Blog

Netsells took part in the corporate relay last weekend. Six runners form a team, each of whom runs their leg, then passes the GPS tracked batton to the next runner. The day was great fun and we are all dead set on taking part next year, however initially we weren’t so sure it would turn out th…

I’m sure you’ve already either seen this story posted around the web or you’ve heard someone talking about it. How Instagram doubled their iOS app ratings in a week with more than 2 million reviews given. Just in case you haven’t read the story or want to read it again. You c…

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond visited Netsells in the run up to the snap General Election to discuss the thriving UK digital sector and what the government could do to assist.  Spending just over an hour with Netsells director Brannan Coady and a number of other local York bas…

Welcome to our shiny new website!  It's been in development for almost 18 months (it hasn't taken that long, we have just been too busy to finish it off!) so we are really pleased to be out with the old and in with the new.  We have finally updated our portfolio, so much of the work you…

When working with Vue, the ideal development setup is to use vue-loader to load .vue files. If you’ve never heard of .vue files, they basically take the idea of self contained components to the next level by allowing you to contain the template, css and component logic within a singl…

We’re pleased to announce that Netsells has been recognized as a leading UK web developer by Clutch. Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that identifies leading IT and marketing service providers and software. Clutch analysts evaluate companies based on multiple factors, such as ma…

Netsells are about to begin an exciting new chapter! We are launching a new company with the objective of bridging the gap between ideas and investment. For many years now the Netsells team have faced the question of ‘what’s next?’ after having listening to talented and excited entrepreneurs explain…

Earlier this month we were shortlisted for two awards in the inaugural Scarborough Business Awards, a brand new annual event that aims to highlight the best businesses in the region! Netsells were shortlisted in the small business of the year category, after showing substantial growth throughout th…

So I've been working at Netsells for about a month now and I thought it would be a good time to write a post and talk about some of the more important things that I've learned from my first month. Without a doubt I've learned so much and I don't think that the amount of things I learn will be slowin…

Nobody likes messy HTML that makes it a nightmare to make future changes. For any project to be enjoyable to work on, you need to ensure that it’s done right. Jumping to and from old projects as I do on a daily basis, you get a much clearer view and appreciation of how your code has improved in term…

I was discussing with a fellow developer friend of mine the other day about which development tools we use to speed up our front-end development cycle. Up until recently he has been working with pure CSS, without a framework or any form of development preprocessor tools. With this in mind I recommen…

At Netsells, we've used a self-hosted version of Sentry to keep updated to any errors that sites we've built for quite some time now. This has usually resulted in fixing the issue and emailing the client the good news before they are even aware there was a bug! Today, we are going to configure Larav…

Clockwork is an awesome extension (and server-side component) for PHP development, written by itsgoingd. Not using Laravel? Don't worry, Clockwork also supports CodeIgniter, Monolog, Slim and Swift. Consisting of a server-side component which can easily be installed from packagist using composer. S…

Today I'd like to share a library written by Jeffrey Way of Laracasts that has proven very useful in our latest client project in tidying up the DOM. For element based objects, it is usually easy to just stick values in data attributes so that you can pluck them out using JS. <div class="rat…

Ribbons and banners have always been a staple of web design, and can be an important part of the visual hierachy of a webite. However, with flat design being so hot right now, you'd be forgiven for thinking that something as skeumorphic as a ribbon or banner may have fallen out of vogue - wrong! Ne…

The mentality that drives the human race: Progressing at the fastest possible rate in the easiest possible way; I like to think of it as electrons in a conductor always taking the path of least resistance. This post aims to examine the relationship and balance between these two factors, focusing on…

We recently started playing around with some local marketing ideas, after becoming frustrated that there were several inferior companies operating in our close proximity with a better local reputation than our own. It pains me to see our superior work quality, superior service and all-round better a…

gulp.js is the new build system on the block. In this post, I hope to give you a brief overview of gulp, and talk you through how to create a simple gulpfile to compile some LESS. I do assume that you already have npm installed on your system. Installing gulp (new gulp project) Open terminal, and…

We have recently had the need for Exim SMTP server to only listen on a select IP. The server in question had about 7IPs - only one of them needed to act as a SMTP server. After a bit of research, this is possible via the WHM interface. First, navigate to the Exim Configuration Manger in WHM and sele…

When I first launched a web development company in 2005, I couldn’t code. Coming from a design background, I had never worked on the technical side of the web, and had very little understanding of the languages and process involved in taking a static design to a functioning site. Looking back,…

We use Cloudapp a silly amount on a daily basis to throw screenshots back and forth between each other over skype Hipchat. It’s always fustrated me that the screenshots taken on the retina screen are 2x that of the standard screenshot. Making the image huge for when we’re embedding into issues on bi…

On almost a daily basis, we find ourselves sat in the Netsells office complaining that customers are yet again having problems following our PDF guide for email setup on the iPhone. We also find ourselves regularly complaining that we never have enough time to work on personal projects that we can l…

Recently, we had to update a few essential packages for one of our production servers to become fully PCI compliant, I thought I’d share some tips I found on the way to help others having to do the same thing! Update (31/07/12): Added disabling WebDisk Update (16/09/12): Added SSL Cipher Settings Be…

We are all starting to use more and more online services, each having their own login details and it’s getting harder to remember them all – especially in an office environment when multiple people need to access a service. Other than having the same password for everything or writing the passwords…

While working on v2 of the Endeavour iPhone app, I was faced with a need to create a custom tab bar, this seemed a much easier task when using titanium compared to Obj-C! I actually ended up writing a library that is available on the netsells github which I will show you how to use in this tutorial.…

While working at Netsells, I’ve constantly found myself in need of converting a string to an md5 hash. This took too many steps to do, so I created an extension for the marvellous Alfred. Once installed, you simply launch Alfred (I use cmd+space), type in md5 with a space followed by the string you…

I’ve used my iPhone and iPad for development in the past and have always been annoyed with the fact that I was stuck in sandbox mode with 1P42 stuck at the top of the registration form that is shoved in my face when I try and register. Anyway, follow these steps to get back into normal sandbox mode……