Look into the Pink Eye!

We run quite a few websites from our fairly modest servers which we host at the highly-recommended eUKHost. Most of these are websites that are well used throughout the year but don't get huge jumps in traffic. However we do have a few clients that have occasional big spikes in demand, for example when there's a product launch or big annual event. This can cause problems with the server, as when it is working hard and slows down for one website, it slows down for all the others on that particular machine.

This graph shows traffic in GB throughout the month of September. Guess which day the BWPA winners were announced!

Up to now we've juggled server resources by hand and managed to keep things going most of the time. But this year we knew we faced a bigger challenge with the announcement of the winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards. This major national competition is entirely web-based, and we manage and host the website. Last year the announcement of the winners nearly - but not quite - toppled our server. This year we knew it was a much more popular competition, with many thousands more images uploaded. So we were expecting a big rush. It would never do for the BWPA website to fail just at its moment of glory. So we put in place a contingency plan that we hadn't tried before, the use of a service called CoralCDN, also known as Coral Cache. It worked like a charm. The website continued live throughout the two days with a 1500% spike in traffic when it was featured on the front page of BBC Online, National Geographic, Bild, The Times, the Guardian and many many more. Read on to see how we did it.

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External link: http://www.coralcdn.org/

It's an unusual problem but a frustrating one. A client had sent us some emails from an Outlook system which had images attached to them we needed. Straightforward? Not this time! The emails came as attachments, with no filetype, and could only be opened as text documents. Needless to say we don't have Microsoft Outlook running so we couldn't open them that way. The text documents were huge, and looked something like this:


Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG"
Content-Description: Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG";
size=416910; creation-date="Sun, 25 Jul 2004 11:33:28 GMT";
modification-date="Sun, 25 Jul 2004 11:33:28 GMT"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

/9j/4R/+RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAAJAA8BAgAGAAAAegAAABABAgAUAAAAgAAAABIBAwABAAAAAQAA
ABoBBQABAAAAoAAAABsBBQABAAAAqAAAACgBAwABAAAAAgAAADIBAgAUAAAAsAAAABMCAwABAAAA
AQAAAGmHBAABAAAAxAAAAGoHAABDYW5vbgBDYW5vbiBQb3dlclNob3QgQTgwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ALQAAAABAAAAtAAAAAEAAAAyMDA0OjA3OjI1IDEwOjMzOjMwAB8AmoIFAAEAAACGAwAAnYIFAAEA


..and so on for another 600Kb. How could we get this image out of the email? A solution was at hand. Read on to see what it was.

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External link: http://www.etresoft.com/decoder.html

Pinkeye Graphics is pleased to promote an event to help people on the Isle of Wight manage their money. Organised by the Footprint Trust, the free 'Cash Low? Cash Flow!' event offers advice about debt management and guidance on making your cash go further.

Cat was delighted to be asked to create the flyer for this worthy happening and, with only a week or so to turn it round was happy to deliver the finished product to the client today. The A5 flyer was printed locally on 150gsm Revive pure offset 100% recycled paper using vegetable-based inks by Crossprint, with an impressively quick two-day turnaround.

External link: http://www.footprint-trust.co.uk/

Cat's a bit of a wiz on Illustrator but can sometimes get frustrated when trying to use that programme's equivalent tools in Photoshop. Take the pen tool; a great device for creating beautifully curved lines. But why oh why doesn't it act the same in Photoshop as it does Illustrator? For example, when drawing a curved line, if you want to turn a sharp corner instead of continuing the curve, in Illustrator you have to click on your node to lose a bezier handle before continuing with the line. In PS, you have to alt+click. It took Cat quarter of an hour to find this out, trawling through a very lengthy, but informative, pen tutorial.

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One of Pinkeye Graphics' recent collaborations was with Isle of Wight charity Footprint Trust on its new 'Energetic' initiative - a project which helps young families and young people to save money through sensible use of domestic energy. As well as designing the branding for this worthwhile project, Cat also created two leaflets plus her biggest design job to date - the back of a Southern Vectis bus.

Cat created the artwork in Adobe Illustrator. It was important to create it in a vector format as the design had to be scaled up to the size of a double decker without any loss of quality.

The Energetic bus was launched in St Thomas' Square, Newport on a beautiful bright day in October 2010. Ray Harrington-Vail from the Footprint Trust plus Neil Hartwell, trustee of the ScottishPower Energy People Trust were there to unveil Cat's work and the designer herself was persuaded to come out from behind her virtual drawing board to help things along.