Web Design and Development Blog - Rochester MN

For those of you who have worked with us for a while now realize that we are a growing company, and because of that we would like to offer more services to our clients. We are looking a discussion of what features / products you would like to see us implement in the future.

We look forward to your input.

~RDS

If you’ve ever worked with a large website and wanted to download a copy of it, FTP could drive you nuts (especially if you have a flaky internet connection). You probably assumed there is some way to zip (archive) a site into one large file for easy download. Now even if you don’t have shell access to your web server you can create a single file for download.

All of the steps below are assuming that you are running a Linux/Unix system with Apache and PHP installed. If your on IIS / Windows this may or may not work. You’ll also need to know the root path of your server, our demo will be set to /home/demouser/demodomain.com/

First off you need to make sure that the web site you want to back-up is not running in Safe Mode. If the site is, request from your hosting provider that it be turned off. Safe Mode doesn’t allow for system commands to be run.

Next you’d want to create a folder that has write permissions (chmod 0777) to place your archive into. We’ll call this folder “backup” for demo purposes.

Now comes the actual code to back-up your website folder.

<?php

system(“tar -zcf /home/demouser/demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz /home/demouser/demodomain.com”);

?>

Don’t worry I’ll explain what this all means.

system
This command basically will replicate a shell prompt for you, however you can only run one command at a time (without some fancy coding)

tar
This is the code to create the actual archive file, on Linux/Unix they call it a “tarball” or “tar”

-zcf
this is creating a compressed tar file (z) means zip or .gz format (c) is create command (f) means file.

/home/demouser/demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz
This is the file path that you want to create. You can name backup and mybackup.tar.gz whatever you’d like.

/home/demouser/demodomain.com
This is telling the system what folder on the system to backup. Depending on the size of your site you may see the page sit for a few seconds. When the page is done you can point your browser to www.demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz and download your file.

Hope that helps those of you with large backup issues. Also this can be run from a cronjob to create regular backups that your clients can easily download.

~RDS

Reynolds Design Studio has started to focus their attention at the twin cities of Minneapolis, MN and St. Paul, Minnesota. We serve all of the Twin Cities metro area with our experienced team of web professionals and graphic designers to create an advertising project you will be proud of. Reynolds Design Studio provides web design services for logo design, graphic design, web site development and custom web design programming.

If you are from the Twin Cities and looking for affordable, creative web design or website development contact Reynolds Design Studio today!

We have made yet another major upgrade to our widely used photo gallery. We have retained all of the functionality from previous versions, but made our templating and installation process much easier. We have created a user friendly installation wizard, template files which are easier to upgrade for non-programmers and a reworked admin.

Keep reading our blog for further updates and patches to popular utilies and other developments from one of Rochester’s leading web development companies.

Reynolds Design Studio is now able to serve our clients better by offering full service website hosting along with our top notch quality website and graphic design services. Our servers are backed up at the minimum once a week and we offer the ability to have your database exported nightly and sent to you by email. We are working on having our system create compressed files for download on a nightly basis as well.

Stay tuned for further updates on our web hosting solutions and other great products from Reynolds Design Studio

University of Minnesota – Rochester (UMR) needed a website for their new Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences degree program. UMR contracted with MLT Group for their advertising needs. We worked closely with MLT Group and the staff at UMR to develop a site that would follow the University of Minnesota’s established branding while bringing forward a new design that better reflected their unique location and degree.

We created an engaging flash utility on the front page allowing the user to read more about the UMR experience from a students prospective. Even with an expedited timeline we were able to produce a website that met all of UMR’s needs and felt as if it was a part of the complete U system.

Feel free to check out the UMR BSHS website at www.r.umn.edu/bshs/

~RDS

Words by Tracey puts a new spin on letters. Tracey takes photos around Rochester MN of objects that look like letters. We worked with Jim Arenson of Arenson Art and Design and MLT Group to create a website that would be visually appealing and allow for the functionality of the database.

We utilized a highly customized version of our RDS Gallery 5.0 to build a powerful utility allowing the user to type in a word and the system will randomly choose letters out of the database of letters. The user has the ability to choose a new letter for any given letter in their word without losing the images they have already chosen. Feel free to peruse her site and order a unique work of art.

~RDS

Home Federal Savings Bank of Minnesota, in need of a redesign to their website, contacted MLT Group to create a website that would meet their clients needs for years to come.

We worked closely with the web design committee at Home Federal and MLT Group to create a state of the art website with a unique look and feel. The Home Federal crew was looking for an experience similar to Chipotle or Vitamin Water, but still needing to be found through the search engines. We created a solution that would fit their needs. Utilizing a unique layering technique, we built a site which from the users perspective appeared to be a flash based site, however still retains all of the search engine capabilities of a static html site.

To supplement their public online presence, Home Federal is having us construct a database driven intranet to service their employees with procedures and policies across their various branches.

~RDS

If you’ve ever watched a server administrator when they are noodling around the server you’d see a bunch of lines keep zipping up the screen. You’ve probably wondered what could they possibly be learning from this information? Although many system administrators know a large array of Linux/Unix commands there are a few that will get you started (and keep you from breaking things in the process).

Commands:

du
this command give you the list of all the files and sub-directories within the directory you are currently logged into. This is great except the numbers on the left don’t really mean much. (In actuality they are the file sizes in “blocks” however to read this in kilobytes, megabytes etc you’ll need to add a parameter).

du -h
Ah, now things are looking more familiar, but I’m still getting a giant list of files. What if you wanted to get the size of all the directories including the files?

du -sh
Now its looking better (however you may be getting permission errors depending on your user account privileges). What if you wanted to look at one specific directory (the same as doing a right-click > preferences in windows)?

du -sh myfolder
There we go. Now you have the size of the entire directory, just like you have in windows.

Now you’re probably wondering how do I move between a folder?

cd directory_name

There we go now we can go into a directory but what if we want to get out of it?

cd ..

You can keep adding ../../../ etc until you are back to where you want to be, or to get to the root of your users level type in
cd /

if you want to know what directories / files you have in your directory you would use the ls command.

ls

You should try this with your own linux system and don’t worry, with only those commands you cannot mess anything up. this only allows you to look at the server. Have fun!

~RDS

Reynolds Design Studio has started to focus their attention at the twin cities of Minneapolis, MN and St. Paul, Minnesota. We serve all of the Twin Cities metro area with our experienced team of web professionals and graphic designers to create an advertising project you will be proud of. Reynolds Design Studio provides web design services for logo design, graphic design, web site development and custom web design programming.

If you are from the Twin Cities and looking for affordable, creative web design or website development contact Reynolds Design Studio today!