The parts of the Online 4 Baby project which is most gratifying to do is the Warehouse Management and Stock Control. There was a lot to learn here, a lot to improve upon, and a nice problem to work upon.

Essentially the problem is one which will have been met with a thousand times or more. How to pick effectively. Primo increases the number of options when it comes to warehouse management for Online 4 Baby. Because the orders are in a database and the items which need to be sent out are easily accessible things that had been taken for granted were looked at again.

By their earlier system Online 4 Baby had to pick all the items in an order together, now that is no longer the case. So long as all the items in an order are sent the same day the courier is happy.

The task at hand is minimising the amount of walking the picking staff have to do in order to complete the days orders. There are a number of things Primo has done to achieve this:-

1. The highest selling items are stored nearest the packing area.
2. Orders are picked depending upon location in warehouse, not the time the order received. Essentially, if there are 8 of a particular item to be sent out they are all picked together rather than picking them with the order of which they may only be a small part. Of course there are some limits built in to make sure that orders get sent on the correct day.
3. To help the pickers deal with the case where they do have to walk around the warehouse for their next batch of items Artumi Systems has developed a shortest route finder which is used to order the items on the batch sheet to minimize the walking distance. This was particularly pleasing for us as the warehouse is large and the program had to be able to figure out the route quickly as the ordering system is based on real time orders.
4. Obviously, only some pallet spaces can be picked from, the rest are used for storage. Primo is asked to choose a pallet space as stock comes in, and it finds the closest pallet space to the area where the produce will eventually be picked from. This further reduces the amount of time required to replenish the picking spaces.

Usually web application development is more about moving data around than calculation, so this part of the project was particularly nice to work on.

Artumi Systems has written a replacement for tinyurl.com. It’s mentioned in other parts of the site, but I thought I would mark it’s existence in the blog. It is a simple application whose purpose is to turn long URLs into short ones which are suitable for reading out over the phone, or placing in an email.

There are a number of advantages of using this over using tinyurl.com.

• The domain is your own, and therefore looks better
• The links can be set up to report how many times it has been viewed. That means that you can send a link to someone and find out if they bothered to click it.
• It is free of adverts
• The URLs are more suited to being read out over the phone, compared to the URLs produced by tinyurl.com, as letters such as “b” and “p” do not appear in the short URL.

Like tinyurl.com our short links website is free for anyone to use.

Enjoy!

There are a number of options when you want to get a website online. Assuming that you already have the website, then it’s a case of looking for a server. Below are the variations that are available.

Use your own computer

If you have an always on connection and you’re happy to keep your computer on all the time you could load a webserver on to your own computer.

Advantages

• It’s cheap, you are already paying for the bandwidth, although your electricity bills could increase a bit.
• You will have complete control over the server.

Disadvantages

• You have to set up a web server, not always the easiest thing to do.
• You will most likely not be able to upload quickly, UK broadband usually has upload rates of 256Kbps, or 1/400th of what a decent server will have.
• You will require either a static IP address or use a dynamic service to direct people towards your computer, the first case costs more and is not available from many broadband providers, the second option means you can’t choose the domain in the location bar.
• You will suffer from increased exposure and will therefore become a bigger target of virus writers.
• Your web site may be slow if you are doing something on your computer.
• Your internet connection could become unusable if the demand to view your site is high enough.

Basically, if you’ve not got any money this may be a solution for you, but unless your an expert it’s going to be hard work and potentially dangerous.

Low cost shared hosting

This has become much better in the last 12 months. With monthly prices from as little as £3 per month (if you pay for maybe 2 years in advance). You will get a certain amount of web space and a managed service from a dedicated company. It is easier to get the site online as someone else is running the network. However, this is probably the cheapest option and does have it’s downsides.

Advantages

• Relatively cheap.
• Dedicated companies who know what they’re doing.
• Generous web space and bandwidth allowances, better connectivity than a home connection.
• Will usually a number of open source programs which are free to use and easy to install, and may be exactly what you require.

Disadvantages

• You do not control the server, none of your information is safe from the hosting company, so this is not suitable for any confidential information.
• You cannot fix some problems yourself, as you do not have control, and this makes your site reliant on the support offered by the company.
• Shared hosting is often oversold, you are promised an amount of bandwidth, but the number of websites on the server are so many that the website is slow and you actually do not get what you paid for. It is a bit hit and miss when it comes to this issue. Either you’re lucky or you’re not.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

This is a mixture of shared hosting and a dedicated server. Basically there is a single server which has something called “virtualization” software running, and one computer appears as many. This gives you the flexibility of having complete control over the “server” and provides security for the clients.

Advantages

• You can run anything you like on the server
• Cheaper than a dedicated server

Disadvantages

• You are sharing hardware, and so depending on configuration you may not get the performance you would have expected, and this has been my experience
• VPS servers have only been available for a couple of years and there are still many developments taking place in the virtualization “world”. As such I have my doubts about the suitability of such servers for anything mission critical.

Dedicated server

A dedicated server is one that you have complete control over. These can cost from about £70 per month for the lower end models. With a dedicated server there is a specific computer for you to use as you please. You can get deals where the hardware is exactly built to specification. The term “Dedicated Server” also implies that you will look after any server problems yourself. This may not be quite what you want, so see “Managed Server” below.

Advantages

• Complete control over the software being run, and how it affects the server, which brings many benefits compared to the shared hosting.

Disadvantages

• The cost is relatively high.
• Someone will have to be responsible to fix and maintain the server

Managed Server

A managed server is like a dedicated server but with the company supplying the technical expertise to maintain the server. This is the most expensive option, but may prove cheaper than having someone in your organisation being in charge of the server. Of course, you are then reliant upon their service.

Colocation

This is really the same as having a dedicated server, although instead of renting the server, you buy your own and rent space in a data centre to connect it to the internet.

IE7 and Firefox 2 have come out. A new release of Firefox is not really big news. These are regular events after all, but the release of a new version of IE7 is something completely out of the ordinary. As far as it concerns Artumi systems, the issues are about how will our sites work? Well, the answer is flawlessly, since we do not use any of the technologies which required lots of work (ActiveX for example) we are relatively unaffected. The sites we have designed have been built to work on both Firefox and IE and so as IE7 eliminates the rendering bugs and moves closer to Firefox our sites continue to work in both.

Which is nice!

A friend of mine was talking about the import of the fact the IE7 will be downloaded as part of the Windows Update program, which means that many people who do not really care about their browsers will have the change forced upon them. This friend felt that if IE7 no longer worked with the sites that IE6 used to, because of security concerns, then there would be a flood of users to Firefox. I will be interested to see if this is the case.