Richard Cross - Photography and Web Design, Edinburgh, Scotland

The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

Here's a full version of the film The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui which I co-produced with a team from ScottishHills.com. It went on to win the award for 'Best Highland Amateur Film 2007' at the Fort William Mountain Festival.

For more details see: www.biggreyman.co.uk

Labels: film, the highlands

Meaningful Funerals by Ewan Kelly

This morning I took delivery of a new book by Ewan Kelly - Meaningful Funerals, Meeting the Theological and Pastoral Challenge in a Postmodern Era. It uses for its cover an image I shot in Mortonhall Crematorium.

In the book he describes how it is possible to work with bereaved families in the construction of rituals which meet their spiritual needs and explores the nuanced meanings of 'spirituality' in the midst of its contemporary religious and human complexity (so says the back cover). I've not read it yet, but it will be in my bag next week as I drive through France.

The image was donated for use on the cover without charge.

Labels: photography, publication

Magento: open source e-commerce

It's been a good couple of years since I developed an online shop (Napiers, 06) and in that time shopping cart software has come a long way.

My experiences with OScommerce and Zen Cart left me certain I didn't want to use them again (no offence guys, but you've not moved very far). Asking around and some some searching revealed what looks to be the bright new hope of Open Source e-commerce software - Magento.

Being Open Source it is free to use and adapt, but more importantly it has been developed by a team who clearly understand the needs of modern online shops. This means that along side a well designed template system which is well optimised for search engines it also includes features which in other applications may require bespoke development.

In just about all areas it has provided a way to meet the client requests without resorting to bespoke programming. That's not to say the development has not been without it's issues. Part way through the project a new version was released. The jump from v1.0 to v1.1 included a major revision to how the templates were handled meaning they had to be rebuilt from scratch. On the positive side this upgrade did eliminate many bugs which were in version 1.0 - the result is a full featured shop which would have been out of the reach of the budget available for a start up e-commerce business only a couple of years ago.