We’re very pleased to welcome Triarchy Press as a new client.

Over the next few months, we’ll be building an exciting new website for Triarchy, which should launch in early 2008. The new site will feature an online bookshop, community features such as blogging, tagging and commenting on publications, and a whole load more besides.

More news, as we have it!

Fred and I spent two very enjoyable days at the XP Day conference, last week. As you might guess from its name, XP Day started out as a very specialised event for the Extreme Programming community, but over 6 years it has blossomed into a convention for all things Agile - and a very good one at that.

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In order to create a Rules Engine to fit our needs, some planning was needed. The first thing to do was to read up on rules engines in general - Wikipedia provided some answers. Their description of Forward Chaining sounded like what we wanted. It’s basically just a list of IF condition then action END IF statements that gets executed in sequence, although we opted to be able to run each rule as a IF condition then actions else otheractions END IF.

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We rather like our TRAC system. It’s simple, loads really fast, and doesn’t confuse our clients (too much).

Since migrating it to our new server, we’ve been able to play around with the functionality a little more. First, we looked for a way to have a more integrated login feature - something a bit nicer for the clients than the ugly old “challenge/response” box.We found the AccountManager pluginon Trac Hacks, which did the job extremely well.(Here’s how the login page looks now).
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Last week, we moved offices to the London Knowledge Innovation Centre, a new development within the South Bank Technopark (Itself part of the South Bank University). We’re very pleased with the spacious surroundings, super super fast broadband (40MB+ downstream) and our own private balcony. Unfortunately, Elephant and Castle feels like a food desert after the delights of Lower Marsh - luckily Coopers, Marsh Ruby and El Vergel are all within 10 minutes walk.

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Following a few weeks of being stuck in css hell (*don’t* mention IE 6 ever again please), we’re proud to unveil the shiny new version of the Centre for Performance Science website.
Designed in collaboration with the Centre’s Aaron Williamon, the site is a fully featured JK Content manager implementation.

New in this version are much friendlier URLs and user generated content (in www.science.rcm.ac.uk), plus a major overhaul of all the code, templating and an update to the content management software.

We’ve recently made a few improvements to our TRAC trouble ticketing/project management system. On an aesthetic level, we’ve now skinned the system in Loopo’s smart green livery, but more importantly we’ve vastly improved the automatic emailing and user assignment areas of the system. Overall, this will provide our clients with an easier to use and more intuitive system.

Also, everything is now hosted on our superfast shiny new servers.

I’ll blog seperately with a more technical piece on the TRAC system, but briefly: It’s an excellent open source trouble ticketing and project management system which we’ve grown to love. It does everything one would expect with minimal fuss and bother, and does not suffer from any application bloating.

We’re used to recruitment agencies being on the persistent side when it comes to cold calling, but a recent caller really took the biscuit.

The agent (we’ll call him “Dave”) first tried fairly straightforward tactics (owning up that he was a recruitment consultant) to get us to transfer the call to our senior developer (who he was presumably trying to poach). Needless to say, he got a fairly perfunctory response.

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Most software written for companies contains rules relating to the problem domain the application is trying to solve. These rules are things like “All customers that spend more than £100 at one time will receive a 10% discount”, “Automatically delete any support requests written in capitals”, “Delivery Dates cannot be set in the past” or “Members who joined after such and such a date are not eligible for the pink elephant special offer”. These rules are called Business Rules.

Lately here at Loopo we have discovered the need for a more flexible and standardised way of handling our business rules in some of our applications.
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Today we rolled out a brand new release of Mash Marketing’s in-house management system, “BABS” (Brand AmBassador Search, since you ask). It’s been a fun few months work, as BABS is essentially a large web database of pretty young things flaunting themselves to the camera.
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