Company announcements, industry news and other relevant information
that we find interesting and hope that you do, too!
The Digital Orchard is proud to be working closely with VancouverEastVillage.ca, a showcase of small businesses in the East Village / Hastings Sunrise region of Vancouver. Together, we will help to foster growth of small businesses in this beautiful and unique community.VancouverEastVillage was founded with the goal of promoting the unique and diverse range of businesses for groceries, household supplies, entertainment and dining services, among others. Through the venues of an easy-to-browse website and social media blasts, VEV, as it...
The Digital Orchard is excited to extend our business to the Philippines. Over the past several years, the owner, Ted Wood, has formed close bonds with many Filipinos here in Canada and around the world, and has come to learn about and appreciate the wonderful culture and uniqueness of the peoples of the Philippines. Ted has also learned of the ongoing struggles that many people in the Philippines face on a daily basis and feels that one way to help...
Over the past week and a half, I've successfully upgraded the three servers that I'm managing which run xAppOS-based websites. Progressively, I've been updating each website to activate the new System Events architecture, and the roll-out has gone reasonably smoothly.As with any new software feature or functionality, there's a certain number of bugs and coding challenges that can only be seen when running the code in a live (production) environment. Real-world testing is still a necessary evil. Here we are...
Today marks the first day when a new feature of xAppOS goes live on several websites. It is a feature that has been in development for several months and finally reached a state deemed stable enough for being let out in the wild. This system is an Event+Action system where actions can be run by triggering events. This system solves a challenge that has been becoming more and more apparent as the xAppOS platform grows and matures. A growing portion...
A 1/3 scale Macintosh....
The Digital Orchard has been providing all-encompassing website design, development, hosting and maintenance services for our clients for many years. We still believe that our all-in-one approach brings tremendous value to our customers, and we will continue to provide these services. However, the landscape for designing and building websites is changing, and we're changing with it. In contrast to when we started, there's now several options available to consumers at lower price points than what we can offer, or even...
During 2013, the Digital Orchard is pleased to offer a special promotional package for any business in the construction industry on Vancouver Island. If the business signs up for a Building Links subscription or a 1stView Business Directory listing, professional website hosting will be provided for the company's website at no cost during the same period of time. This offer is available to all builders, roofers, plumbers, windows installers, landscaping specialists, siding professionals, architects, home designers, and any other professional...
MyBlog is the name of our Blog software for the xAppOS web framework. It provides an easy way for our clients to maintain a blog, filled with rich content and syndication in a variety of ways - email subscriptions, RSS, ping services, Ping.fm, and so on.The most recent update to MyBlog added the support for what we call Substitutions. This is a feature that enables the blog author to define content they want to include into a number of blog...
xAppOS - the magic behind our sites.For the past several years, we (The Digital Orchard) have been developing a website framework that forms the foundation on which we build most of our clients' websites. This framework has evolved through several versions and architectures to become what it is today. There's many web frameworks available, each bringing their own strengths to the table. Some are full-featured self-contained packages, such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, and others aim to be really good...
Some fun facts:Steve Jobs started Apple in 1976 with his buddy Steve Wozniak.Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, and after a year on sabbatical, started a new company called NeXT.The World Wide Web (HTTP/WWW) was created on a NeXT computer.Apple purchased NeXT and their NeXTSTEP operating system in 1997, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple.NeXTSTEP was eventually morphed into Mac OS X, the next generation of the Macintosh operating system.Prior to 1997, Apple had several active mobile projects,...
Let me start by saying - upgrading to Lion doesn't really bring much else to the table that Snow Leopard offered, in my opinion. In a way, I'm surprised that it's getting such rave reviews. Snow Leopard from Leopard was a far more important upgrade. That said, I'm running Lion on an older MacBook Pro that doesn't feature a multi-touch trackpad, so I can't take full advantage of Lion's new input methods (3-finger swipes, etc.), which is probably its biggest...