Author: Nicholas

The RemoteDevelopment CMS admin looks after this site. Contact Nicholas on Slack (see footer). Nicholas is also a Developer on Remote Development and the founder of the site.
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Lexicon

There are whole languages dedicated to how your image may be represented on your screens, languages that direct how email is delivered and yet more, including this one, the one people understand.

We have a lot of terms around technical subjects and nomenclature is oft a reason to avoid breaking the ice and understanding even basic things.  Language is a tool – and should never be a barrier – so this page is dedicated to clarity.

 

D

domain

Your address on the web

L

Lithium Cloud Hosting

Our mail server may send you messages.  As this is its name, it may be from lithium.cloudhosting.co.uk.  Do not worry.  It is just a server name.

S

Subdomain

A secondary domain from your domain which can host a separate or website or service allowing extensions to make your site richer without also making it too complex to work on.

W

www

www is a subdomain of your main domain.  Your main domain is used as the suffix for email addresses: e.g. yourname@abc.xyz

The domain, abc.xyz has a subdomain called www.abc.xyz – this is usually configured to load your domain website (so abc.xyz or www.abc.xyz would both load www.abc.xyz).

You should always use www. when referring to your website unless it is in an email address or if you actually want to refer to a subdomain which replaces www.

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Development Story

Adding new kinds of products to Remote Development

Products had been kind of rushed and too specifically sewn together while getting the latest version of VueJS working for me instead of against me!

It is tricky to debug but very informative, it basically is telling you if you have configured it incorrectly, so it produces only working Javascript that effectively abstracts to make a logical component architecture.  Sometimes you have to fiddle to get things right, like any architecture you have to get used to the tool set.

We went from three or four basic products to being able to add products to generate enquiries without much configuration and importantly by only creating the product and its membership in certain groups.  Configuration changed things.

Next, we have to think about a sales presentation – the component architecture is now taken to its elemental pieces – they can be organised into prettier boxes without breaking everything!

 

 

 

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Picking and specifying web colour

Or color – the American spelling is used on the web.  The English version is used in novels.

We have a system for specifying a colour with 256 stages for each primary.

RGBA = Red Green Blue Alpha.  Alpha is the opacity level, and defaults to 1 (100% – i.e. no transparency).

Technical

Hex colours are expressed as a triplet of hex numbers (i.e. hex numerals from 0 to 15 are reprented as 0, 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E.   255 is represented as 0xFF or just FF

Each colour can be represented with a leading #RRGGBB series, or as an rgb or rgba function.

Examples

#000000 = no colour = black

#00ff00 = 100% green

#ffff00 = 100% yellow

rgb(23,34,45) = #233445

rgb(255,0,0) = red = #ff0000

Useful Link

For a useful colour tool to mix your own pallet try this:

https://www.hexcolortool.com/#8dbfb6

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Evolution

We are evolving better ways to introduce our abilities to clients, replicating successful software development practices used by major London agencies.  We want to continue to offer remote software services to corporate clients and at the same time build teams of developers who are available to clients and build new web businesses for clients.  Here are recent post updates summarised for a quicker read.

How to: WordPress: Make a post

How to: WordPress: making a new post

New Client Homepage

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New Client Homepage

We are considering releasing an update that expands client options to include a range of Introductory options for first timers and ongoing services for existing clients.

We develop software designed by clients and get their hands dirty controlling their web assets.  We integrate e-commerce pages into the site for clients (in sites like this site, a CMS), or advanced framework full stack development to make your web business ideas into online sales pages.

Our home page allows clients who have an (optional) Intro page to expand it with services, or to build their online infrastructure with our help.

live.RemoteDevelopment.co.uk is a living example of one of our Full Stack projects, it is a full stack Laravel project.  You have to register to use it.  It is free to Register and to use to generate enquiries.  We may have a cost-effective solution to your business problem or be able to take your business to the next step with its use of WordPress.

Clients who register will be given more options to order services or make enquries.

  • Services
  • Hosting
  • Bandwidth
  • Upgrades
  • Development

Services

Order Intro sites

Order CMS sites

SSL services

Domain services

Hosting

CMS hosting fully supported on proven and established third-party infrastructure

Cloud Hosting fully supported – fast websites, secure environments, easily rebuilt instances if latest Linux software

Data Hosting – large scale data cloud for reasonable rates

Bandwidth

CMS: Unlmited (spikes may be looked at or trigger agents to prevent abuse)

Cloud: You are the only person affected by what you do.  The first 500Meg of transfer per month if free, we charge by the Gigabyte.  We try and keep it inexpensive by offering cheap storage for a massive datastore.  Bandwidth is what you serve.  It is more a function of how many users access your content.

Upgrades

Development

 

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Introductory package idea

In a single week “Sprint” we can often train a dedicated client to maintain their own blog with social networking, membership and informational pages.  Our Introductory offer is to use our site configuration skills to provide a framework to work with from Day One.  We include up to 5 day of developer time in the Introductory offer.  This 5 days may be taken over a period of 3 months or 6 months.  The website may be visible the whole time (we advise this), or it can be kept private (sometimes a good idea for two weeks at the start or for a release event).

For the Introductory duration you continue to have daily support contact without any fuss to build new website capabilities, provide configurations, apply your design and colour plans, adjust any of the above.

We work with Clients who want to know how to achieve good site content that is both relevant to their own customers.  You can also use this time to provide online ecommerce purchase pages and totally secure isolated payment systems.  We can install your software and configure it and teach you to use it online in a support session.  If we need to send you a screen shot or a link we can.  We are (for the foreseeable future), human.

We realise this may take you month, but 15 minutes a day support may keep you making better content.  You do the posting, writing, uploading.  We help you organise and maintain it.

 

 

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How to: WordPress: Make a post 1

Login to your wordpress account:

websiteaddress.com/wp-admin

the top black menu is a quick way to do useful things in WordPress.

on the Left is a W in a circle (wordpress link), then a HOME button and the site name.  Then indications of how many updates are available, how many comments and then the  [ + New link ] to add new Posts.

The left hand menu also allows you to list and add new posts.

If you are currently an AUTHOR – you can only add posts.    Your admin will setup Categories for these.  Each post belongs to one or more categories and the selection of the category agrees with the Menu items in the Updates item of your main menu.

Your site Admin will help you to add new categories and may advise you to keep categories list to an absolute minimum.

Posts, Post Categories and Pages can all be menu items but as an Author, you can not add to menus.   You admin will do this for you.  Simply assign it to an existing Post Category and your post will be accessible from the menu.

Or, assign it to the Admin category, and Slack the post URL (the link near the top of the page that appears under the title when you have added the title) to the admin.   Admin posts do not appear on your public site, usually.

 

 

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Being a service centre or a nerd club?

It is quite hard to map the direction when you create organically. But the two central themes of RD are: Service and Technical brilliance.

Service

  1. Our services are more in touch with the client
  2. Our services are more flexible and agile
  3. It is not expensive to change your ideas
  4. It is not unknown for us to start again and reinvent badly shaped wheels

Technical Brilliance

  1. We can adapt our software to add any clients requirement into an option
  2. We love agile as it keeps the work variety and intensity of technical application very smart
  3. Change gives us opportunities to refactor
  4. Smart frameworks make Project level refactors far easier to consider

There is a fit between these objectives.

Therefore are products are:

Intro Site: a one year excercise using WordPress with the Client defining what they want

which then progresses to either:

  • CMS Site: a hosted continuation of the Intro site
  • Development Site: we either develop to staging for a commercial client OR we extend the WordPress CMS with a sub-domain hosted Laravel instance (or GOlang/NodeJS based server depending on the team).

Development Sites are hosted on a Cloud.   CMS sites – we use shared hosting for email and DNS as the support is essentially free.  NS point at the CMS host.

The www domain can be switched to point at the Cloud site easily with an A record.

Additional Products

We can add new products by adding new Enquiry types.  The proposal can only propose CMS/Dev solutions – so some Enquiry types include an Order form bypassing the proposal system: So an Enquiry->Proposal->Order->Project can be Enquiry->Order->Product instead (i.e. for SSL certs, etc).

 

 

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Tech Guides

We have added another section under Developers –> Tech Guides.  You must subscribe to this site and be a member in order to access.

The purpose of Tech Guides is to provide important tutorials and ways to learn for each developer who aspires to work as a Remote Developer to be technically engaged with best practices and the modern web.

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Laravel API

RESTful Laravel API Tutorial

Laravel is our preferred development framework at Remote Development.  Making Microservice APIs is often a useful way to allow software projects to proceed in a more isolated,  disciplined and less bug-prone fashion.

The skill set addressed by this tutorial is important for all Laravel full stack or back-end developers. It is very basic and only starts to address the issue in the Routes and Controllers section. If you are new to Laravel, use the top link, it gives a basic grounding in the framework.