Latest Posts

Why WordPress?

Written by Will Scott

One thing you’ll notice is that both this site and most of the others that we’ve worked on in the last 4 years or so have been based on WordPress – so why do we feel that what was traditionally a “Blogging” tool is suitable to use as the basis for client sites?

Back in the beginning, while WordPress had support for pages, the creation of a fully-fledged website (with something other than a blog as the homepage) relied on plugins (that occasionally broke with updates…). Now, of course, it’s quite a different beast.

Ease of Development

From our point of view, WordPress is a dream to develop for. It’s reliable and consistent as well as being well documented. With the newest versions (particularly 3.x) the added features mean we can do more and more powerful things with greater and greater ease.

Actively Updated

Knowing that WordPress is both actively updated and easy for clients to update themselves gives us a little bit of peace-of-mind. The flip-side is, of course, that WordPress is actively exploited…

Ease of Use

The reaction we get from clients, time and time again, is that WordPress is simple to use and easy to understand for anyone who’s familiar with a word processor.

A new home

Written by Will Scott

It has been a long time coming, but we finally have a new server that we’re 100% comfortable with. Meet Voyager – you’re actually using him right now to read this post.

Previous servers have been based in Paris, Maidenhead and Manchester but this one is based slightly closer to home in London. We don’t have any of the latency problems that we experienced when we tried out Media Temple, nor are we woefully short of either processing power or memory like the last few.

Development can now proceed at full pace – we’ve got a few awesome things in the pipeline (more about those later) – now that we’ve finished off this year’s major projects.

For now, stay safe.

Will
Director, Pulse Media Development Ltd.

Latency & Databases

Written by Will Scott

Or “Why Media Temple isn’t good enough”.
We run a lot of database depended sites, this being purely one example, all our apps are likewise. Media Temple’s (gs) looked great in principle – that kind of load flexibility is what we need but their implementation of MYSQL is sub-par. If what we wanted to do was just to serve simple, HTML-based pages, their (gs) would be fine. I guess if we were to cache absolutely everything, that’d be fine too.

But moving to “the cloud” shouldn’t have to involve such sacrifices. It’s telling that MT readily acknowledge the problems with their (gs), have been working on an alternative for a couple of years now but as yet haven’t been able to get it off the ground. I spent 5 days putting Media Temple through their paces as I assessed whether it’d be suitable (or even passable) for our needs. The answer was no.

So – the greater control of a VPS it is then…