Utah Web Design Blog » Utah Web Design

Utah web design position available.

Matt Moeller — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:19:01 +0000

PHP DEVELOPER

Posted: 2.02.2012

This is an on-site salaried position, based in South Jordan, UT. Please do not contact us about outsourcing. And please no recruiters.

We are looking for a PHP developer that enjoys working on challenging projects in a vast array of industries. If you get bored maintaining only a hand full of the same old projects or are stuck in a position that has you pigeonholed into one genre, this position is for you. Imagine new clients and new challenges every month, finding clever solutions to all the interesting requirements clients think up. A career that will keep you progressing and learning on a daily basis.

Red Olive is a digital agency centrally located in South Jordan, Utah. We are a small, strong, and incredibly talented group of 10. In 12 years of business we have never had to advertise yet we stay fully booked. There is no top heavy corporate structure with big egos to contend with, just a talented team that genuinely enjoys what they do and who they work with. We offer a fun environment, competitive salaries, and benefits that most firms cannot.

NOTE: Red Olive cares about the health of it's employees and maintains a smoke free campus, smoking will not be permitted on the property.

Benefits

Medical Insurance
Dental Insurance
Matching 401K
Holiday Pay
Vacation Pay

Requirements

3yrs experience with PHP and MySQL
Experience with MVC
Working knowledge of Web Services
Working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript
Familiarity with mobile web development (Android or iOS)

Job Responsibilities

Develop, maintain, and implement a broad range of web and mobile based client tools including Content Management, Ecommerce and custom applications
Ability to accurately specify timelines
Attention to detail, We like to do it right the first time
Work closely with UX developers and Design teams on large projects
Know current XHTML and CSS standards

4 things Microsoft can do to improve pc growth rates

ryan — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:31:55 +0000

Apple's 'Let's Talk iPhone' keynote is underway today. And in typical Apple fashion, they are starting with statistics. The big stat that caught my attention was the 'Year over Year Growth' chart showing PC at 4% and Mac at 23%. So I thought I would come up with a list of a few things Microsoft can do to improve PC growth.

Allow PC's to run 360 games, this would boost hardware sales.
Partner with a hardware company to develop a $600 retail desktop with a powerful video card to run app store games.
Most pc's come with lousy video cards, and to upgrade, you typically have to buy a more powerful power supply as well. Replacing a power supply and video card just to play mid-range games = lame and expensive.
Try to work with hardware manufacturers to reduce bloatware on new machines.
Start shipping PC's with restore discs again. Trust me, people like restore discs.

Switchback Grille gets a website that looks as good as their food

Matt Moeller — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:24:49 +0000

The Switchback Grille was founded in 1996 at the gateway to Zion National Park. Inspired by the majesty of Zion Canyon, Switchback was conceived of by Dan and Mike Marriott in hopes of enhancing the Zion experience for all who are lucky enough to make their way to this incredible part of the world.

Construction began in 1995 on a building that would house a restaurant, gift shop and package liquor agency. On May 10, 1996, Switchback opened for business and has been taking care of park visitors ever since. Switchback’s special blend of customer care, quality and attention to detail truly set it apart.

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How to create an Infographic

ryan — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:35:49 +0000

The focus of this post is to give you ideas for finding data to create an infographic. Infographics are a powerful tool to build natural links for SEO. There are hundreds of infographic tutorials, but most of them are related to the design and abstract details of the thought process. I want to help you with the data discovery process.

There are a lot of research firms that release data and statistical reports. However, I will be focusing on government reports & statistics websites. I will also show you an example of a statistical report that was turned into an infographic.

Here are some sources of data that may be helpful in creating your infographic:

Here are some Utah sources for infographic data. Check for similar sites for your state.

Here is an example of an infographic from Utah.gov regarding 'Where Utah State Dollars Come From.'

Infographic: http://www.utah.gov/data/infographics/infographic-statedollars.html
Data Source Site: http://www.governor.state.ut.us/budget/
Specific report from the Site: Page 6 - 2011 Budget Summary Book (extremely large pdf file)..

Another tip is to search google for the topic of the inforgaphic.
Your search could look something like this: "employment intitle:statistics inurl:.gov" - without the quotes.

The final tip I have for you is to do your homework. Find out what types of infographics are getting the most attention, you can do this by checking out the delicious tag for infographic. Nearly all infographics have a source of data listed. See where they are getting their data and build a list of sources to brainstorm.

If you know of any really great sources of usable data for infographics, please post below.

The Official Dale Murphy Website Launch

Matt Moeller — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:02:40 +0000

Being huge baseball fans, when we heard that the youngest player in history to ever win back to back MVP awards in Major League Baseball was looking for a firm to design and develop his website we jumped at the opportunity. Dale Murphy was one of the most beloved athletes to ever play in Atlanta. His number (#3) was only the fifth in Braves history to be retired joining those of baseball greats Hank Aaron, Eddie Matthews, Warran Spahn, and Phil Niekro and hangs today in Turner Field.

This project has some pretty neat features including hours of MLB footage, fan stories, social media integration, blog, and a slick AS3 coded baseball card gallery. The gallery features every card from every maker by year that you can flip through. A great project for a great man. Check it out http://www.dalemurphy.com

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Link Building Ideas – Potential Links and Ideas for Acquiring them

ryan — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:20:39 +0000

Link Building Ideas

Link building can be a difficult and time consuming task. And in fact, I started building this list of ideas out of a desire to return to the basics of links and why someone might want to link to you. Rather than focusing so much on what competitors are doing and trying to get in their same link profile, which is time consuming and really not much fun.

Types of links websites typically offer, follow or nofollow, and ideas for acquiring them:

To be clear, these are common link areas on websites and some ideas for getting into these areas. At the bottom of the post, I give some examples of creating content that will likely earn links, but the topic of content will be for another post, another day.

1. Link from their links, affiliates, or partners pages.
Become an affiliate or partner.

2. Link from their members or membership pages.
Become a member.

3. Link from their sponsors page.
Become a sponsor.

4. Link from their ad space.
Develop some ads.

5. Link from within their content or blog posts.
Think about why they might link to you.
This requires knowledge of their content.
Make a connection with them via twitter or facebook.
Develop content that relates to their content.
Mention them in your content.
Ask them, and mention your relating content.

6. Link from their related articles or related websites section after their content or blog post.
If they don't have a section like this, would they consider it?
Would they consider adding your site?
Again, might need to make a connection via twitter and facebook.
Mention them in your related content sections.

7. Link from their footer.
Why would their visitors want to come to your site?
What could you offer their visitors?
Could you offer something to their visitors, that would boost their site's appeal by having your link in their footer?

8. Link from a list page regarding a specific topic, resource, or event.
Is your content, resource, or event potentially part of a list someone is maintaining?
Search for lists that are relevant to you.
Since they are already building a list of offsite things, your chances of getting a link are good.

9. Link from their partner or affiliate discounts page?
Does it makes sense to offer their visitors a discount for your products, and vice versa.

10. Link from their news page.
Mention them in your news.
Write a review about their service, and tweet it to them.
Write how their service or product helps your company.
They might just link to you, or tweet a link to you.

11. Link from their testimonials page.
Write a testimonial for a company.
They might not link to you, but they will probably mention your company.

Content
Creating content that is likely to get shared or linked to, is another key component of link building. This relates to what you can do to get links, not really what types of links someone will likely give you from their website (the purpose of this post). The topic of content that is likely to build links deserves a blog post of its own. But here are some quick ideas for content that might likely earn links: infographics, brand wallpapers, tools, web apps, reviews, top ten lists, and helpful tutorials. Like our recent tutorial on mysql backup automation on a windows 08 server. I don't understand it, but I'm glad our developers do.

If you have any good link building ideas or suggestions, please comment. Also check out my previous post on keyword optimization to build upon your link building efforts.

Follow me on twitter: @RedOliveRyan
Follow our entire team of Web Designers, Developers, and SEOs.

Red Olive Wins Gold in the 2011 National Addy Awards!

Matt Moeller — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:52:26 +0000

The national Addy awards are in, and Red Olive secured a gold for our work on The Chork project.

Why does this mean anything? The American Advertising Federation Addy's is a real world, tangible competition with renowned agencies competing, award ceremonies, judged by experts at top firms in the industry, and is hosted by a real entity, the AAF. Wining amongst your peers in the local Addys is rewarding but competing on a national level is the pinnacle. We work long hours and tirelessly hone our craft and it is very appreciated when we are recognized on this level for it. Great work guys!

How to automatically backup all MySQL databases zip them and delete backups older than n days on windows with a batch file

Matthew Moeller — Mon, 23 May 2011 16:23:10 +0000

How to automate MySQL backups with a .bat file on a Windows server. Typically we have used the backup facility built into MySQL administrator, which unfortunately has now reached end of life. While it worked well it had some major shortcomings. For example once you created a scheduled backup it would only include the databases you told it to at the time of creation. Well, if you are like us and you constantly add new databases the new ones simply wouldn't be backed up, Annoying. What replaced MySQL administrator? Enter the new MySQL Workbench. Great tool save one missing feature, they decided to no longer support scheduled MySQL backups.

Obviously there are lots of scripts out there and easier solutions for linux based systems. The only windows solutions seemed to use php which seemed overly complex, relied on unnecessary systems that could fail, and introduced security concerns when you could use a simple batch file with a few lines of code to accomplish the same task. I had little luck Googling solutions on how to backup all the databases individually, zip them into one file, and delete the older archives so I sat down and wrote my own batch file. It was so useful to us that I feel compelled to share it with others. It should work on any version of windows x86 or x64 and any version of MySQL, but it was only tested on 2008R2.

Platform Tested: Windows 2008 R2 x64 En with MySQL 5.5.x

Updated 12.29.2011

Features:

Backup all MySQl databases, including all newly created ones automatically
Create an individual .sql file for each database (God send when restoring)
ZIP all the .sql files into one zip file and date/timestamp the file name to save space
Automatically delete MySQL backups older than n days (set to however many days you like)
FTP your backup zip to a remote location
Highly suggest you also setup a scheduled task to backup your MySQL directory and your new backup folder to an off site location

Setup Instructions:

Right click and edit mysqlbackup.bat file in notepad
Set the backupdate format, whatever your preference, mine is yyyy-mm-dd-m-s
Set the root u/p
Set the MySQL data directory to match your install
Set the path to mysqldump.exe to match your install path
Set the destination of the backups should go, make sure there are write permissions obviously
Set the path to your zip application with it's flags/commands to zip an item, I am using the command line version of 7zip which is free.
Update the path where your backups will be saved and then deleted once zipped
Set the number of days to keep backups, using the win program "Forfiles" for this, mine is set to 30 days "-30"
Test your batch file on a dummy directory. You'll see the backup directory fill up with .sql files, then a timestamped zip file is made, and the directory is cleared. Put some files older than 30 days in there and they will be wiped at the end.
Finally create a scheduled task in windows to run the batch file on a schedule, remember to choose "Run whether user is logged on or not" otherwise it will fail.

To save you some time I zipped up all the necessary files including the 7zip.exe app with the folder structure to match the batch file. Simply unzip and update your specific paths in the .bat file and you're done.

DOWNLOAD MySQL-BACKUP-WIN-v1.2

Here is a quick look at the .bat file:

:: AutoMySQLBackupForWindows Servers By Matt Moeller v.1.2
:: RED OLIVE DESIGN INC.

:: Follow us on twitter for updates to this script twitter.com/redolivedesign
:: coming soon: email admin a synopsis of the backup with total file size(s) and time it took to execute

:: UPDATE 12.29.2011 Thanks to Kamil Tomas for catching and resolving the time bug

::If the time is less than two digits insert a zero so there is no space to break the filename

set year=%DATE:~10,4%
set day=%DATE:~7,2%
set mnt=%DATE:~4,2%
set hr=%TIME:~0,2%
set min=%TIME:~3,2%

IF %day% LSS 10 SET day=0%day:~1,1%
IF %mnt% LSS 10 SET mnt=0%mnt:~1,1%
IF %hr% LSS 10 SET hr=0%hr:~1,1%
IF %min% LSS 10 SET min=0%min:~1,1%

set backupdate=%year%-%day%-%mnt%-%hr%-%min%

:: MySQl DB user
set dbuser=root

:: MySQl DB users password
set dbpass=123xyz

:: Switch to the MySQL data directory and collect the folder names
pushd "c:\MySQL\data"

:: Loop through the folders and use the fnames for the sql filenames, collects all databases automatically this way

echo "hello"

echo "Pass each name to mysqldump.exe and output an individual .sql file for each"

FOR /D %%F IN (*) DO (
"c:\MySQL\bin\mysqldump.exe" --user=%dbuser% --password=%dbpass% --databases %%F > "c:\MySQLBackups\backupfiles\%%F.%backupdate%.sql"
)

echo "Zipping all files ending in .sql in the folder"

"c:\MySQLBackups\zip\7za.exe" a -tzip "c:\MySQLBackups\backupfiles\FullBackup.%backupdate%.zip" "c:\MySQLBackups\backupfiles\*.sql"

echo "Deleting all the files ending in .sql only"

del "c:\MySQLBackups\backupfiles\*.sql"

echo "Deleting zip files older than 30 days now"
Forfiles -p c:\MySQLBackups\backupfiles\ -s -m *.* -d -30 -c "cmd /c del /q @path"
echo "All done, pretty slick eh"

::FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO FTP YOUR FILE UNCOMMENT THESE LINES AND UPDATE - Thanks Kamil for this addition!

::cd\[path to directory where your file is saved]
::@echo off
::echo user [here comes your ftp username]>ftpup.dat
::echo [here comes ftp password]>>ftpup.dat
::echo [optional line; you can put "cd" command to navigate through the folders on the ftp server; eg. cd\folder1\folder2]>>ftpup.dat
::echo binary>>ftpup.dat
::echo put [file name comes here; eg. FullBackup.%backupdate%.zip]>>ftpup.dat
::echo quit>>ftpup.dat
::ftp -n -s:ftpup.dat [insert ftp server here; eg. myserver.com]
::del ftpup.dat

If you found this script helpful all I ask is you like us on Facebook as a thanks.

New PGA Utah website launched

Matthew Moeller — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:09:05 +0000

PGA Utahselected Red Olive to handle the overhaul of their website for 2011. Some highlights of the new site are:

Custom CMS to handle one off features below that would not exist in an off the shelf cms
Course directory by region, alpha, or individual.
Trick wallpaper background that can toggle between wallpaper mode showing fantastic photography from local courses and hide site content or website mode where it randomly rotates in the background.
An events calendar that is powered by Ajax/JSON that categorizes the events by type and date with support for multi-day spans
Integration with blue golf, the stats and reporting engine for all the standings.
Sponsor AD system that tracks statistics and loads sponsors based on Junior Golf, Utah Open, and premium level sponsorship.

Check it out: http://www.utahpga.com

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How to fix UTF-8 charset problem with IIS 7.5 and PHP FastCGI

Matthew Moeller — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:12:52 +0000

The performance gains from using the FastCGI version of PHP 5 are obvious and the preferred method. If you build apps that require encoding the page in UTF-8 character set you may have noticed that IIS7.5 overrides your settings. You may have tried explicitly stating it in your php/IIS config or even on the page with "" to no avail. The problem resides in the implementation of the fastcgi module.

By default FastCGI uses ASCII encoding for server variables and there was no way to modify this behavior with the initial release. While just a mild annoyance with a content manager this quickly turns into a problem if you are using server variables that your web application requires to function when IIS7.5 forces the charset on you. Up until last week there was no resolution for IIS7.5, Microsoft finally posted a hotfix that resolves this issue here. We have tested this and it does resolve the issue.

IIS 7.5 FastCGI charset fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2277918/
IIS 7.0 FastCGI charset fix: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c17a72bd-7009-4830-85e0-06290f3b8367

Ok, I installed the patch, now what? Instructions on how to deploy the charset fix?