Well it’s been another busy few months. We’ve got a lot of news to share with the world, but right now not quite enough time to share it all. As a company we’re expecting some serious growth. There’s a lot of very exciting stuff happening.

To make things easier as we move forward, we’ve been making some changes – simplifying things. September heralds a new beginning in many ways. One of the changes we’ve made is switching our accounting from Xero over to FreeAgent. Why?

Before I say anything else I just want to say Xero is a great accounting package. The team there can clearly see what’s needed and are working very hard to provide it. The amount of funding they’ve received is a testament to their commitment and has no doubt impacted hugely on the quality of the product and its overall feature set.

But for us, it’s just too much. As a small business with very simple needs, there are some features we don’t need and never use. And then there are some things that Xero just doesn’t do and probably never will. Things like time tracking.

A business of any size ought to keep track of employee time. For a small business that charges by the hour, it’s crucial for calculating profitability, estimating deadlines and projecting costs. Even on a fixed-price jobs, time-tracking is necessary.

Personally, I believe that time-tracking should be linked with accounting. While we use Basecamp for project management, the time-tracking features of FreeAgent are in my view far superior. Being able to turn Timeslips into Invoices is a massive win.

FreeAgent’s UI is also a mega bonus. Xero was clearly made for accountants. FreeAgent on the other hand has been designed with real people in mind. The helpful hints and clear buttons and menus make it easy to navigate and do what you need to do.

The layout of the menu is especially interesting:

Notice how, going from left to right, you deal with each aspect of money management as it happens: create/update Contacts (customers and suppliers) first, then assign Estimates, Project, Time, and Invoices to clients (money in). After that is money out – Bills, Expenses and Taxes. Then all of your financial reports for that retrospective look over your accounts. It’s a flow – and it’s in a logical order.

It really is a joy to use. It also plays nicely with other apps such as Basecamp. Add to this other key features such as adding attachments to bank reconciliations (i.e. PDF invoices), Estimates, automated VAT return in the UK and automated invoice emails.

The fact that they’re based in the UK too means they understand what it’s like to run a business here. Xero is based in New Zealand and other services tend to be based in the States (e.g. FreshBooks).

I initially tried FreeAgent a while back, but because we were happy enough with Xero at the time, I kept quiet. The trial account expired and I needed to pay before I could use it again. As I hadn’t really used the account, I just asked the guys nicely if they extend my free trial. Amazingly they did! So customer service is well up there too.

FreeAgent suits us very well as a company. It’s focussed around time-tracking and project-level work, which is our bread and butter. The fact that it’s primarily a web app is important to us. We could use desktop packages such as Billings, but we all feel they impose limits on when and where we can do our accounts.

All round we’re thrilled with FreeAgent. It’s making all of our lives a hell of a lot easier. As we move forward as a company, we believe that services like this are key to our growth. There are some things that need a little work, but the team is showing real interest in their community by working on features that their users are requesting. So FreeAgent, keep up the fantastic work!

We’re running a free workshop at our offices next Monday starting at 11am for developers (and designers) interested in building web apps that work on mobile devices. It’s free to come along, just get your name on the list before places fill up.

We’re going to focus on using jQTouch as it’s brilliant. It’s going to be a very practical session, getting all of the basics together for those of you who want to give it a go, but haven’t had chance to and sharing ideas for those of us who have already started using it. So bring your laptops and smartphones!

Snacks and drinks will be provided, and there’s a great sandwich bar onsite if you want to grab some lunch while you’re here. It’s going to be a very informal session with a lot of opportunity to share ideas and get some assistance.

To sign yourself up, add your name to the guest list on Facebook. If you don’t have a Facebook account, send us an email.

We love events. And we love giving away free stuff for doing nothing. So come along to the free networking event next week to say hi, then join our Facebook group and win an iPod.

Free Networking Event

We’re sponsoring a free networking event to be held at our offices on May 25^th. It’s being run by the company that manages the building, Evans Easyspace. Feel free to come along and say hi. We’re going to be playing Mario Kart on the Wii all day and we’ll have plenty of tea and coffee on the go, so come and join us!

Win an iPod Touch

Ok so we’re desperate for Facebook fans, but we want to offer something genuine to our fans: so just become a fan before the end of May and you’ll be in with a chance of winning a brand new iPod Touch!

Have you spotted any changes to the site recently?

FlipStorm is growing and now we’re looking for a web developer to join us!

We’re especially interested if you’re a young graduate looking to get into the industry with a fresh, fast-moving studio. We’re offering a paid internship with the following awesome benefits:

• Lunch provided every day
• Transport costs paid for
• You get to use a brand new iMac!

Who we’re looking for

An enthusiastic and willing person who has some experience (doesn’t have to be commercial) with PHP. You will be confident with writing standards-compliant HTML and CSS.

Ask yourself:

• Do I love social networks like Facebook and Twitter? Do I want to get paid to play around on them all day?
• Do I believe the web is the future and that web apps are going to one day take over the world?
• Do I know: what are WebHooks? what is memcached? what APIs stands for and why they’re amazing? (What do I do if I don’t know what these are?)
• Am I excited by ubiquity? (What’s ubiquity?)
• Are offline web applications cool?
• How can I make this website server 1 million page requests at a time without crashing the server?
• What’s OOP and MVC?
• Do I love sharing my ideas?
• Do I geek out about cool stuff I find on the web?

Don’t worry if you don’t have answers to all of these questions. If you have the desire to find out what the answers are, chances are you’re a good fit! Bonus Experience/Skills:

• Javascript (esp. using jQuery) – AJAX, JSON
• Apache
• MySQL
• Linux (esp. writing bash scripts)
• Mac
• Adobe Tools
• Other markup languages (esp. XML)
• Other programming languages (Python, Ruby, Perl)
• WordPress (setup, customisation, themes, plugins)
• Any flair for design
• Some use of version control software such as Git or Subversion

The Position

Part-time (max. 24 hours/week) web developer to work from our office in Oldbury on a temporary basis (initially for 3 months), with the possibility of a permanent role.

You will primarily be tasked with building CMS websites from raw designs (PSDs) or templates for FlipStorm’s various clients.

You will also be building web applications using our own open source MVC web application framework for internal and client projects.

Other tasks will involve promoting client brands and products through various mediums, researching and implementing new ways to grow and interact with their communities.

In some cases you will have charge of the entire project life-cycle. In other cases you will be asked to assist on ongoing projects.

You must be able to communicate in an effective and timely fashion directly with clients, through various tools and services (email, Skype, Basecamp).

A warm and chirpy nature will go far, you must be able to cope under pressure. When things go quiet, use that time to come up with cool and innovative ways to pass the time

If you think you fit the bill, give Simon a call on 0121 286 22 88 or fill out our contact form

April has been one hectic month! Between launching WhatGrowersUse.com, pre-launch marketing Optimise and fixing PlantConnection, I’ve barely had a moment to stop and think!

Add to this the fact that I’ve been swotting up on all things dev. I love coding in PHP and today I managed to hack out a super slender piece of functionality for an awesome *top secret* project I’m working on!

I basically need to pull a massive XML feed (think >10MB) and process the contents into a database. So this is grand-scale processing of huge wads of XML data – something I’ve never really had to do before.

This may seem a bit backwards, but moving away from the XML is imperative. This project needs to be fast and agile. I don’t want to have to allocate huge chunks of memory to my whole PHP layer just to deal with a few records in various, disparate XML files.

Starting with SimpleXML

SimpleXML is a fantastic XML parser. Being able to turn XML into native PHP objects, arrays and variables is supremely handy. However, “Simple” is definitely the operative word! When it comes to huge amounts of XML data, SimpleXML just doesn’t cut it!

So in my search for an alternative, I came across something I’ve never used before: a little-known – and it seems little-used – PHP extension called XMLReader. My hero.

XMLReader saves the day

XMLReader is what is known as a pull parser… you grab what you need as the parser races through the XML at lightning speed. It streams the file into context too: reading, caching, splurging… so you can deal with the XML before the whole file is loaded into memory.

This is a huge advantage for massive files. As long as the XML is valid, you can run away processing elements and attributes at a blistering pace.

Something to remember though is that doing it this way is no good if you then try to process all of this data in memory intensive variables or objects (which is the problem with SimpleXML). You either face increasing the memory allocation to PHP (which is limited by how much RAM you have) or you find a quick way to deal with the data and move on.

It’s grab-and-release… no time for processing here. Any kind of re-assignment of data where volumes exceed 30,000 reps of a while-loop will suck your memory dry. So no massive strings, no huge arrays and definitely no objects!

Execution Time

The only issue left is execution time. Between parsing the XML file  and saving it to a local MySQL db, your script could take a lot longer than your default execution time.

XMLReader is pretty darn snappy and there’s really no way to improve that with digging into some C code and rebuilding the extension. The code that actually does stuff with the data from the XML is very minimal. The biggest challenge is time writing to the database.

I’m using MySQL. The quickest method of writing to a database (save reformatting the data into some kind delimited text file and using load_data_infile) is mysqli prepared statements. This greatly reduces database load and running thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of queries can be done in mere seconds.

However, even this will be too slow if your max_execution time is 30 seconds. But the only real way to speed MySQL up is a faster processor and improved disk-write speed (think SSDs). Those are expensive options.

The simplest option? Increase script execution time. If this isn’t a user page, you can be a little more relaxed on timeouts. You should be able to use the set_time_limit() function to increase execution time. In fact this function has a handy habit of simply extending your current execution time by the limit you set.

<php
  while ( $xmlReader->read() ) {
    set_time_limit(2);
    // ... get data, save to DB etc ...
  }
?>

This will give each loop an extra two seconds to execute, which should be more than enough time to parse an extra few XML nodes and execute a prepared statement one more time.

So there it is. If you’d like to see the full code or have any questions, just ask, I’d be happy to share it. A huge thanks goes to Chad Fennell for his excellent post on XMLReader

It’s Monday morning and that means two things: 1) sorting out my to-dos, and 2) the blog run – catching up on all of the latest news and articles and boiling it all down into a sweet syrup to fill a tasty pastry, web news pop-tart.

So the first article I’ve stumbled across is this interesting article on drawar about the need for designers: do we or don’t we?

It throws a very CTFD-brick at all the designers out there who are desperately trying to hold onto to their means of living. However, the writer seems to miss one vital point: with all these shops out there providing off-the-shelf design, we still need good designers to produce all of that content.

So it’s a question of diversification. If you’re a talented web/graphic designer, but haven’t yet managed to reach the climbs of stardom that the more popular designers have, you need to spread yourself about. I’m not saying do spec work (that’s another debate entirely), but rather produce some of those cracking designs and sell them off through these design ‘thrift-stores’. There’s plenty around. My particular favourite is ThemeForest.

Also of note is this excellent article on improving your client relationships. I know I personally need to apply some of these steps a little more.

What interesting articles have you found/written recently?

We were really pleased to help NorthScale Inc. finish the public launch of their website. This morning TechCrunch wrote a brief review about NorthScale that’s already attracting major attention.

Rod Ebrahimi, Product Manager for NorthScale, contacted us about payment integration for the NorthScale website – where they sell software subscriptions for their memcache-related products.

They chose to go with Braintree as their payment gateway, a service we’ve never integrated with before. Thankfully all of the cogs moved quickly and communication between NorthScale, FlipStorm and Braintree was fast and detailed.

Hats off to the team at Braintree for producing a great product that was easy to integrate and a big “Well Done” to the NorthScale team for their continued assistance and willing co-operation.

Their product looks amazing and we’ll definitely be testing it out at some point. It’s already being used by some big names, including Zynga – creators of a number of hugely popular Facebook games, including FarmVille!

We look forward to working with you all again soon!

[tweetmeme]I was recently invited to the NEC to give a 20-minute seminar to those gathered for the annual PROMOTA trade show.

It was an interesting day as I was also called in as a “Business Expert” to provide free, hands-on advice to attendees.

The only question everyone asks me at these kind of shows is: How can I get to the top of Google? My answer: stop trying!

It may sound a little simple and stupid, but in most cases, the people asking have neither the time or budgets to make it worthwhile.

If you’re a small business with the goal of being at the top spot (or close to it) in Google, in certain cases you will need more than a couple of hundred pounds every month to get there!

In other cases you might not need a thing: Google “professional connections” and look for www.xon.cc… that’s a client of mine who hasn’t paid a penny for SEO!

So what’s the solution? Well, there’s no easy way to say this… be content with the position you’re in.

I’m not saying that being number one won’t bring you more sales… statistics show that it does. But don’t let your desire for the podium allow you to become disappointed in your lacklustre performance.

Remember, enterprising small businesses have made a decent living way before Google and will continue to do so.

If you can find the time to work on improving your online presence yourself (or with resources within your organisation), do it. There’s plenty of advice online to guide you in the right direction and many small companies are succeeding with this.

No matter what position you have on Google, sales aren’t guaranteed – after all, people only buy what they need/want and being at the top of a search is no guarantee of quality or competitiveness.

Also, being at the top of a results page for a particular Google search is still no guarantee that you’ll be seen or that users will click through!

It’s like having your company name on a slither of paper at the top of a pile of other names on similar slithers, in a box with a label on it, stowed away in an old library basement archives section – sat there… waiting in earnest for someone to dig it up.

Even if you managed to get the archivist to put you on top, there’s still no guarantee that anyone will see your label or that they’ll do anything with it when they do!

Image: Andersen library archives © dancypants

—

UPDATE 11.03.2010:
Some interesting related articles were published today that you might find useful. I feel they back up my point quite well. Check out Nick Pettit’s SEO is a terrible idea and Paul Boag’s response to the question Does Google Personalised Listings Affect Your Ranking?

We recently did some work on the relaunch of the website of Midlands-based design agency The Partnership. We were pleased to help them get their new site up and running.

You can see it here.

A big shout-out goes to @falconsallies for his input and direction.

I still don’t have an iPhone. I’ve wanted one from the moment it was released, but I think I’m just mistiming my upgrades… I plumped for the iPod touch and it has been ok for me for a while. I will get an iPhone this year (I need a smartphone). But I also want to give the iPad a spin. So what do I want if I’m using both devices?

The Home Screen

As soon as the App Store got into full swing, it became apparent that the iPhone interface wasn’t quite perfect. For me, scrolling through screen after screen to find that app I just downloaded is just not going to cut it.

I’m a bit OCD when it comes to organising files and apps. I want to be able to get them quickly and organise them easily (sometimes while I’m out and about) and I’m not thoroughly convinced that the touch-hold-drag method is the best for organising many apps.

This is probably not so important on the iPad, but the facilities for organising many apps and bookmarks still need attention.

App Syncing

If I download an App on my iPhone, I may also want to use it on my iPad – if it’s compatible with both. So I want some way to easily synchronise the two without the inevitable plugging both of them into my laptop!

Files

I understand te pros and cons of storing files centrally on the iPhone, but there definitely needs to be more centralised access to files. Then these files can be kept in sync across devices using services like MobileMe and Dropbox and still be accessed by other apps.

This will become more necessary for the iPad when it comes to its usability as a productivity device with the iWork suite. I certainly don’t want to have to keep copying files across wireless networks from one device to another in closed-off pools of allocated memory.

Bluetooth file transfer from the iPhone perhaps?

Innovative Uses

I want to see both the iPhone ad iPad used in innovative ways to interact with my Mac. I want to use my iPad as a wireless keyboard/mouse for my Mac mini (which, when I get it, will be hooked up to my mega flat-screen) and also with purpose-built soft-keyboards for certain applications like Boxee.

I would love to be able to have my iPad on my lap, be watching pause-able Internet TV, and be able to see sideline info against the program I’m watching.

Multitasking

Understandably on the iPhone this is something that is best left untouched. But on the iPad, it will soon be obvious that something is missing if you can only run one app at a time. Whilst the push notifications system is handy, it still doesn’t fulfil in my view.

Even if apps had to have a separate background-only mode that had tighter memory restrictions and only a certain number of apps could run in the background, it would at least allow me to access my Twitter feed while I’m surfing the web! I envisage some sort of drop-down menu interface from the title bar, similar to the menu bar on Mac OS where some apps reside.

I feel certain that Apple will do this as the iPad purportedly has the capacity for such overuse.

Are you contemplating the iPad and already use an iPhone? What would you like to see integrated between the two? Express yourself in the comments.