Ashley Byrom

Hey! I'm after speaking to a few other developers/designers just for general networking and expanding my circle. I guess I could do with people to just bounce ideas off and discuss design/development with. I'm primarily a web developer, having been playing with dev. for around six years, doing it seriously in the last two or three years. I'd say my design work's come up to scratch in the past year or so. I'm on twitter @ashleybyrom and skype (ash.byrom) if anyone fancies a chat. Could lead to somewhere interesting I guess!

I have a dedicated linux server that I host all of my clients websites on running WHM/cPanel, it's your average set up. I've noticed my clients emails seem to be taking up a reasonably large amount of space and I can't really figure out why or if there's anything I can do about it. For example, I've had my gmail account for coming up to five years (I'm aware google's servers will be much better at handling emails than mine but still), I have around 8,500 emails and that takes up around 0.9GB. One of my clients websites has been live for just over a year, they have around 2,000 emails yet their emails take up around 3.5GB. This isn't just one client either. Is this normal? Some of my clients use POP and delete the emails off the server which is great but I don't want to force my clients to use POP. How do you guys handle this? Thanks

Thanks! That's reassured me on quite a few things, just didn't want to tell someone something without at least someone's second opinion on it.

Out of curiosity: Somebody said that having a custom generated social feed on a site can be good for SEO because: You will have constantly updating content Search engines will be able to tell it's a social feed. (By custom I mean a PHP script that'll grab tweets/fb posts and collate them into a list that you can include on your site, not the default widgets twitter and facebook provide.) One I've found shows twitter and facebook posts in one feed and separates them by giving twitter posts a class 'search_twitter' and facebook ones a class 'search_facebook'. Their guy said Google will tell from these div classes what's going on and it'll boost rankings. I'm skeptical but not an SEO pro so thought I'd ask here. Is a custom generated social feed good for rankings and would Google be able to tell from the custom classes on a couple of divs which posts are twitter/facebook etc.? Thanks

This is probably me being a complete idiot but I haven't got a clue here. I've been given a D7 site to finish off and it has a bunch of Drupal pages all with php includes to actual php files. Some of these pages have dependencies on them (Eg. some pages need an ID to be specified) however if I am on a completely unrelated page (such as the home page) which doesn't include any of these php files I see error messages (generated by these php files) at the bottom of the site. The home page is http://www.new.ediblesworld.co.uk and at the bottom you can see an error message generated by one of the php files (that isn't intended to be included on that page) I hope somebody can help!

Just found this and thought it was pretty clever. http://lea.verou.me/2009/02/bulletproof-cross-browser-rgba-backgrounds/ Basically instead saving transparent PNGs as a fallback it's a php script that takes rgba values and outputs the image for you

Thanks for clearing it up. This is the thing. I always thought widgets etc. were iframes most of the time because that's the easiest way to implement it but then I wondered if it was for SEO. The way I found includes a php file so assumingly search engines wouldn't know it's a social feed because it'd be actual output.

I'd say design them and see what you can come up with, that's the only thing that really sticks out to me it doesn't look like it belongs there. I think once the sidebar's designed with the new site design in mind it'll fit

I found a way to include a social feed on your site but instead of being an iframe-like widget it outputs your tweets with php. I'm not sure whether this would benefit SEO because it'd have constantly changing content on every crawl or whether the site would be penalised for having repeated content on all pages?

I had simplicity in mind, thanks!

Don't think about print just think about setting out your content. You need spacing inbetween to separate them. It's the same has having 20px margin beneath a paragraph to separate paragraphs. If you have two sections next to each other you'd have 20px between them.

Hey, you've done a great job I reckon. When I saw how it is now I did a quick redesign in my head and your concept matches it quite well. I'd say if you strip away the content and sidebar it's solid, i think it starts to slack with the content/sidebar design. I don't know whether you just couldn't be bothered designing content yet so you just did a quick mockup, I've done that before but it looks like it slacked from there. I'd also maybe make the nav a bit bigger, but it could work as it is. Looks great!

I'm in a similar boat. I'm working on a project with scaling in mind. Depending what your database is for look at Drupal modules / Wordpress plugins that do something similar. The successful ones will have scaling in mind considering the size of some Wordpress/Drupal sites. All you need to do is look at the tables and try to reverse engineer them, it's a great learning exercise.

I can never properly concentrate with anything rocky on, it grabs my attention. I do like the first one you linked, very chilled!

http://960.gs/ is built using their own grid system. They link a few examples too.