January 2012
4 posts
“Just like it was only …better.”
– Round 16 of drafts between a client and I (via clientsfromhell)
I think @falconsandallies will appreciate this one…
2 tags
The MicroPHP Manifesto
On almost every sentence of this post I found myself nodding and humming in agreement. The rousing finish rang loud and clear, especially with our approach to eddy.
One of the main things for me when I started eddy was to have a lean setup process. Nothing complicated, nothing that required more than 2 or 3 lines of code or opening/creating multiple files. I wanted to be able to create a new...
December 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Dribbble Blog: Time Out with James McDonald →
James is a cracking designer who deserves every bit of attention he gets. I’ve been pleased to work with him on one of our projects and hope to work with him on more in the future.
Mate, I loved your selection of Rogie King’s shot… that was gorgeous! My jaw also hit the floor. Fantastic stuff. Keep up the great work!
dribbble:
Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five...
Windex →
9-bits:
Windex is a cool little project from David DeSandro and Scott Evans that styles pretty (and mobile) server index pages ala PHP.
Almost forgot about this!
2 tags
Going on a rampage
Just wanted to let you all know that I’ll be going on a little rampage tonight. I’ve just spent near enough the entire day porting an install of WP eCommerce over from the development site to the live site.
Why has it taken me this long? Well I had a number of problems, but the main one was to do with product pages not displaying correctly. Instead of using the WP eCommerce theme...
2 tags
Got the Guts? Get the Girl!
So it looks like Dwolla are my new favourite startup. They just announced that all transactions they handle under $10 will have no fees. No fees!
I don’t care who you are, but that’s amazing. I don’t know a lot about Dwolla yet, and they’re services aren’t available in the UK, but I guarantee they’re going to go far! It looks like things are changing there...
November 2011
3 posts
3 tags
The kind of inconsistencies I hate
I love PHP. I know there might be “better” languages out there, but PHP does the job for me. Except for one thing… its inconsistencies.
The latest one: MySQLi_Result::fetch_object(). It takes a couple of optional parameters, one being the name of a class you would like your data to be instantiated in. But stupidly if that parameter is ‘null’ (like if you pass it as...
1 tag
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“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they are really...”
– Steve Jobs (via mrsteveheyes)
October 2011
3 posts
Framework Awesome: Hi Matt, Interstate, and... →
frameworkawesome:
First of all, please welcome the second developer to Eddy’s team, Matt (dVyper). He’s already started pushing some good changes and fixes to Eddy, including a dirty typo I made and some new functionality - the ability to use ‘IN’ in your Model::get() ‘WHERE’ clause!
Related to that, we’ve been…
3 tags
HTML select, Crazy Egg, IE and iframes - UPDATED
Today I was talking to a good friend of mine about a problem that a client of his was experiencing with their ecommerce checkout. Some users were getting to the final stage and holding on there for a few minutes then simply dropping out, for no apparent reason.
It was soon discovered that the segment of users that were doing this were all using IE7 or IE8. So what’s happening on IE?
When...
2 tags
Lessons I've Learned from Steve's Apple
Be personal
Create a few beautiful, usable products
Make sure ‘it just works’
Be prepared, and don’t be afraid, to change your mind
Don’t stick doggedly to a piece of tech just because you’ve invested heavily in it - if it’s not right, it’s not right, so get rid
Create a complete customer experience
Don’t compete; innovate
Don’t be...
September 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Don't use .local for local web dev
I just found out something totally ridiculous. For a while now we’ve been developing on our local machines with fake domains, as you do.
If you’ve never done this before, it’s basically a hack to make working locally act as if you were working on an actual domain… without all of the fuss of DNS and firewalls, domain registration etc etc.
It goes like this: add a domain to...
4 tags
I just read an amazing blog post by Jon Tangerine. Although I don’t class myself as a web designer, his modest self-affirmation has made me contemplate my own journey into and through this fascinating industry.
It all began in the late ’90s. During my school years I’d been interested in programming and the web, but I had no clue how to get into it.
I remember when Google...
3 tags
Introducing: Built With Bootstrap →
A new blog I’ve set up to discover and showcase sites and apps built with Bootstrap, Twitter’s toolkit for kickstarting new web projects
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What Makes a Website Big?
Measures of scale are one of the cornerstones of the human understandings of the universe and everything in it. Without understanding large and small, big, heavy, massive, microscopic, light-years, nanometers (I could go on), our perception of creation would be entirely different.
Meaningful scale results from comparison. Some would say that atomic structures are miniature universes, but clearly...
2 tags
CommandQ →
If you use a Mac this will probably be a life-saver! Don’t know how many times I’ve wished for something like this.
2 tags
Do you use software at work?
Of course you do, almost everybody does! But the real point to my question is: does the company you work for use specialised, bespoke software tailored to their field/industry? And perhaps more importantly, does it suck?
If you can answer yes to both of those questions, please put me in touch with someone in your company. I hate all this junky software that exists - there’s probably more...
“If the UK’s creative businesses want to thrive in the digital future, you need...”
– Eric Schmidt (via deplorableword)
August 2011
5 posts
4 tags
How to Learn Programming →
I know for many of you who see these posts from my blog, you probably have little or no understanding of my geeky ways. If you are intrigued by the thought of writing computer code though, give this awesome new website a try.
It’s free to use and is very simple. Lessons are quick and fairly straight-forward. The language you’ll be using is called Javascript - the language of the web.
...
2 tags
Time !== Money
How much do you value your time? I want to pose something wild and new to you:
If you always place a monetary value on your time and that of others, you don’t value your/their time highly enough.
Earning money is an unfortunately-necessary part of life. Money is what makes the world go round, it seems. And a common saying is “time is money”. But this does not mean time equals...
2 tags
CSS3 Needs a Built-in Reset
I’m getting pretty fed up of resetting styles. When you’ve got styles applied to a class of objects but one is irregular to that, inheritance can be a real pain, especially right now if you’ve got multiple style declarations for the different browser support of various CSS3 features.
CSS libraries like LESS and SASS provide a solution with smart use of mixins, but it’s not...
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Does Releasing Early Always Work?
We officially launched our redesigned website on Thursday (11th August) to overwhelmingly positive feedback. But the site is minimal and doesn’t really do anything yet. So why on earth would we broadcast it now? Does releasing early, releasing often work for websites?
Well we realised a few things about our website:
In general, most websites are almost never finished
We’ve got huge...
3 tags
IE6 - Holding Us All Down
I just read Remy Sharp’s excellent summary of the situation with IE6 for web designers & developers. I can’t help feeling that it’s a response to this post by Colby Rabideau.
I agree 99% with Remy. It would be 100%, except for one thing: If it wasn’t for staff calling out the cost of supporting IE6 when managers and directors can’t see it, how will we ever free...
July 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Roar
I was very eager to upgrade to Lion. Convinced that this is the pique of OS X development, I had to get my hands on it straight away and get it running! The experience so far:
Upgrade
There was no apparent way to do a fresh install using the installer download from the Mac App Store. I’m guessing Apple are trying to make it easy for us all. But it would’ve been nice to see the...
3 tags
Where have you been?
When I look at my blog, I feel like I’ve been trapped in a sleazy pub where I’ve etched my life story into the counter with the sharp end of a broken beer bottle - it’s been that long since I took a look in here.
I thought about writing an article the other day, but there is so much to say and such little time! A lot of the blogs I read are flooded with reviews and previews of...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
May 2011
8 posts
“I don’t know quite what we’ll be selling yet. Maybe niches. I’ve heard the niche...”
– (via clientsfromhell)
Niches yes, like opens… The open market seems to be on the rise
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Don't Do the Professional's Job
Here’s a little reminder for anyone who hires anyone else to do something for them.
Why did you hire that person or company? In all likelihood it’s because they provide products/services that you don’t have/can’t do.
So when they start working, don’t tell them how you think they should be doing their job.
Remember: they’re the professional (that’s why you hired...
3 tags
Things I've Learned From Forrst
I love the Forrst community. Overall, it’s a very positive and helpful place to share ideas and problems. The responses are mostly well-thought-out. Add to this the fact that it’s curated by a bunch of diligent chaps makes it a really cool place to hang out.
So the main lesson is: curation works. But there are other important things I’m learning too, smaller things like how to...
4 tags
Augmented Reality Everywhere
Augmented Reality (AR) is fascinating. And it’s starting to appear in more and more places. While still in it’s infancy, the potential is huge: the way we see and interact with the world around us could be completely changed. But right now, AR is limited, a bit of a fad implemented by only the few daring enough to give it a go.
The biggest challenge facing AR’s mass-market...
April 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Do you build Desktop, Mobile or Web Apps?
Do your apps have websites?
If there was a .app TLD, would you buy a domain on it to show off your app?
How much would that domain be worth to you?
Have any of you tried to apply for a new TLD? What’s involved?
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If I Could Code on Holiday...
I’m really pleased to see Buffer doing well. Hats off to Joel and Leo. If you use Twitter for any kind of marketing, you need to use Buffer!
What’s struck me the most recently is their output while they’ve been in sunny Spain. The amount of updates and ideas that they’ve not just tossed around but actually built out in such a short time is enthralling.
It’s got me...
3 tags
"Learning should never end."
Some thoughts I’ve been having recently have been crystallised by this post by Peter Chang I found on HN. It ties in really nicely with what I something I’ve been wanting to write for a while…
My favourite quote from Peter’s article is this:
“I think many skills can be learned outside of school and the quality of a programmer has more to do with determination and...
joel.is: Treat it as finished →
joelgascoigne:
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I’ve run my current startup compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure for us to ship very early, and…
Some great points here!
March 2011
3 posts
3 tags
iPad AppStorm →
The AppStorm sites are invaluable for finding awesome web apps, desktop apps (for Mac + PC), and mobile apps for your smartphones.
They’ve just added the iPad site today. So if you own an iPad (or are thinking of getting one), subscribe to the blog to keep up to date with the latest and greatest apps for your shiny mega-toy
"Broccoli is Home to Small Flying Creatures"
And other stories from Vegetable Forest
- My new tome (one day)
Things I Hate About CodeIgniter
It doesn’t didn’t come with basic ORM out of the box
It doesn’t play nice with my IDE of choice (Netbeans), i.e. I can’t use the CMD+Click on model methods to jump to them
There are so many config files
There’s no setup for running apps under different environments, e.g. dev, test, production
View selection isn’t automated, so I have to type...
February 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Back to Mac Basics
Apple’s new lineup of MacBook Pro’s finally dawned upon the world in usual fashion last Thursday. It’s not a huge leap forward (even from my Late ‘08 13” Unibody MacBook), but there’s a lot of potential.
One thing that is sounding loud and clear from Apple HQ is the impending doom of the 13” MacBook Pro. Why do I say this?
1. The 13” MacBook...
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Wordpress 3.1 Finally Puts a UI on Internal Links
With the introduction of Menus in Wordpress 3, I was clamouring for more link-based goodness. Now with 3.1 - released on Tuesday - the TinyMCE link builder has been extended to make it even easier to link to pages and posts within your blog.
This is a sweet feature for site owners and content creator. The Wordpress development community is continuing to convince me that I’m onto a winner...
Six important factors for building online...
kylewritescode:
I’m working on a full-length essay about building communities online and everything I’ve learned so far making Forrst, but here’s an outline to give a sense of what I’m thinking about.
Don’t try to build a community
Your first 50 to 100 users are the most important users you’ll ever have
Be human
Have a focus
Always listen to users, but only sometimes
Users need to feel...
January 2011
2 posts
2 tags
The Bursting of the Search Engine Balloon
Well what a decade! I started this 21st Century at the tender age of 15. There’s no way I could’ve imagined then that by the time I came to writing this I’d be married… Or living in Dudley. Or perhaps more interestingly posting this to a web service from an iPhone.
Many of the futuristic visions I’d grown up with had been dismally betrayed, but some had been gloriously fulfilled. Little did I...