Busy Times

So, as 2012 draws towards its close, I sit here, typing on a funky iPad2 with a bluetooth keyboard,
wondering why it feels busier than ever.

This latter part of the year has seen me running (virtually on my own) the infrastructure of 2 very different companies. Firstly, my career job, the home from home that is my Infrastructure Manager position at BMS. A very successful year in infrastructure terms, despite the network outages a few months ago, and the conficker spread in March it has been reasonably quiet. That said the workforce has practically doubled and the server rooms have seen numerous additions. The company’s ambitions continue to match my own and 2013 looks set to be even busier.
Secondly, Redsumo.com, the friendly, local web design, it services and hosting company, founded in 2010 and run out of an office in Alcester with servers hosted on the interweb. Well, what a change we’ve seen there. With an office move into Studley and an even more ambitious server migration to locally hosted servers, a mere few feet from my own desk! Redsumo has continued to take a lot of my time, with building, configuring and maintaining the web and email systems as well as helping with the migrations and even a fair bit of web coding, something that has always been a passion of mine. Redsumo has become more of a Web Development & Hosting company over the last few months, with the IT services gradually phased out. The site has seen a revamp, with new products sitting alongside the old and trusted services that have been provided since day 1. A new WordPress based blog has also been developed to provide a news platform for existing customers to share their stories and prospective customers to see into what we do and how we do it. The Blog project has been something of a success for me, practically recoding an entire theme with many customisations to make it like no other out there. Whilst on the outside it looks plain and simple, I
assure you underneath the hood there’s a lot of clever things going on!

2013 looks set to be a busy, and hopefully compelling year for both companies, and therefore for myself as well. I’m really looking forward to the challenges ahead.

WordPress Development

I’ve spent the last 3 days improving my WordPress (and basic web) development skills, almost to a new level. The RedSumo Blog was previously used as a place to post technical findings, a little like how this site started out. There’s posts about PHP, MySQL, Linux etc. But with the way the company has changed, especially recently it was decided to use the blog platform as a way to promote products and services of not just RedSumo itself, but of all the customers who are hosted on the RedSumo servers and/ or designed by the very skilled team.
I have spent numerous hours manually re-coding the “Slicker Press” theme to make the site look a little like a newspaper/ magazine – taking inspiration (on design only!) from The Daily Mail etc.
There’s still a long way to go, however, the site is fully functional and has a few neat little features such as the Yahoo based weather widget, the Featured Posts slider and the customer logos sections.
If you’re interested to see how the developments going, head over to http://www.redsumo.com/blog now!