Mike's Blog

Good news for us all at the Ixis office this week with the results of a 13 year-long study on drinking hot beverages.

Scientists in the Netherlands have been tracking 40,000 people who enjoy a fair few coffees and teas during the day, and the results are handy to know.

"Those who drank more than six cups of tea a day cut their risk of heart disease by a third" ... Consuming between two to four coffees a day was also linked to a reduced risk.

So our healthiest team member is hosting expert Chris, who can drink huge mugs of tea constantly all day. However, we're probably ruining the health benefits with the beer tasting we do on a Friday!

A recent request from a client was to improve the Views 2 exposed taxonomy filter so that it intelligently hides taxonomy terms which aren't related to any of the content returned by the View query. As anybody who has spent time poking about in Views vast configuration panel will know, this isn't possible through the existing Taxonomy handler.

Stackoverflow.com had a few posts from users requesting the same functionality, and replies from others saying it wasn't possible with Views 2. Well the good news is: it is possible, right now, without hacking Views.

Whilst doing some R&D around Twitter related services I've noticed holes lacking in APIs for a number of services. It's not just myself that groans, support queues, mailing lists and Twitter are full of people grumbling about lacking functionality from the services.

Today it was the turn of photo hosting service Twitpic who provide a great basic API service but lacks any ability to extract all images for a specific user through the API. A minor bonus is that each user of the service gets an RSS feed of their uploaded images, although it only serves the last 20 images - 20 being the number of photos shown per page.

We kicked off the new year with expansion in our web development team to meet the never ending increase in Drupal demand.

During the last 12 months we were turning down work because the team was fully booked every month with client projects, and 2010 has already brought a wave of new clients for both the development and hosting services, so the team expansion could not come at a better time.

The content management platform Drupal powers 100% of Ixis' projects, and has seen a huge increase in adoption from small to International organisations across the world. This growing buzz has lead to a staggering increase in Drupal specific work leads on a daily basis for us here at Ixis IT.