It’s not often by personal passions and my day job collide but when we got the job of rebuilding the well-regarded and very popular Binocular and Telescope website, I was thrilled.

The job meant we had to preserve and/or improves the sites Google ranking during the changeover and without hurting the traffic and regular sales in the lead up to the christmas period. By this time the new site had to be 100% operational and working well.

We phased the build in stages running the old and new sites in parallel – transactionally – before cutting the original domain name over. This worked well and we improved their SEO ranking. The new website also has real-time inventory synchronisation with their backend point-of-sale system, fully transactional payments, multiple payment methods, real time shipping info and a number of promotional and content related features.

If you’re looking for Celestron Telescopes or indeed any other kind of astrophotography equipment or binoculars, check out The Binocular and Telescope Shop at bintel.com.au.

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to do for ages : remap a key on the keyboard that when hit, spits out 1 paragraph of “lorem ipsum”, the ubiquitous standard filler text. If you are a designer / developer you’ve probably wanted this for a while too.

Step 1

Create a new Automator workflow as a Service, select “Applescript” and paste in this text with these settings :

Code :

on run

set lorem to “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus elit nisi, tempor at rhoncus id, porta tincidunt metus. Nulla dictum faucibus justo. Quisque non urna nec tortor cursus lobortis. Proin quis nunc nibh. Curabitur consequat gravida augue, vitae vestibulum sem eleifend ac. Maecenas facilisis molestie vehicula. Fusce pulvinar nisi a orci iaculis bibendum.”

set the clipboard to lorem

tell application “System Events” to keystroke “v” using command down

end run

Step 2

Save the workflow as something meaningful eg “Lorem Ipsum Button”

Step 3

Go to Sys Prefs, keyboard shortcuts and add a keyboard shortcut to the service you just created.

Note .. if you want to use an F-key you have to “unmap” all the existing functions which are then accessible by holding down the function key.

That’s it! Press your key (in my case, F1) and BOOM! Instant Lorem Ipsum!

I just saved you a couple of copy paste keystrokes right? Hopefully this makes the world a better place.

Dylan.

We recently had the opportunity to help the good crew at Stone & Wood with their website which needed some development updates and features. The Beer Finder has been re-launched after a small hiatus which a much easier “search by postcode” feature.  You can also now search by beer TYPE so you’ll always know how far you need to go for your next Pacific Ale!

We’ve also created a dynamic mobile template that uses the same backend content as the main site, so there is no need to duplicate content or manage duplicate versions. As is best practice with this kind of thing though, iPads are excluded since most iPad users don’t want the mobile site, but the full regular desktop site.

If you haven’t tried Stone & Wood before,  head to the Beer Finder right now and find yourself some to try!