News

Always looking at new ways of making it easier to set up and maintain your website, Salon Alchemy have now gone one step further with our latest innovation - Telepathic Websites.

Gone are the days where you had to log on to a content management system and enter in all your treatment menus and price lists by hand, and upload each image to your website from your hard drive. With a new Telepathic Website from Salon Alchemy, all you need to do is stare at your computer screen and watch your website take shape before your eyes. Your treatment menus will be perfectly formatted with no typing errors, images will automatically be cropped, resized and tweaked to look "just right", and your website will look exactly as you've always wanted it to be. Best of all, our advanced telepathic technology works "both ways" too - every page on your website is dynamically generated in real time based on the target audience - so your website will always be top of a Google search, whatever people are searching for - and potential clients will be amazed at the way that their every need has been catered for - it really will look like they have found their dream salon.

Our state-of-the-art technology is based on the latest project from open source experts Apache - Apache Portable Runtime inline linking for Object Oriented libraries - combined with the Spring Framework, Hibernate and some fiendishly complicated code written in Java and XML.

Best of all, our new Telepathic Websites will be available at a lower cost than our existing websites, as we won't have to do anything much at all to maintain them.

We're currently making some ongoing changes to improve the performance, reliability and robustness of the Salon Alchemy system.

The Java application server upgrade 3 weeks ago has already made a huge improvement to the performance and reliability of the system, but we haven't stopped there. We're now in the process of implementing "caching" on our websites, so that if nothing has changed in the underlying data used to generate the page (e.g. salon contact details, treatment menus/prices, special offers, etc), then we don't go to the effort of generating the web page "on the fly" each time, but instead store a copy of the web page and send that back instead. This has already made a big improvement in performance and page load times on several types of pages on our websites already, and we plan to get this working on the rest of the web pages in due course.

We've also made some improvements to robustness in some of the pages in the back-end Salon Alchemy system too, e.g. for editing web pages, news, special offers, testimonials, links, etc - all these screens now implement "optimistic locking" which means that if you are editing some content, and someone else makes a change to the same content and saves their changes before you do, then you will get an error message saying that someone else has already made changes, instead of you overwriting their work. This will be of most benefit for big salons where more than one person is working on website content at a time.

Soon, we hope to get "clustering" working with Salon Alchemy too - which will mean running the application in parallel on two servers in two different data centres (one in Wolverhampton, one in Cheltenham), where data is synchronised in real time between the two servers - and if a problem takes any server offline for whatever reason, the other one will carry on working. We have considered this essential before we begin to offer the salon management features we have intended to offer all along, e.g. appointment booking and management.

It's almost a month since we did an upgrade of the Java application server on which Salon Alchemy runs, and unfortunately we were finding a lot of issues with it - so we've taken the decision to ditch that application server (JBoss) in favour of an alternative Open Source Java application server.

We spent from Friday evening through to this morning migrating the Salon Alchemy application across to work on the new application server (including vigorous testing on our "test" server in Shrewsbury); Salon Alchemy went "live" last night on the new application server, although we subsequently found an issue in "live" early this morning that wasn't happening on the test server due to a Linux configuration issue, which we have now fixed.

Early indications are very promising; memory usage is a lot less than with JBoss, and it's taking a lot less time to start up and shut down the application compared with JBoss too, which will greatly minimise downtime when we perform maintenance on the system (e.g. installing a new version of Salon Alchemy with new features and bug fixes).

This is probably one of the most significant steps we've made so far in improving the performance and reliability of Salon Alchemy... one which we felt we really had to take before going forward with our salon management functionality such as appointment booking and client appointment histories.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Salon Alchemy over the next few days, in case any unexpected teething troubles rear their ugly head, although so far, things are going far smoother than the JBoss upgrade last month...

There's a scam going round at the moment, where a company cold-calls you and says they are in charge of advertising on Facebook and asks you for some extortionate amount of money to set up Facebook advertising for you.

Except that - wait for it - they don't work for Facebook - and are yet another of the sort of cold-calling rip-off merchants that I've mentioned before!

If you want to set up Facebook advertising, you can do it directly from within Facebook - you don't need some cold-calling cowboys to charge you an arm and a leg to do it for you!!!

After a couple of teething troubles, we've now completed an upgrade of some of the Java application software used to "power" the Salon Alchemy system.

This should improve performance and reliability - web pages should load consistently faster and the system should be generally a fair bit more stable.