Blog

I wanted to post an update on the data center migration.  We had two web servers and a database server that we were moving to an entirely new load balanced configuration. A few weeks ago we completely finished one of the web servers and turned that device off. We are more than half way through the last web server. We hope to turn that web server and the database server in the old data center off…

This is a very important update so please read carefully. What we are doing We are moving to a new datacenter within Rackspace's network. Our servers are currently located in their Virginia database. We're going to be moving to their Chicago datacenter. When we are doing it We will be doing the migration the beginning of February, 2013. We don't have exact dates yet, but it'll most likely be…

As some of you may know we have been working on server upgrades to help improve performance and stability. This morning we moved to step 2 of 3 and implemented a Network File Server (NFS). The NFS will be used as a shared file server between each of the load balanced web servers (coming soon) so that files between servers can be kept in sync.  Everything went fine right up to the final step…

We've had some requests lately to add some flexibility to viewing member profiles in the administration for our Members app. We've pushed out a number of changes over the last week that make it easier to see the information that you want to see. Below is an overview of the changes that we've made.  Customizable columns for the profile list table You can now customize the columns that show in the…

I'm sitting in an airport right now, waiting for a flight. Taking a quick glance around me, I see a handful of people doing who knows what on their tablets or smartphones. For all I know, they could be on your website. Whether the experience they're having is optimized for them is another story. Today people are reading, watching and buying on smaller devices and in more places than ever before…

Here at Aptuitiv we are in the process of planning out a new server architecture for our hosted CMS that will be more secure, scalable and robust. Through this process we have identified an area that causes some security concerns. That area of concern is the fact that we allow custom PHP to be run on client's websites. It is common for a shared hosting provider to allow custom PHP to be run on a…

Javascript is everywhere. With the arrival and subsequent, frequent updates of the many libraries and frameworks built from it, Javascript has become one of the most popular languages in the world. It's hard to visit a site that doesn't make use of it in some shape or form. Frameworks, such as jQuery, Mootools, and many more have made it very easy to utilize Javascript in a variety of ways. The…

Normally we embed YouTube videos into a website by just placing them into a div somewhere, but a recent project I was working on called for a YouTube video to be loaded in a lightbox. Our preferred choice for a lightbox plugin is Shadowbox due to the fact that it's easy to use but can also be used for complex situations. No problem, right? This is a pretty common request and a simple one to…

We just made a change with our databases that will enable support for international characters (like Chinese). For quite a while now our database tables have had the UTF-8 character encoding. However, up until now, our database connections were not explicitly setting the character set for the connection to be UTF-8. This meant that for certain types of queries the data returned was not returned…

I want to welcome our newest employee, Matt Robitaille, to our team. Matt is a recent graduate of New England School of Communications. He did an internship with us over the winter and we were so impressed with his work that we had to have him on our team.  Matt is a skilled front-end developer and he'll be involved in building out a lot of our client's new websites.