Showing posts from the category "all"
Scheduled for 29th July 2021.
RSS is XML with a specification, however not all RSS feeds follow the spec. In this post, we process the feed as an XML document meaning we can access the extra attributes and values
Scheduled for 26th July 2021.
Using 11ty global data files, we create an 11ty collection from an RSS feed. As an example, we show the latest YouTube videos on our website
Scheduled for 12th July 2021.
Using 11ty Global data files, you can make collections from JSON APIs, allowing you to make whole websites from one endpoint
Scheduled for 28th June 2021.
I rebuilt my beer review website using a JSON API and 11ty. This is a rundown of how I tackled it
Scheduled for 15th June 2021.
As a starting point with the server tool debugging, this blog post explores htop and setting up a server status page with Apache
Scheduled for 14th June 2021.
I'm investigating a Linux server which has performance issues and walking through the processes and steps I am doing to find a solution
Scheduled for 31st May 2021.
Rather than client-side user authentication, this blog post works through how to catch a user authentication error with Nuxt
Scheduled for 17th May 2021.
11ty filters can exist as JS functions inside the declared filters directory - these can be accessed by other files not processed by 11ty
Scheduled for 3rd May 2021.
This quick block post shows how to upload an image to Cloudinary using PHP, using their provided SDK
Scheduled for 19th April 2021.
There are plenty of ways to get your 11ty site live depending on preferences and skill set, this blog walks through a few of the popular ones
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Posted on 15th April 2021. Written For Liquid Light
With version 9, TYPO3 introduced a native redirects module - not only does it give you a place to centrally manage your redirects, it gracefully handles page renaming
Posted on 15th April 2021.
I published an NPN package the other day which contains some everyday 11ty utils
Posted on 12th April 2021.
List all of your posts (or other collection items) in a calendar/diary format to give a timeline of your past
Posted on 11th April 2021.
Posted on 6th April 2021.
Since 2021, I have stuck to a writing schedule - not only has it helped write more posts, it prevents the flurry of inactivity
Posted on 5th April 2021.
Learn how to schedule blog posts and other items to go live with your static site generator without having to rebuild the whole site. Get all the benefits of a dynamic CSS with static files
Posted on 2nd April 2021.
What is a side project, if not a safe place to get imposter syndrome?
Posted on 23rd March 2021.
Posted on 22nd March 2021.
PHP Deployer is a great little utility for deploying your PHP app via command line. It doesn't force you to use any specific tech stack and simplifies the process of getting your app live.
Posted on 11th March 2021.
Posted on 8th March 2021. Draft
Buy thin client - install debian - Installed on a hard drive, USB stick tricky. - skipped root but made user with password - edit /etc/sudoers (last line to ...
Posted on 8th March 2021. Draft
sudo apt-get install libav-tools` `sudo avconv -stats -i "/mnt/Media/Downloads/Fargo.S03E04.720p.HDTV.x264-AVS[eztv].mkv" -codec copy "/mnt/Media/Downloads/Fargo.S03E04.720p.HDTV....
Posted on 8th March 2021.
I recently migrated our Gitlab server install from one server to another. With the help of a few tutorials it was fairly painless, however I thought I would outline the steps here
Posted on 23rd February 2021.
Posted on 22nd February 2021.
I have recently made a side project called "Socket RSS". The idea is it becomes a place for Gleefreshing, not Doomscrolling.
Posted on 15th February 2021.
Laravel Mix is a great asset compiler from the creators of Laravel - but you don't have to be using their framework to benefit from it. This blog walks through setting it up to run with 11ty.
Posted on 1st February 2021.
Despite the name, Laravel Mix isn't just for Laravel. It is a tidy, succinct task runner with understandable syntax and a single config file. This tutorial will run through setting it up with your project
Posted on 18th January 2021.
In this post we are going to set up a custom domain in Netlify using Cloudflare. We will also install a self signed Cloudflare certificate on Netlify to ensure end-to-end encryption.
Posted on 14th January 2021.
Delegation is hard for people who find themselves in management roles. The trick is to be the overflow, not the gatekeeper.
Posted on 31st December 2020.
2020 brought the first pandemic of my lifetime, but plenty of good things too
Posted on 12th October 2020. Draft
Posted on 12th October 2020. Draft
Export button in craft - Tidy up the output - Add as json - Loop through - Single view - - - - Download entries as CSV from craft - `"[0...
Posted on 7th October 2020.
I spent the week converting Behind the Source from Craft to Eleventy (a static site generator). Will I use it again?
Posted on 5th October 2020.
Walking through setting up Homebrew on your Mac, so you can install NPM and Eleventy.
Posted on 24th September 2020.
Posted on 16th September 2020.
Posted on 15th September 2020.
I am currently in the midst of developing a new side-project and wanted to use the same class as a base for two separate elements of the project.
Posted on 8th September 2020. Draft
git clone --bare --mirror [path] du -h [folder] 10 largest commits ` git verify-pack -v objects/pack/[file].idx | sort -k 3 -n | tail -10 ` `git rev-list --objects --all | grep [hash]` - find ...
Posted on 22nd July 2020.
Part 2 of the Slack status updater with Netlify. This walks through using dotenv and locking the function down to "local" use. There is also a crude UI that has been made
Posted on 20th July 2020.
So I'm a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to web stacks - I'm all about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I had an idea for a small little web app and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to give Netlify a go.
Posted on 7th July 2020.
Posted on 5th July 2020.
It seems I have been doing a lot of command line work on Debian with MySQL recently and have been having to search the internet (or my bash history) every time I need to do something. Here is a collection of commands I have been using
Posted on 8th June 2020. Draft
[email protected]:~ $ ip a 1: lo: mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_...
Posted on 6th June 2020.
Posted on 28th May 2020.
The magic 40 character string that is attached to every commit you do. What is it, where does it come from and will understanding it help you with Git in the future?
Posted on 18th May 2020.
Posted on 1st May 2020.
Posted on 20th April 2020. Draft
This blog post walks through generating an SSL certificate with `certbot` from Let's Encrypt, specifically, when your DNS is with Cloudflare. For those on Cloudflare wondering why you would want ...
Posted on 20th April 2020. Written For Liquid Light
Cloudflare is a service which, among other things, provides a CDN (Content Delivery Network), firewall, and performance layer for your website. It has plenty of paid upgrades and features and ...
Posted on 19th April 2020.
Cloudflare has a few different options when it comes to selecting which TLS/SSL mode you should choose.
Posted on 19th April 2020.
Posted on 16th April 2020.
I set up Tiny Tiny RSS as a self-hosted feed reader, but it wasn't clear how get the application to fetch RSS feeds in the background. This blog post gives a walkthrough
Posted on 15th April 2020.
For regular readers, you will notice a fresh new face on the old dog (my first blog post that made the many migrations was from 2009!). This has been a long ...
Posted on 10th April 2020.
Posted on 5th March 2020.
An example of how to use Cloudflare Workers to set a cookie on your page without modifying code on your server. This Worker can set a cookie based on either a GET parameter in the URL or a particular file path
Posted on 26th February 2020.
Serverless & Cloudflare workers have been cropping up a lot recently. I try to organise my thoughts into what they are and how you can use them
Posted on 31st December 2019.
2019 was a strange year, new kitchen, bathroom car and bike. But overall it was good. I enjoyed it.
Posted on 10th December 2019. Written For Liquid Light
As a developer, dealing with designers and their creations can sometimes be challenging. At Liquid Light we've honed our process to ensure minimum friction between both developers and designers.
Posted on 1st December 2019. Draft
It seems my CloudKey doesn't like some of the updates Unifi issues and sometimes crashes. This blog post outlines how to get it back and what you can do in ...
Posted on 13th November 2019.
Posted on 11th November 2019. Written For Liquid Light
All too often you hear about people losing their phones and, along with it, their data. This blog post explores how you can become "device agnostic", freeing the tether between your device and your memories.
Posted on 22nd August 2019.
I've always been keen to discover new newsletters and have always kept my eye out for recommendations. I decided to collate these recommendations and build a directory.
Posted on 31st July 2019.
I read "The Real Dark Web", a blog post from @sonniesedge and within a few paragraphs it really hit home. There are a few noisy web developers who are innovating, ...
Posted on 20th June 2019.
To save me Googling, I have collated all the user-related commands I often use - particularly useful when setting up a new VM!
Posted on 20th June 2019.
Xen is a basic but powerful package for linux which allows you to create virtual machines, A rival to Vagrant, Xen has less configuration (but is potentially less "agile")
Posted on 3rd May 2019.
Using a Share This plugin (or similar) or the native sharing widgets from social networks can really bloat your page and look ugly. This code is how we, at Liquid Light, implement social sharing widgets
Posted on 20th April 2019.
Fetch is a fantastic JavaScript function which allows you to natively get and post data from the browser. This post includes some examples of how to use it.
Posted on 14th February 2019.
Docker allows you to host websites locally, which allows you can develop them within an environment which can be an exact replica of the live one. This blog post explores my first experience with Docker.
Posted on 4th February 2019.
Newsletters that I, as a front-end developer, have found extremely useful and insightful. This is a new list compared to the original from 2016!
Posted on 31st December 2018.
2018 was a big year for me, in all sorts of ways. This blog post summarises one of the most life-changing years of my life.
Posted on 17th November 2018.
I recently sold my Xbox One S and bout a PlayStation 4 Pro. Why did I do this and what are the differences? This post outlines my thoughts from an "everyday consumer".
Posted on 18th October 2018. Written For Liquid Light
Lumen is a micro-framework from the creators of Laravel. Using Laravel methodology, Lumen offers a leaner, cut-down version of the framework. By including less code, Lumen is able to offer ...
Posted on 18th October 2018.
The table below details what I've been listening to, what I am listening to, or albums I've discovered. There is no shame in this list, these are things you'll catch ...
Posted on 13th August 2018.
I've had a few questions regarding what apps I use with which themes and settings. This is an up-to-date blog post with the answers.
Posted on 7th August 2018.
Sounds confusing, but there is a use-case, honest! Imagine you have an array with a set number of items in and you wanted to filter another array of objects based on that in your JavaScript. The post explains more!
Posted on 19th March 2018. Written For Liquid Light
At the beginning of this month, Google announced they were rolling out Hangouts Chat to all users of Google Suite over a week or so. Our suite was finally updated ...
Posted on 12th March 2018.
I've recently moved all of my git repositories to Gitlab, this blog post walks through a script I have written to clone all of my repositories locally as a backup.
Posted on 8th March 2018. Written For Liquid Light
In 2017, one of our front-end developers wrote and released a book about the JavaScript library; Vue.js. This blog post explains the process he went through to get the book from his mind to print.
Posted on 31st December 2017.
It seems to be the done thing to do a "year in review" post. I initially scoffed at the idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how keeping track of accomplishments can be a little encouragement and ego boost. So here goes!
Posted on 18th December 2017.
This blog post covers the initialisation and basic usage of Vuex - a central store for your Vue applications. It covers the basics of the four main components of Vuex: the state, mutations, actions and getters.
Posted on 18th December 2017.
In the second part of this series, we cover implementing a Vuex Store into a Vue.js application
Posted on 8th November 2017.
There are many ways to manipulate a value to make it user-friendly using Vue.js. In this tutorial, I show you how you can use Vue filters to alter the appearance of a variable without affecting its data.
Posted on 26th October 2017.
This Vue.js tutorial explains the difference between dynamic and static attributes and props. It shows how you can pass variables to components or other HTML elements to display dynamic contents.
Posted on 25th October 2017. Written For Liquid Light
Posted on 21st October 2017.
This quick video walkthrough shows how you can replace any URL parameters in your components with props and how to pass them through from vue router to access them within your component
Posted on 13th October 2017.
Using the browser's localStorage we can create a Vue app which has its Vuex store cached. This allows the user to navigate away from the app and not lose their preferences.
Posted on 18th September 2017. Written For Liquid Light
Validating your Google Event tracking is working can be a tricky business. This blog post walks you through checking the data being sent to Google Analytics, so you can verify the information is correct.
Posted on 5th September 2017.
Changing permissions on files and folders can be tedious, so why not do it in one fell swoop?
Posted on 15th August 2017. Written For Liquid Light
Navigation drop-downs, or mega menus as they are sometimes dubbed, are becoming more and more common on the web. A drop-down menu is a navigation block which appears when a ...
Posted on 10th August 2017.
I was recently trying to install a copy of macOS from a USB stick I'd made and kept getting an error saying the OS was damaged. I created the stick using both the command line and the OSX Install Disk Creator and whatever I did I got the error.
Posted on 26th July 2017.
I’m not sure if this is a thing or just a pipe-dream but bear with me. I want to create an unbiased service, a factual hub where cyclists and ...
Posted on 23rd July 2017.
Sometimes you don't want to have to enter your password every time you run a sudo command - this blog post walks you through disabling that.
Posted on 3rd July 2017.
There may be a point in your CSS coding that you want to know the opposite of a direction (e.g. up, down). This function allows you to pass it a direction and get the opposite back!
Posted on 22nd June 2017.
Changing habits is hard - especially when it's being part of your lifestyle for so long. After watching a video, I decided to address my reliance on social media and mobile phones.
Posted on 14th June 2017.
Last September I gave a talk at Bytes 2016, a mini-conference for people in the web about my digital bucket list for people who work with the internet.
Posted on 19th May 2017.
I needed to locate any folder following a particular pattern that did not have a particular file. The command allows you to locate the folders and perform actions on them.
Posted on 18th May 2017. Written For Liquid Light
On 30th March, I took the many trains over the many hours required to get to Oxford from Brighton and attended Render Conf. In it’s second year, this conference ...
Posted on 15th May 2017.
There are rare times when you need a slightly obscure git command. You spent several minutes googling, crafting and constructing your command only to run it once and not need it again for a while. This blog post will serve as my dumping ground for those odd commands I seldom need, but when I do I can then copy and paste. Feel free to get in touch with your favourite curve-ball command and I'll do my best to add it to the list!
Posted on 10th May 2017.
It may be that you wish to include a lot of information in a Github issue (or anywhere else on the web that allows HTML) but don't want the code/error to fill out the page. Luckily, there is a way to collapse it using latest HTML tags.
Posted on 3rd May 2017.
Being able to animate with CSS transitions is great, although there are a few gotchas when using them. This one with transition-delay had me scratching my head for a while.
Posted on 26th April 2017.
CSS Custom properties are now supported in Edge, meaning you can use them nearly everywhere. However, there are some cases where further browser support is required. Using PostCSS we can use CSS custom properties in development while still maintaining cross browser support.
Posted on 13th March 2017. Written For Liquid Light
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool developed by Google to rank the speed of your website. There are a few things it doesn’t look out for, such as code validation or usability but it’s a good starting point at getting your site up to scratch.
Posted on 15th December 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Feefo, the customer feedback and review website, launched version 3 of their product at the end of September. Although customers had no choice to be updated to version 3, what does this ...
Posted on 12th December 2016.
Recently, a friend and I purchased a cheap action camera from eBay to see what quality you get for £14
Posted on 17th November 2016.
I recently set out to remove all of the vendor prefixes from the CSS for all of our clients at work. This is because we use Gulp with Autoprefixer - which means we have up-to-date prefixes and cleaner SCSS. One way of doing this would be to open every CSS file, search for `-moz`, then search for `-webkit` etc. Some of the CSS I was searching through is well over 5 years old and is rife with vendor prefixes.
Posted on 3rd November 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Vue JS is a javascript framework which has recently released version 2. Allowing you to display, manipulate and navigate data, Vue is a React, Knockout and Angular competitor. This blog post walks through building a web app with Vue Router.
Posted on 23rd October 2016.
How to set up a new VPS with all the expected features and functionality
Posted on 2nd August 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Trello is a great tool which lets you easily manage projects. Ranging from websites to weddings, Trello helps you create tag and move cards. At Liquid Light, we use Trello to keep track of our marketing output - this blog explains how.
Posted on 13th July 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Posted on 27th May 2016. Written For Sitepoint
Atom is a fantastic IDE and is hugely powerful. I share my favourite, time-saving tips, packages and shortcuts for GitHub's Atom code editor.
Posted on 20th May 2016.
With recent front-end twitter conversation turning to CSS frameworks, I went on a roller coaster of emotions but eventually settled on the above to sum up how I felt about the ordeal. Before we settle once more, let me take you on the journey I travelled.
Posted on 4th May 2016.
I have recently been writing some small code snippets and examples for alligator.io. It's a great little website which takes front-end code and breaks them down into bitesize ...
Posted on 4th May 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Creating a responsive, HTML email template is not as easy as it first appears. Email clients are still behind with web standards and supporting latest web technologies, so HTML emails need to be built using the table element and inline styles. This blog will walk you through creating a custom template while still using Mailchimp's WYSIWYG and Image editor
Posted on 20th April 2016.
You may (or may not) have noticed that my site had a massive overhaul. With that overhaul, I changed CMS from Anchor to Craft. Anchor was great, but didn't ...
Posted on 11th April 2016.
There is so much information on the web these days about development, that I often miss out on things on twitter. For that reason, I find HTML newsletters amazingly simple ...
Posted on 22nd March 2016. Written For Liquid Light
Gulp is a task runner used for compiling SCSS to CSS, minifying JS and creating SVG sprites. Version 4 is about to be released and this blog post runs you through how to update and use the new features of gulp.
Posted on 6th March 2016.
I recently purchased a Western Digital EX2 NAS box for my home storage. This device is a low powered file server which is on all the time - perfect for taking care of those hefty downloads and long running tasks so I don't need to keep my laptop on.
Posted on 4th March 2016.
Recently I need to loop through elements on a page and, if the element had a background image apply a jQuery plugin. The plugin required the background image path & dimensions to function
Posted on 15th February 2016. Written For Liquid Light
The Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer which has taken the technical world by storm. Originally developed to encourage children and schools to get into programming - the ...
Posted on 29th January 2016.
I have been searching for a solution to my problem for a while now and I have had no luck - so i'm putting it out to the masses to ...
Posted on 25th January 2016. Written For Liquid Light
We are often asked whether videos for your website should be uploaded and hosted on your own website and server or if they should be uploaded to a social website ...
Posted on 10th December 2015.
Recently a friend, Chris, and I have embarked on the journey of building our own 3D printer. This is something I hugely recommend if you are into that kind of thing. It's taught me many things already and is amazing to see something moving that you've built.
Posted on 3rd December 2015. Written For Liquid Light
For website creators, making sure a website looks good across device and browsers is our biggest challenge. Websites don’t have to look the same, but they do have to ...
Posted on 2nd November 2015. Written For Liquid Light
Making sure your typography is readable on every display is arguably one of the most important aspects of front-end development. If your users can’t read the content on the ...
Posted on 11th October 2015.
I have recently been carrying my Raspberry Pi back and forth between my home and my local hack space - BuildBrighton. Both places have WiFi and with a Raspberry Pi ...
Posted on 25th September 2015.
At Liquid Light, we often have hack days - a day where we down client work and hack something together for a day.
Posted on 17th June 2015.
I recently acquired a Raspberry Pi camera and the first thing I wanted to do was set up a timelapse. The brains behind this is a slight modification of the ...
Posted on 17th June 2015.
Getting your passwords out of Locko into something else can be tricky due to their unique export format. This post helps with PHP
Posted on 4th June 2015.
I finally managed to get my hands on an Arduino board a couple of days ago and have been playing around with it this evening. Arduinos run one bit of ...
Posted on 30th April 2015. Written For Liquid Light
Slack is a hugely popular communication team tool which has grown from strength to strength over the last year. It was publicly released in February 2014 and has recently been valued ...
Posted on 13th April 2015.
Make sure you read the introduction to this series So you want the start hacking with your Raspberry Pi? There are a few things you need to do before you ...
Posted on 1st April 2015.
I've recently been playing around with Raspberry Pi and some hardware - seeing what else can be done with the tiny computer.
Posted on 10th March 2015. Written For Liquid Light
Git is a tricky subject to get your head around. Knowing the commands is one thing, but knowing how to use them is another. This article will walk you through a simple, single developer Git workflow - covering the commands that you would use at each stage.
Posted on 12th February 2015.
I was recently asked by a friend how you would make a table filterable by using a select box & jQuery - for example "show me films made just in 2014.
Posted on 15th December 2014. Written For Liquid Light
HTML emails are a great way of keeping your customers up-to-date, but are not as versatile as web pages. Here's our list of things to consider when designing and building HTML emails.
Posted on 3rd December 2014.
To put it very simply, a PHP class is a way of grouping a set of functions and variables into entities,allowing them to be used as self-contained instances . It ...
Posted on 11th November 2014. Written For Liquid Light
Following on from our recent blog post about SVG Sprites which gave an introduction and overview to using SVGs in a sprite, this post will outline the processes and tools ...
Posted on 22nd September 2014.
Living in Brighton, there is a huge array of bike shops to choose from. Ask any local cyclist and the phrase "Support your local bike shop" is often muttered - ...
Posted on 7th August 2014. Written For Liquid Light
This article will explain how and why you would want to use SVGs and what advantages using them in a sprite can bring. It will also cover scaling the images ...
Posted on 25th July 2014.
Posts round here have been a bit quite because my time has been taken up by starting a new cycling club - Hovélo
Posted on 19th June 2014.
Evans Cycles blogged "10 Moments Every Cyclist Hates" and before I had even read the blog, plenty of moments popped into my head - these are my top 10
Posted on 10th June 2014.
With the weekly golden nectar of Sass News winging its way into my inbox every week, I decided to take on the challenge of giving the newsletter a facelift (if ...
Posted on 6th June 2014.
Recently I wanted to tidy up my public_html directory - as the folders were getting too much and I like a clean directory. My site uses a beautifully simple ...
Posted on 22nd May 2014.
With gulp starting to find itself into my everyday workflow - I've started to understand its quirks and twists, and how to get along with it. This is an advancement on my original gulpfile from a few months ago
Posted on 13th May 2014.
Far too often recently I've noticed people committing libraries and packages to their main application (website) repository.
Posted on 8th May 2014.
I have recently discovered the power of Bower - a front end package manager. Rather than having to go and find the hosted jquery link, or download the files for fancybox and copy them into my application (website), I can download them off bower.
Posted on 24th March 2014.
Writing and updating CSS can be a repetitive, tedious and arduous task - especially for big projects. CSS preprocessors can help with that - amalgamating related styles and helping you make your style sheets more DRY
Posted on 17th March 2014.
This post introduces how to compile SCSS with Gulp along with some core concepts
Posted on 23rd February 2014.
We've been going through a bit of a reshuffle at work with regards to our front-end conventions and layout. With the introduction of Sass into the team, we took it ...
Posted on 18th February 2014.
I've been cycling since I can remember, and driving since 2009. Over the last few years, I've believed something more and more and I would like to make a bold statement - Cyclists make better drivers, drivers make better cyclists
Posted on 4th February 2014.
Recently we've decided a change in preprocessor to help optimise our workflow. Within this blog post, I am going to type Sass, but really I mean Scss.
Posted on 23rd October 2013.
Creating a Less mixin to style input placeholders without using an autoprefixer
Posted on 19th October 2013.
A quick tip on how to enable git autocompletion on the command line
Posted on 19th October 2013.
We have been using LESS for a while now, but our process involved including the less.js in the header during development, compiling the LESS using an app before launch and then maintaining the site using the css.
Posted on 29th July 2013.
The Trailwalker event is something I've had my eye on for a while. 100km over 30 hours seemed like a sporting challenge I could do. I was 16 when a friend started ...
Posted on 3rd June 2013.
About a year ago, my nerdiness got upgraded. I purchased a second hand NAS. This sat behind my TV and stored my music and films and meant we could stream ...
Posted on 22nd May 2013.
Frank Turner, a wonderfully talented musician with whom I have recently embarked a music-man crush upon, has sung some beautiful songs on his recent album.
Posted on 18th May 2013.
As I mentioned in my first post I have made an archive of my previous Wordpress blog posts into a static page. This is done through some SQL and ...
Posted on 13th May 2013.
This week I announced that I was closing the curtain on my mini-conference Points Brighton. Points has been my baby, my creation. I feel, now it has found its end, ...
Posted on 21st February 2013.
For those of you that know me, you would be aware that I have recently moved house. For those of you that don't, I have recently moved house.
Posted on 15th February 2013.
So like my good friends Anthony and Kris, I've realised how little i've blogged over the last year. Looking at my archive the last 6 months of 2012 played host to just 1 ...
Posted on 3rd January 2013. Written For 12 Devs of Christmas
There are plenty of articles on the web about how to become a web designer, how to build sites and how to sell them. What this article opens up, is ...
Posted on 11th November 2012.
I've recently been getting into pre-processors for CSS and I have been using LESS for sometime - getting to grips with the nesting and variables while keeping a library of ...
Posted on 29th August 2012. Written For .net magazine
This article first appeared in issue 230 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Conferences are great. You get to meet fantastic people, you learn ...
Posted on 19th July 2012.
Road cycling. Its boring. Its rubbish. Most road cyclists just go round in circles. Up to the top of a hill, turn round and back again - wash, rinse, repeat.
Posted on 11th July 2012.
In the middle of May, I attended my first big web conference – the Future of Web Design. I’ve been to a few small-scale conferences before, but never one but never one of the big boys
Posted on 30th June 2012.
I've been cleaning up my sever space recently and found a few apps i've made that i may have tweeted about before, but aren't linked anywhere. So in the interest ...
Posted on 23rd June 2012.
Many a times I have dealt with various companies and agencies about pointing different domains at our servers - what shocked me is the basic level of understanding, most of the time, is 0. I thought I would dump my brain about domains and whatnot, because then even if everyone has a basic understanding, life will be good.
Posted on 18th May 2012.
Before you continue - make sure you understand the story. The next thing is that php lines always need to end with a semi-colon (;). This tells php that the line ...
Posted on 16th May 2012.
I bloody love twitter. It's great. Now, I'm not some twitter addict or nerd, well I am, but that's by the by.
Posted on 10th May 2012.
Before you continue - make sure you understand the story. When developing static sites (i.e. sites without any sort of CMS - be it Wordpress, Drupal etc.) the ...
Posted on 9th May 2012.
Last night was the second of my mini-conferences, Points Brighton. It featured speakers and keynotes of all different varieties, and the infamous Points Bazaar (the raffle) was, once more, a ...
Posted on 6th May 2012.
Recently, a few friends of mine have been asking questions about PHP and want to learn the basics. I am a front-end developer for a web design agency. i.e. ...
Posted on 5th May 2012.
Update: Although this blog says it was updated in 2019, the only change I have done is to remove the missing images. This blog post is most likely out of date....
Posted on 29th February 2012.
Points. A simple, barely-a-conference conference. For ease of reading, this post will follow a traditional approach with a modern twist: Who, What, How Much, Where, When, Speakers, Sponsors Why. ...
Posted on 26th February 2012.
Whenever I am thinking about making a significant purchase, I always hunt around for reviews, check out blogs and generally search the web for word, be it good or bad.
Posted on 16th February 2012.
Recently I've been going through a fad of buying web related books. I love the feel of books, I love reading books. I love sitting on the train reading about ...
Posted on 7th February 2012.
After reading the aforementioned HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World book, I have come to realise that there are loads of changes included with HTML5.
Posted on 4th February 2012.
I’ve been commuting for nearly a year now. Proper commuting that is. Getting up at some unearthly hour to sit on a train for a bit. Living in a ...
Posted on 24th January 2012.
Recently with the spate of CSS3 and media queries, there has been a few debates over how development should be done.
Posted on 19th May 2011.
I found this in an old recipe book I found in a charity shop. Not quite sure what happened to it, but I've tweaked the recipe and named it after my wife!
Posted on 16th March 2011.
Sometimes I wish we lived in a musical. Not not necessarily with all the singing but just with all that general happiness. I’ve commuted too and from work, be ...
Posted on 10th March 2011.
If you would like to limit the amount of items coming out of an array (for example the first 5 news items)
Posted on 21st February 2011.
If you would like to 'redirect' all your users to a central domain (for example if you would like all users to browse your site with the www or you ...
Posted on 16th February 2011.
This PHP statement applies class="even" to every other element when in a loop.
Posted on 14th February 2011.
If you want to apply a different class to the last item in a list generated by PHP, start off with Setting the $lastOne variable to the end of your list
Posted on 4th February 2011.
The following code will get the dimensions of an image: <?php list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize(PATH_TO_IMAGE); I found this useful when using a lightbox to ...
Posted on 17th November 2010.
Creating a HTML email is like going back to the nineties with web design – you have to go against all your natural instincts as a web designer.
Posted on 5th October 2010.
Recently I was tasked to transform a full website into a stripped down mobile version for those visiting on their i-whatsits.
Posted on 25th June 2010.
For the final year of my degree, I was required to create an Experimental System Design. At the time, I was heavily involved with a live version of The ...
Posted on 2nd June 2010.
So you've got a brand new website that you want to promote? Recently I finished a website for Frag Records. Once completed they asked me for some hints and tips ...
Posted on 22nd April 2010.
Just a short note on my Twitter series of posts! I thought i'd let you know about this tweeting kettle...or Twettle (seeing as it is on the title..). I ...
Posted on 21st April 2010.
Twitter, Twitter Twitter. How you have taken over the world? (And my life?) I have recently properly got into Twitter. Before it was just a laborious update to show I ...
Posted on 20th April 2010.
I have always been a music fan. Playing violin from the age of 7 and progressing onto guitar, the musical world has always intrigued me.
Posted on 29th January 2009.
I feel geeks are somewhat underestimated in the continuum of time and space. But, in reality, they are amazing. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a geek.
Posted on 28th January 2009.
Knowledge is a powerful thing. I can turn worlds into war, it can turn people to power, and it can turn children to critics, humans into inhabitants. Its one of ...
Posted on 27th January 2009.
Thoughts are someone’s heart, someone’s soul, someone’s hero trapped inside the body of their worshiper, their disciple, and their devotee. Thoughts can make someone’s day, someone ...
Posted on 25th January 2009.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets are the easiest, cleanest and most accessible way of styling a website. Tables were previously used to position objects on the page and CSS used just to make the text look pretty. Now CSS is being relied more and more to position images, text, add spacing to websites and bring the whole site together.