Tag Archives: new site

Sportspower Club – Custom PHP/MySQL website made to a tight deadline

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Sportspower ClubI was recently commissioned to produce a site for a new betting tip service, which had to have a members area updated daily with new tips. The most important criteria to the client was speed: the website had to be up and running as soon as possible.

I chose to start from the ground up using HTML/CSS for layout and PHP/MySQL for the management components, rather than using a pre-built CMS, to get exactly and only the features the client and their clients needed.

Ed Townend Does Design! completed the project on time and to the clients delight – adding the tips each day and managing club members could not be easier! Members love the way they can filter tips for any date and the streamlined PayPal subscription system.

New Server

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Today I moved teamtownend.com to a new server hosted with ukhost4u.com. I used them in the past for another project and they were for the most part okay to work with, and excellent value. Previously, I hosted teamtownend.com on my own homemade IIS7 server in our attic. It worked very well, however the myriad other roles the attic server has (file server for our household, print server, Orb server) pushed the little AMD Sempron 2GHz processor and 1GB RAM to the limit at times. Also, our ADSL connection with Be Unlimited has a feeble 1Mb/s maximum upload speed. Things should be a lot quicker now!

The swap went as smoothly as one could have hoped, I exported the MySQL database using phpmyadmin, copied over the files, updated wp-config.php, and away WordPress went. Then I had to manually convert IIS7′s config.ini files to .htaccess since the new server used Apache. Finally, it was just a case of adding the DNS and CNAME records on the new server, before setting the name servers for the domain (to ensure a seamless swap with zero downtime, not that I get enough visitors to really matter, but it was still fun.) The Sempron is sighing with relief now!

New Day, New Homepage

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So today you’ll notice teamtownend.com has a new homepage. As you can see, it features my blog entries front and foremost, so it’ll give you a lot more reason to return regularly! I’m still tinkering with the style so don’t get too settled yet, I think those big green stripes above need some work.

For those of you who never saw the old site, I moved the homepage to a subdirectory so you can see how it evolved!

For now I’m sticking with the old portfolio layout which you can see here, since I spent a whole day just last week squashing a little javascript bug in the popups, but eventually I may think about integrating it into this site.