Blog

About 6 months I made the big decision to take the plunge and start my own veterinary hospital. Little did I know, just how many forms and red tape busting that would take.

But all that is just about over now and things are happening at a fast pace. My new hospital will be opening very soon and I've just finished building the practice website- well for now anyway.

Jump on over to www.companionanimalvet.com.au and have a look at what we're doing.

The issue:

We have previously been using Symbian for our outsourced pathology. For many reasons we have decided to change labs. Symbian installed software in our system that pulled the results off their server for integration into our practice management software (RXworks). IDEXX does not currently have this complete functionality. They have taken some steps towards automating the process but it still required some manual intervention to import results. The following is how I completed the automation so that results are imported into RXworks without any user intervention.

In my previous post (http://www.mattyoung.com.au/automatic-mobile-device-detection-drupal) I outlined a method using php in the settings.php file to get a drupal 5 multisite to detect a mobile device and redirect the user to the mobile subdomain site but then if they want to visit the main site, they need to be able to view it. The method outlined in that post allows the user to view the requested page on the main site but when they try and access another page they will then be redirected back to the mobile subomain. In order to allow them to continue to navigate in the main domain you need to set a cookie which indicates that they want to view the main domain not just the mobile site.

I have previously set-up automatic device detection for mobile devices for a domain so thought I would document how I did it here as I had alot of trouble finding information on how to do it. I had considered using the accessability module but it didn't really do what I wanted and seems far too complex. I think this way is much easier!

The basic setup

First of all the main domain is a drupal 5 site. For the mobile site I decided to use drupal multisites and a subdomain. So basically the mobile site is a completely different site.

I have just finished creating a new mobile site for Crown St Veterinary Hospital. After pondering over several possible ways to go I eventually decided to create a whole new site in a subdomain- m.crownvet.com.au

So you have your domain name, now what do you do? You now need a server somewhere to store the information that is contained in your website. Here you have 2 options:

Hosting it yourself

Many people surf the web and can find information they want or are interested in, but not many of those understand what it is they are actually viewing. And why would the end consumer want to, then they would end up looking at web pages the way I do instead of just enjoying them for what they are a display of information with a purpose rather than a bunch of code calling the browser to display combinations of text, images and scripts.

In my opinion you should not ask 'why I need a website' but 'why wouldn't I need a website'. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006-2007 64% of households had internet access and of those 61% used the internet to purchase products and services.