Development

Jan 19, 2015

This is just a simpe one-pager for reinsurance company Kelvin Re but with some nice responsive features and CSS animation when the page loads to give an otherwise fairly unexciting page a bit of life. Awaiting designs for the full website, so watch the space for something a little more interesting.

Jun 11, 2013

Derby is one of a new breed of JavaScript frameworks that take advantage of the interesting NodeJS to create a web app framework that runs your code both on the client and the server. This has a tonne of huge advantages compared to writing a complex JavaScript application that has to communicate with a different language on the server and still maintain visibility to Google. The big advantages I see from this: Only one language to work in makes it easier for developers Communcation between client and server is automatic and seemless Pre-rendered on the server, updated on the client so Google gets the proper content but you still get dynamic updating for your users So with this in mind I decided to do a little test app and of course the first step was getting it installed. These are the steps I had to go through to get it working.

Dec 10, 2012

I thought it was about time I published another blog post and I have just been messing around trying to set up an ultra simple project using git for source control, Cloud9 IDE for the editor (which is all very simple) and then I thought wouldn’t it be nice to be able to push those changes live from the IDE. So, seemed like a simple thing to do and there were a few posts around on the net that helped but nothing that really pulled all of that together in once place so I thought it would be a perfect thing to explain.

Jul 31, 2012

This is an update to the blog post and gist I wrote about getting image source filenames from wordpress when all you have is the thumbnail version. It turns out the whole thing is a bit more complicated, especially if your client/editor is uploading files that already have dimensions in the filenames. Not to mention an odd little WordPress “feature” where you sometimes don’t get the files in the sizes you expect.

May 16, 2012

WordPress is a fantastic tool for building websites but sometimes there are little things that are a bit tricky – one of those is thumbnail images. All the more frustrating because it gives you almost all of the tools you need – but not quite all of them. Here is a little utility function I have used to get around the fact that there is no wordpress function for getting a thumbnail image for a specific size (even when you have correctly generated the thumbnail at that size using the add_image_size function.

Mar 30, 2012

This is a really quick and simple tutorial to explain how to add a CMS Block to your Magento sites footer. It is a simple case of creating the block and a few lines of content added to your layout xml file, all of which I will explain below. First thing is to create a new CMS Block from Magento’s CMS menu and to add some content, taking note of the identifier that you have entered.

Mar 2, 2012

After a few weeks of development I have finally decided to “go public” with a new site I have designed and developed. Drum-roll if you please… Humans Who Made! The site is basically an index of humans.txt files that forms a directory of sites and the people who actually built them. The idea for humans.txt files themselves comes from the people over at humanstxt.org and the idea for indexing the files using a crawler, rather than by submissions is down to me.

Jan 16, 2012

I have recently made a start on a website that requires a more graphical interface than you would ordinarily be able to produce without the use of flash. Thankfully the rise of HTML5 and it’s associated specifications and technologies now gives me the option of using the far more palatable (not to mention iPad compatible) option of the Canvas element. While there is always the option to work directly with this kind of graphical library, such as the GDI in old windows programming or the newer canvas HTML element it is generally better practice to sit your application on top of a higher level framework.

Dec 1, 2011

DataTables are a brilliant plugin for JQuery that restyle and add functionality to your tables. They add searching, pagination and sorting right out of the box with very little configuration needed – unfortunately the sorting doesn’t support the UK date format so you need to add your own sorting methods – basic ones are supplied by the site itself but I have added a couple of tweaks to handle blank dates.