Tim and I first mooted the idea of working together to build an affordable website platform for Liberal Democrat council groups and individuals in October of 2002. But we’d already known each for other a little while before then.
A recent talk at Symfony Online guilt-tripped me out of the “var_dump() and die()” debugging style once again and back into using XDebug. It’s clearly the right solution to debugging in PHP and Derick is a good friend so I often feel guilty that I’ve fallen out of the habit. Coincidences being what they are, it really came in handy that I’d set it all up again when I had to diagnose a problem with one of our APIs this week. You can’t really var_dump() in a subrequest.
Following this year’s review by the Boundary Commissions for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the next General Election will be fought on new constituencies for the first time since 2010.
Full data isn’t published by the ONS yet. But the Lib Dems use our well-loved online interface to Salesforce, Lighthouse, to manage selection processes for election candidates and need to have the new constituency data to plan for the next GE, in addition to the existing constituencies on which any by-elections before the next GE will still be fought.
In order to import the new data into Salesforce, they naturally turned to Prater Raines for our expertise in political geography and API and database design.
If you work with political geography data and Salesforce, need your own organisation structure mapped, or your online campaign would benefit from enabling supporters to email MPs based on their geographic location, get in touch.
When Prater Raines took on its first batch of customers, the only smartphone was a BlackBerry, less than 200,000 UK homes had a broadband Internet connection and Pop Idol’s Gareth Gates and Will Young were dominating the charts.
We’re proud and excited to be celebrating 21 years in business this year and looking forward to many more to come.
At Prater Raines we’ve provided campaigning websites for more than 20 years. Our role as provider of choice to every Liberal Democrat local or regional party in the country means that we’ve registered over a thousand domain names.
During our recent launch of the party’s new federated website platform Fleet we noticed something unusual when we were asked to register some domains containing hyphens for new customers. We were seeing warnings that the sites might not be legitimate.
Every morning at our full-team stand-up meeting we all share what we accomplished yesterday, what we plan to work on today, and the obstacles getting in our way. I wanted a way of tracking what I’ve been working on that was unobtrusive and didn’t require big changes to the way I like to work or huge amounts of time spent on the task of time tracking itself.
The solution I found is the simplest you could come up with but I think there is awesome skill in producing an application that does everything it needs to and nothing more.
It’s come to light this week that serious security flaws have been discovered in the processors of most modern PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cloud computers. These bugs allow programs to steal data being processed by other programs running on the device, and could be exploited to extract secrets from running programs, including passwords and personal files.
Now that we’ve set up our multisite WordPress network, the next problem is going to be moving the content from our multiple existing single site installations into the multisite network.
Last week I went into detail about how we’ve simplified our procedure for keeping WordPress up to date by using Composer for dependency management. Stage two in our process to clean up our many separate installations of WordPress is to create a single “network” where all the sites on our server share the same core code and plugins. Why update 19 installations when you can just update one?
Prater Raines launched our 19th WordPress website recently, a petition campaigning for justice for the marginalised children of Vietnamese mothers and South Korean fathers born during the Vietnam War.
Our support contract with clients always includes backing up their data and keeping their website secure and easy to modify in future by making sure it’s running the latest version of WordPress and any contributed plugins. This has been a fairly manual process for a while and it felt like a good time to streamline things a little.