Company announcements, industry news and other relevant information
that we find interesting and hope that you do, too!
Mortimer is a modern, smart chatbot that helps you to apply for a mortgage or get a pre-approval ... in minutes, with no obligation.Check him out here — Canadian Mortgages by Haystax. Click "Get Appoved" at that site to get stated.The world needs our help. The climate is changing. Haystax is committed to getting us closer to a solution.#PinkIsTheNewGreenSo get your mortgage from Haystax and help the environment by planting some trees! ...
Visit Pickle Ridge Rustic Carpentry, by Live Edge Design in Duncan BC, maker of well-built rustic indoor and outdoor furniture.The carpenters at Pickle Ridge take great pride in hand-crafting fine rustic furniture that add warmth and charm to any setting. They specialize in furniture with a natural bark finish, have extensive experience in all styles of rustic carpentry, including bent willow, twig mosaic, naturally edged timber slabs, and driftwood.Pickle Ridge furniture is designed to be affordable and stylish, bringing the...
Here at The Digital Orchard, we develop complex software, while aiming to keep the user interface and experience simple, clean and predictable. That's our goal, and we believe that we've achieved that goal to a great degree. But we'll never be "finished" aiming for better.Today, we investigated a situation where one of our clients, consisting of a small team of four people, was experiencing "failed saves" while using the custom application that we developed for them. This application manages their...
Nick Vujicic gives a powerful motivational speech. Here's a highlight. Prepared to be woken up to a fresh perspective on your life. ...
Over the past year, we have been moving towards a new, broader architecture for our website and application hosting. Previously, we had at most four application servers that each hosted several websites and databases. This model has become unsustainable and does not support our principles of a distributed architecture and high performance. We've since been moving to a new model consisting of separate server instances for each website, database or client, depending on the needs of each project. We've chosen...
One of the jobs here at The Digital Orchard is to constantly evaluate which websites are pointing to our clients' websites, and then to offer suggestions to our clients for improving that. Why is this important? Because links are "votes" — a link from a quality website to a page on your website is a vote of confidence, and this is essential to achieving a higher page rank in search engines.It is highly desirable to have a growing number of...
The Digital Orchard, while a small operation, is proud to be home to some of the best website technologies available to small business and non-profit organizations in Canada. Over the years, we've painstakely built a leading-edge software platform that delivers on its promises of high performance and tremendously flexible functionality, without sacrificing security. Through a combination of careful software design and well-managed hosting, we deliver on this promise to our clients.It's common thinking that websites can come cheap, and there's...
The Digital Orchard is pleased to announce the launch of a brand new website for the Comox Real Estate Team. This website has been designed and built from scratch, coded entirely by hand, and built for the future. With a responsive, clean design, it works equally well on both desktop and mobile, helping home buyers to find their dream home quickly and easily.This new website leverages a multi-domain strategy, combining several internet domain names that each focus on a particular...
Brian Daly, MH CHt, Certified Hypnotherapist in Campbell River is holding a workshop from September 5th through September 7th.Come explore what it is like to look within yourself and discover your Awesomness!Contact Brian to reserve your spot today! ...
The Digital Orchard has officially adopted MongoDB as the backend data storage platform for our databases after getting our xAppOS + MongoDB adapter working. I never expected it to outperform our highly-optimized MySQL adapter, but it cleans house!Today, we ran a LoadImpact test against one website that's using Mongo and is still under active development, and the server easily handled the upwards of 50 virtual users thrown at it, without any increase in load time! Every request was handled in...
The Digital Orchard is launching a new service in October 2014 that is designed to promote small businesses in a unique and creative way – through creative writing. We are currently seeking anyone interested in visiting and writing about small businesses in their own and nearby communities on Vancouver Island. Over time, we will be expanding this service thoughout BC. Each writer will be provided with funds to purchase goods from the small business being written about, and the writer...
You've heard the saying "It's Just Business", but for us here at The Digital Orchard, we believe that true success comes from caring about how that business is done, and that takes presedence over everything else.Earlier this week, one of the companies that we've used for many years to help run our business, Code Spaces, had their business hacked. They lost all data backups and several of their key systems. Even though they were using the highly-respected infrastructure provided by...
Are you an architect, contractor or builder? Looking for more exposure on the internet? You can get ONE YEAR of free website hosting in two easy steps. The Digital Orchard is providing this exclusive offer to all professionals in the building industry on Vancouver Island.Two steps:Sign up for a free Building Links Trial (link). No obligation. No cost.Contact The Digital Orchard using our contact form. When you receive our response, simply reply with your logo and contact info.That's it! We'll...
Websites that Drink from the Fountain of YouthHere at The Digital Orchard, ensuring that the websites and business databases that we build perform extremely well is one of our main priorities. All of our websites and databases are built on a high-performance platform that is constantly being scrutinized, tested and optimized for the absolute best performance possible. Essentially, this ongoing process helps the websites and databases become rejuvenated and stay healthy over time. This is contrary to many hosting environments...
Here's a small tip about how to optimize the performance of the is_numeric() and is_integer() functions by not using them at all.For a given variable, $x = '1234', if you want to know if it is a number, the following code is 3 to 4 times faster than using the above functions.if ($x == '0'.$x) { ... }By simply prepending a string zero onto the front and then doing an equality check, you can immediately differentiate between numbers and non-numbers....
The Digital Orchard specializes in building elegant, easy-to-use and reliable database and software solutions for our clients. One common task that spans many software applications is contact management, and one use for maintaining a list of contacts is for sending emails. Whether they be marketing emails or newsletters or something else, your business or organization relies on email communication on a day-to-day basis. Here at The Digital Orchard, we have developed our software platform to make the task of managing...
The Digital Orchard is seeking micro-investments in order to move forward with several of our software projects and services. Rather than seeking a few large high-risk investments, we want to spread the love around. Invest $50 to $500 and be paid back with a healthy return after certain goals are reached.These micro-investments will be held in trust and will not be used directly by the company to cover operating expenses.Put your money to work for you! Think of it as...
Stop pulling your hair out. Have a database custom-built for your Vancouver business today that will make it run more efficiently. Sleep at night knowing that your data is safe and just a few clicks away at any time.For just one simple payment of $100 per month — no strings attached, no long-term commitment — we will build the database that improves your business productivity. Cancel at any time, but we know you won't want to. You'll be extremely impressed...
Safari 7 is far too aggresive, virtually ignoring the autocomplete="off" directive added to form and input elements. Its predecessor had a preference that controlled this behavior. Why Apple decided to remove that preference and always AutoFill is beyond me, and became very frustrating when developing web applications that contained password fields. My personal login username and password for the site would override the value in these form fields. I'm okay with having to toggle AutoFill on and off as needed,...
The Digital Orchard is proud to have been given the opportunity to work with the Cowichan Folk Guild and build a brand new Volunteer Database for their annual Islands Folk Festival. This new database replaces a former database that the owner of The Digital Orchard, Ted Wood, first built for the Festival back in 2000. We were amazed to learn that they've continued using this original database over the past 13 years! It was time to upgrade them to the...