The Fubra Blog

CatN vCluster for free!

Posted Friday 30th April 2010 by Joe Gardiner

CatN is a new hosting service that provides clustered php hosting, while offering levels of control similar to a dedicated hosting solution.

Why clustered hosting?

Clustered hosting has many benefits:

  • Load is spread across numerous servers, reducing the reliance one machine, and avoiding bottlenecks.
  • Your site will be spread across all parts of vCluster, so if one server goes down, the remaining servers will continue to host your site and keep it live.
  • Different processes can be separated. We use a separate layer of servers for serving scripts to static content like images, which enables us to control resource use and guarantee performance of php scripts with dedicated resources.
  • The nature of clustered hosting enables us to scale our super computer to meet any demands on capacity instantly. Experience no drops in performance when they receive a visitor spike, we simply add more servers to meet the new demands.

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The importance of blogging

Posted Thursday 15th April 2010 by Harry

I wanted to write a quick blog post the importance of blogging as a company on the web. Fhoke – another local web company – recently wrote a blog directed at their clients on how important it is to make time to blog.

“Updating your site regularly gets you noticed, your competitors and clients may be watching, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look.”

They also listed a total of 19 tips on how to drive traffic to your blog, including these:

  • Publish as frequently as possible
  • Pay attention to the headlines (blog post titles)
  • Add a link in your email signature

I would like to add one of my own tips to this list that I think is most important when blogging:

Data.gov.uk

Posted Thursday 21st January 2010 by Jonathon

I wrote last year about Gordon Brown’s announcement that the UK Government would be releasing a load of data for public consumption.  Today the first step in that plan went live.  Data.gov.uk is a repository of a whole load of data sources provided by the Government on everything from Council Tax rates through to local NHS dentists.

We here at Fubra have been part of the discussion surrounding the release of the data for the last few months, and are really pleased to see something coming to fruition.  While the site is still in beta it really does show promise for those of us who just can’t get our hands on enough data.

Igloo: the movie

Posted Thursday 7th January 2010 by Nick

With most of our staff stranded at home, the few of us that were able to come in undertook an epic igloo construction project.

It took nearly 8 hours, 6 staff members and over 100 snow blocks to create, as you can see the result was pretty fantastic.

My fellow designer Harry has prepared a brief video of the event complete with Hoff/Pingu soundtrack enjoy!

PetrolPrices.com WordPress Plugin

Posted Friday 27th November 2009 by Jonathon

We have just released a new WordPress plugin which makes adding the minimum, maximum and average fuel prices for your area in the UK to any WordPress blog easy.

As mentioned in this blog post the plugin makes use of the new PetrolPrices.com XML data feed in order to build a fully customisable table.  The plugin provides both a widget which can be included in any widgetized theme, and a shortcode which can be included in any post or page.

There’s more information on the PetrolPrices.com feeds page, and the plugin can be downloaded from WordPress.org.