Joe's Blog

We're looking for new people to join our small but dedicated team.  We develop and support our own content management system, with an education focus.  Schools use our system to manage their websites, intranets and learning platforms, helping their community of teachers, parents and pupils communicate and share news, work, revision help, administrative information and more.

We're small, which we means we can stay close to our clients and develop and improve our products very quickly to meet their needs.  It also means you'll get great exposure to all of the things we do — customer support, training, development, marketing and selling — in a fast growing business.

We're looking for a number of skills, and pay and hours (full or part time) will depend on how many of these you can tick.  We need you to be able to tick more than one — we want to make sure you have some variety.

• Support: keen problem solver, system administration a bonus
• Training: clear communicator, presentation experience
• Front end development: an eye for visual and UI design, some HTML, CSS and JavaScript experience
• Server side development: some programming experience, some SQL database experience, C# preferable

Yesterday saw the launch of a brand new website for St Paul's School in Barnes and its junior school, Colet Court.  It's great after lots of hard work to be able to show it off to the world.

The site runs on the school's Firefly installation, which also runs the school's extensive intranet.  This allows the school to update the site themselves while maintaining the design provided by award winning agency Clearleft.  Clearleft also worked with the school on the user experience and information architecture of the site.  Firefly plugins, developed at St Paul's, pull in events, sports results and staff contact details automatically from the school's MIS so the website is always up to date without manual editing.

Congratulations to Clearleft on a fantastic design and David Smith at St Paul's and John Barlow at Colet Court for spearheading all the work at the schools themselves.

You can click on either of the two screenshots below to visit the new site.

The Times has an interesting piece mentioning several of our client schools about how schools have been able to deliver work online to pupils while some of them (and their teachers) have been stuck abroad because of the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland.

"This [online support] is a precursor of the way education will go in the 21st century. Five years ago, schools would not have been able to cope." - Anthony Seldon in the Times

Wellington College, who use Firefly for their website and intranet/learning platform, have been able to set up web based tutorials and encouraged their pupils to work from internet cafés if they could not return to the country.

It's the second time this year where weather conditions have forced schools to look carefully at their online teaching and learning capabilities.  The snow forced many schools to open late at the beginning of the spring term.  Magdalen College School in Oxford used their Firefly powered website to quickly publish online teaching material while the school remained closed.

Making the investment in a good learning platform allows schools to be more agile in the face of unexpected events, as well as being much more convenient during the rest of the year for pupils and staff who are not at school for more mundane reasons - scheduled holidays, evenings and weekends!

I'm happy to be writing this post as the first in our brand new website.  For a while we've been hard at work on it behind the scenes and it's great to be able to open the doors to the public!  Please let us know what you think on the e-mail address at the top.

Anna deserves a special mention for all of the hard work on the design, as well as painstaking browser testing.

We've also restructured our user manual to make it easier to navigate and finally added search so you can find things more quickly.

Now, back to helping others with their websites...

February is upon us already, so I wanted to post a quick update on a site we've just launched with City and Islington College.  City and Islington needed to create a new micro-site for two courses, their International Foundation Programme and English Language Summer School and they approached us to provide the content management system.

We were able to get the site up and running very quickly and I think it looks great - click the screenshot to visit the site.

In other Firefly news, Anna has been doing some great work on our own website redesign, there'll be more on that shortly.

It felt like we had only just put the stand up... possibly because we had only four days earlier, but at 4 o'clock on Saturday it was time to take it all down and then reflect on our first year at BETT.

We're going to BETT! We recently booked a stand at BETT in London's Olympia on January 13-16 2010.  Why not come down and say hi?  BETT is the largest educational technology show in the UK.  You'll find us at stand W36, upstairs in the national gallery.

Half term saw the launch of the new Firefly 2.6 at St Paul's.  St Paul's also chose to launch a new template at the same time giving the site a fresh new look and feel.

Before and after shots courtesy of Alex's blog http://alex.mullr.net/blog/

The template was built by Alex Muller, currently studying at York University.  For more information about the re-design and further before/after shots see Alex's blog post.

Congratulations to Alex on a great design!

The blog has been a bit quiet in the last couple of weeks... because we've been busy!  It's always nice to bring news of a new site launch: after lots of hard work we launched today the new Glendower Prep School website.

David Gifford (Inscript Design) worked with the school to create a design that reflected the school and showcased some great photography.

Glendower are using a Firefly hosted system so they can keep their website up to date and provide a password protected parents only area.

FeedMyInbox.com is a great free service that takes an RSS feed (like the ones that Firefly can generate) and sends you an update by e-mail up to once every 24 hours when the feed changes.

Don't forget, you can generate all kinds of RSS feeds from Firefly including

• What's new in site (eg your entire intranet)
• What's new in section (eg a department)
• What's new in page and children
• What's old (for webmasters to see what pages are out of date and might need updating)
• Comments on page
• My feed (customised, user specific feed controlled by user)

To see some of the available feeds in Firefly, just click the orange RSS icon in your browser, near to the address bar (works on Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox).

And of course it'll work with all your non Firefly RSS feeds (eg BBC News) as well.

It's completely free.  I've been using this service for a while and thought it would be worth sharing it.  For feeds that require authentication (protected pages), you will need to put your username and password in the address you give eg http://myuser:mypass@server/test.rss - bear in mind you will be handing over your credentials to the guys and gals at FeedMyInbox.com (and although the service seems to work well, I can't personally vouch for them).

A busy week this week and it's only Wednesday... we had our annual users' group meeting at St Paul's in London (thanks to SPS for hosting) on Monday and released Firefly 2.6.0.  Thanks also to all of those that attended - we hope you found it useful.  We certainly did and it's always good when we get a good deal of agreement on future features.  I'm also keen to raise the profile of existing features and make it super-easy for users, so will be producing some material (on this blog and elsewhere) to help with that.

Meanwhile, I have been in and out of the recording studio making screencasts to help new and old users alike get to grips with all the new features.  Next stop is getting the website fully updated to reflect all the new stuff.

And of course making my first blog post!  I'd like to use this blog to keep users and interested parties alike aware of the things going on at Firefly Solutions, and amongst our growing userbase - they have a great habit of surprising us with uses we didn't think Firefly had!