Dumfries and Galloway Freeshare group is open to all who wish to ‘recycle’ items whether you want to pass an item on or maybe find something you’re looking to acquire something yourself.

Anyways — use the link below to subscribe.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Dumfries-and-Galloway-Freeshare/

The above is for ‘Free Stuff’ but for those slightly valuable things, they can be sold on the Dumfries and Galloway Car Boot Sale (link below) — from the site, it is described as:

A virtual Car Boot for the residents of Dumfries and Galloway to buy and sell items.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Dumfries-and-Galloway-Car-Boot/

Lincoln’s 1st birthday

Peter — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:21:45 +0000

Happy birthday to you…

Images on mobileme http://gallery.me.com/petergraves#100016. Download the original AVI files (right click + save target as…):

Get the DivX codec / player from http://www.divx.com/

Flash videos:

A little hello to my hosting company

Peter — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:33:15 +0000

This is a hello to my hosting company, Parcom.net, who host petergraves.co.uk. In one way or another I have been with them since about 1998 / 1999 — that’s almost 10 years and I am happy to say they have never ever let me down. They have always been there. Lets hope we stay together for another 10 years.

It’s a long distance affair — they are based near Seattle and I am across the pond in blighty. But that doesn’t matter.

The price is fair, support (on the very rare occasion that I have needed it) is prompt and polite and they are just a great bunch of guys and girls to deal with.

On the technological side they offer components from the major vendors (components from Persists and the Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite component which make my URLS look pretty - amongst others) which is very useful from a development point of view (though through dot net the Persists components seem a bit antiquated now - but they are there if needed for legacy code).

The Helm control panel negates the need to contact them, as everything is very ’self-service’. Help yourself, turn things on and off till your heart is content. Way too much disk space (more space than you can shake a stick at) and generous bandwidth limits.

There is also a vibrant community of other Parcom customers and Parcom staff, including ‘Crazy’ Dave - the CCE (Chief Custodial Engineer), owner and connoisseur of noodles.

So, if your looking for web and email hosting I highly recommend them.

Right… Where’s my backhander?

dCMS - Content Management System

Peter — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:32:24 +0000

dCMS is a content management system offering many features out of the box and has the ability to integrate custom modules - easily and simply. The current version is 1.0.6b and requires IIS5 and MySQL.

Plans are afoot to rewrite the dCMS from the ground up using ASP.NET 2.0 and MS SQL.

This was created by me before my time at digitl with Shout It Out and has been worked upon during my time at digitl - adding new features and functions.

Features:

Page Editing
- WYSIWYG Page editing
- Multiple page templates
- Easy addition of Modules, Galleries and Forms to pages
- Full control of meta data for SEO
- Easy addition of images and documents to pages
- Easy linking of pages together (related pages)
- Search engine friendly links and page caching
Out of the box modules
- Google Maps API
- Google Site-maps (sitemaps.org)
- Events listings
- Search
Custom modules have included
- Blog
- News
- eCommerce
- RSS feeds
- Advanced hierarchical listings
- Integration with the eBay API
- flickr API
- RSS integration / consumption of external RSS feeds
- Screen Scraping
- Live currency conversion
- YouTube API
- Comments and ratings
Comprehensive but simple media management
- Global repository for uploaded content available to all aspects of the dCMS
- Automatically re-sizes images to three custom sizes (large, medium and small)
- Images can be assigned into categories and categories in turn can be turned into public galleries
- Documents can be uploaded with additional meta data
- Auto recognition of Flash content and easy insertion into pages
Form management
- Many forms can be defined (contact, feedback, competition etc) and easily added to pages
- Forms can go to user definable email addresses as well as being stored internally in the dCMS database
User Management
Easy to change global settings

dCms powers a whole host of sites, a list can be found here.

If you would like an easy to use and powerful web site management tool then get in touch to discuss your needs.

dCMS - who’s using it?

Peter — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:00:35 +0000

The sites below are currently using a version of the dCMS for content and site management:

London - June 2008

Peter — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:42:10 +0000

Some images taken first thing in the morning of the views over london.

Gretna Hotels

Peter — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:28:15 +0000

http://www.gretnahotels.co.uk/

From the site: Gretna Hotels features accomodation in Gretna for weddings. If you are looking for a Hotel in Gretna, or a Guest House, B&B or Self Catering accommodation in the Gretna area, they should be listed on Gretna Hotels. You can also submit your Gretna Hotel online.

The site features an administrative interface allowing the easy management of content, google maps integration and a proximity locator finder (i.e. find more hotels x miles away from this hotel).

Technologies used: ASP, AJAX, Google Maps API, MySQL.

Design by Kit Allen.
Programming by Peter Graves.
Created at my time with digitl Ltd.

Hello world!

Peter — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:57:35 +0000

My name is Peter Graves and I am a freelance web programmer available for hire and able to work with Microsoft scripting and programming languages such as Classic ASP and VB.NET as well as the usual HTML, CSS, JavaScript, a bit of PHP and Windows Server 2003.

I have recently returned to being a freelancer after a few years trudging away in an out of town office, doing what I do now and did before.

I will be using my WordPress blog to publicize myself more and to showcase what I have done in the past, what I am doing now and what I will be doing in the future.