Isotoma Limited

Firstly, we’ve rolled out a wide range of new features on our recipe community site forkd.com and removed yet more “coming soons” from the site in the process:

• Activity panel (my favourite)
• RSS feeds
• Change message when changing a forked recipe
• Blog to Wordpress
• People search
• Tag brush — our humble attempt to evolve the act of tagging

As usual, the full details are on the Forkd blog.

But more importantly, I am happy to announce that after our 6-month invite-only beta, sorry feta period, we are opening registration on forkd.com! We’re confident that we have a strong enough feature set, and have squashed all really embarrassing bugs, that we’re ready to open it up to all comers. So if you’re not on Forkd yet, why not sign up and give it a go?

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Forkd kitchen has rolled out a bunch of vital new features for our favourite recipe sharing site:

• Post to Blogger from Forkd (more blog platforms to follow soon)
• Upload photos directly to Forkd — you don’t have to use Flickr if you don’t want to
• A recipe search form at the top of every page
• A way to browse all users on the site
• Plenty of bug fixes!

See the Forkd blog entry for more details.

To our beta testers: thanks for all the recipes, and please let the head chefs know what features (or bug fixes) you’d like to see next!

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As rubbish as we are about letting people know what we're up to it's probably worth a quick post about what David (our mystery third director) is up to at the moment.

Right now, as I type, he's over at PacSec07, giving a presentation on his work for the Honeynet Project, where he's been running the GDH project. His talk is on the problems, pitfalls, positives and results of the project. You can find out more at the PacSec website.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's all go here! Yet another customer site goes live today... InternetRetailing.net is one of the leading trade publications for the etailer community, and we're proud to have developed the latest version of the site. Using Plone and OpenAds as the underlying technology we're excited to have such an active site as part of our portfolio.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am very, very, pleased to reveal in all it’s glory a site that we’ve been working on now for some considerable time: MindShare. It’s a huge site for a very large (and very lovely) customer.

The design is courtesy of Rob Dennis, and our own Francois Jordaan did the extremely spiffy Information Architecture. I hope you will agree that the results speak for themselves - I think it’s the best website I’ve contributed to in many years.

The technology is particularly interesting, using Twisted, lxml and Oracle’s dbxml to produce a new and quite radically different CMS technology. The architecture layer for delivering pages uses XPROC, XQuery and XSL to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. There are a lot of exciting possibilities with these technologies, and we’ll be releasing some very interesting components based on some of them as soon as we can.

Oh, and it’s driving the sister MindShare Interaction site too - and we’ll be launching sites for MindShare in German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian over the coming months, all running from the same content repository.

So huge props to the everyone who has worked on the site, both within and outside Isotoma ,and many thanks to the Twisted guys for their consistently excellent code, to Stefan Behnel for lxml and to Oracle for releasing dbxml under an Open Source license.

Watch this space for more interesting uses of the XML stack in the comings months.

Posted by Doug Winter at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another customer site went live today - old friends of Isotoma Blue Latitude asked us to help them build their new site. Once again it's based on Plone, with design by Rob Dennis of Red Red Robot. We're really happy with the way it looks, even if all that transparency was a bit of a bugger in IE6.

http://www.bluelatitude.net/

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're pleased to announce that we have just launched another customer site. The Forster Company are one of the country's leading PR agencies, with a fabulous track record of working for social change. Working with such driven and smart people has been really entertaining, and it's another site that we're really proud of. www.forster.co.uk.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’ve been beavering away pretty hard for the last few weeks on a new site which went live today. Gordon Brown’s campaign web site. One of the most topical sites we’ve ever launched (and linked to from BBC News, too, which always makes for interesting server administration panics). Given the inherently short time scales the team here have really pulled out all the stops to get it live, and even if we say so ourselves we think it’s all looking rather nice…

Posted by Andy Theyers at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're recruiting again... We've got 2 positions open at the moment, both of which are described over on the jobs page of the main site. If you, or anyone you know, are interested please give us a shout ASAP. We've got some exciting new projects just starting and a couple in the pipeline.... Join us!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So we’re particularly chuffed that our favourite (if a little neglected right now) baby Sleevenotez has made it in at number 12 in Techscape’s list of The top 25 UK web 2.0 start ups (as also reported in The Register). Thanks guys. That’s fair made our week!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's that time again... We've been working like lunatics since late December on a project with STA Travel that gets soft launched today - MapMyAdventure. It's a monster Google Maps mashup, allowing travelers to plan their trip around Australia and then blog about it once they're there. The back end was already written when we started on the team, but the front end is entirely ours and one of the biggest single Javascript jobs we've done - bigger even than Sleevenotez (at least at the moment).

It's also the first time that we've worked with Kirsty and Simon from Big Picture (now with Mindshare Interaction), who've turned out to be some of the most switched on and enthusiastic customers we've had (which is nice).

Look out for the official launch in a couple of weeks, but feel free to go and have a poke around right now...

Posted by Andy Theyers at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TechCrunch UK has been put on hold after a falling out between Sam Sethi (the UK editor) and Mike Arrington (Mr TechCrunch himself).

Doug and I have a lot of time for Mike Butcher and really felt that he was turning TCUK into something worthwhile. Which makes this particularly upsetting. It’s the loss of a newly found and much needed UK voice for a thriving scene.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so pleased to have a “UK version of TechCrunch” in the first place? What we really wanted was a “UK alternative to TechCrunch”, which is a very different thing altogether.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick note to welcome James to the company. Doug and I are very excited to be growing again and James is proving to be an invaluable asset already. He comes from a C++ background, but has taken to Python and Javascript like the proverbial duck to water. He’s been getting his head round TurboGears for the last week or so and is now putting in the hard hours on our latest project - Forkd - which we’re hoping to release early January 2007.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We're pleased to say that after a much harder second iteration than we expected Sleevenotez is back up and running. It's quicker, more stable, much much more Internet Explorer friendly. Please go there, have a look, sign up and tell all your friends!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our Customer List is getting a bit long in the tooth, which is a bit annoying. We’re working on some long-term projects right now, which don’t qualify for the customer’s page really, so here’s a quick update.

First up is Sleevenotez which has been mentioned previously. We’re working on this with a major european telco. We’re also working with Paul Everitt and a major Plone systems company on a large Plone deployment in the states. That job is particularly interesting because we’re doing some pretty advanced stuff with XSL and Javascript. I’m going to blog some more about that later.

We’ve also got a project on the go for a major European music publisher, that has stalled at the last hurdle. The project is good to go, but has become mired somewhere at the customer. If said customer is reading this, please press the appropriate buttons, we love that project and want it to go live! :)

Posted by Doug Winter at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick post to say that we've launched another customer site - we've worked with eModeration for a while on a range of projects, but this time we were asked to develop their site using Plone. A strong look and feel makes it one of the least 'Ploney' sites we've put public.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've been rather quiet for a while because we've been working on something rather exciting... We've just launched the first cut of Sleevenotez - a website that tries to recreate sleeve notes that are now so sadly missing from mp3 files. We're doing it in the open, so you can read about our progress at the Sleevenotez blog. If you aren't an audioscrobbler user you might want to take a look at our office account. Load the page and then wait a few minutes until the record changes...

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been working with La Luz Property for a while on getting their new site up and running in Plone. Today it went live. The requirement was to provide a proper content management system to replace the static site that they had been managing in Front Page for the last few years, but not to break their current corporate identity. As always, Plone came to the rescue. The ability to skin it pretty much how you like combined with the flexibility of Archetypes meant that we could deliver an Enterprise level content management system with the right look and feel for a fraction of the cost of a more traditional system.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’ve finally moved in to the new office. Choosing the hottest week of the year was perhaps not the wisest thing, but Doug and family have safely arrived in York and both of us are now firmly ensconced in Tower House on Fishergate. The new address and contact number can be found over on the main site

Posted by Andy Theyers at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)