It’s been a few weeks now that this website went live, but I was busy with http://tiny.projecttime.co.uk/ so blogging about it was put to the side.

Yoga Glasgow, run by Siobhan Fitzgerald, is another yoga school based in Glasgow.  It was also another site run on an open source CMS engine, Joomla again I believe, and the developer didn’t know really much at all about design.  I say again I don’t know much about design, no formal training, but I know what looks good.

The old site can still be viewed if you wish to see it.  But it makes me slightly sad when I look at it.

Out with the Old in with the New


All I did again was search around the tints, and find a nice looking design, and changed it to fit in with Siobhan’s ideas and needs.  And Siobhan is now really happy.

What I might be lucky with is this site won’t need much SEO.  Look at the URL – it’s got Yoga and Glasgow in it!  Look at the title – it’s got Yoga and Glasgow in it!  Look at the copy – it’s got Yoga and Glasgow in it!  And if you are searching for yoga classes in Glasgow, you will search for “yoga glasgow” and she is there, right at the top of the list, and also the top of local business.  This is SEO made simple by the URL, title and copy all being inline (and also a great search term to boot).

So I had to do something fun!

Yoga Glasgow on Flickr

In one of the images above, the “About Siobhan” image, you will see a grouping of photos.  These photos comes from Flickr and Siobhan’s own photostream – http://www.flickr.com/photos/yogaglasgow/.  There is a Flickr API for .NET and at the time of build I found it could be quite slow, however at the time of writing I do notice that the FlickrNet API has been massively updated.  But I always find these APIs have much much more than you actually need when writing simple websites.  So I started to write my own API.

FlickrCocoNet

The difference between the API that I have started and the ones available, is mine only contains the methods that I need.  FlickrNet also deserialises the XML returned from Flickr completely into an entire object with all the properties of the XML.  Again this is massive over kill.  All I need is a list of the photos in a photos set – basically just the link to the image itself.  So I used XmlDocument and XPath, loading the returned XML and only querying it for what I need.

I am not sure if this makes things faster, but it makes things simple, especially if Flickr update their XML, I just need to change a couple of small parts of code, instead of waiting for an update from a 3rd party API.

I might do a post later on my API just to show you what I mean, but I think I have said too much about code, when this post is about Yoga.

Back to the Yoga

So the site has been up and running now for a couple of weeks, and it seems that it is getting more popular – I ran Google Analytics on the old site and comparatively we are up by more than 100% of visitors!

And what am really pleased about is the client is using my CMS, and it’s not breaking*!  It’s not a perfect CMS, far from it, but that’s for another post.

* it’s not breaking as often as most open source CMS engines seem to.