scrumpy jack

"Just like it was only …better."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:00:39 +0000

“Just like it was only …better.”

- Round 16 of drafts between a client and I (via clientsfromhell)
I think @falconsandallies will appreciate this one…

justinrampage: The cast of Community received a mind blowing...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:18:15 +0000

Community-X by Aviv Or

Wolverine - Troy Barnes

Professor Xavier - Abed Nadir

Cyclops - Jeff Winger

Jean Grey - Britta Perry

Magneto - Pierce Hawthorne

Nightcrawler - Señor Chang

Shadowcat - Annie Edison

Storm - Shirley Bennett

Emma Frost / White Queen - Dean Pelton

justinrampage:

The cast of Community received a mind blowing X-Men redesign by artist Aviv Or. You can check out more of her excellent work here.

Community-X by Aviv Or (Blog) (Facebook) (Twitter)

Lol… I love Community

The MicroPHP Manifesto

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:30:00 +0000

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 project and see it work very quickly.

That’s why, when you build an app on eddy, your public/index.php file only has two lines in it.

Another thing is to have a useful but lean starting point. But I still wanted the MVC separation of code. I like the look of Sinatra-esque frameworks, but I wonder how manageable they are in the long-term…

Still there’s no need for all of these complex libraries of functionality I may never use in my application - and choosing whether I should load them at startup vs $this->load or require_once everywhere is just a recipe for disaster.

So eddy employs namespace-based autoloading (based on this). But you can still load classes that you know will be used early on (for caching) by include’ing them in your config.php file for example.

I can’t speak about overall size and lines of code or any comparative performance benchmarks as yet because I haven’t done any of that analysis.

It’s not full-stack, it’s not perfect, but it works the way my mind works and that helps me to work faster. Who said “write less, do more”?

laughingsquid: The Very Worst of British Cuisine So true

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:23:42 +0000

laughingsquid:

The Very Worst of British Cuisine

So true

Dribbble Blog: Time Out with James McDonald

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:25:24 +0000

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 questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to James for being today’s interviewee.

Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.

Hello, I am James McDonald. I am a 21 year old UI…

Windex

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:22:44 +0000

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!

Oh my life…. I love these. justinrampage: Tumblr artist...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:02:06 +0000

Oh my life…. I love these.

justinrampage:

Tumblr artist Mike Mitchell created three inspiring / awesome pieces for Gallery Nucleus’ upcoming “The Lovers, The Dreamers, And Me - A Jim Henson Tribute Exhibition” going on Dec 10th to Jan 2nd in Alhambra, CA.

Jim Henson Tribute Artwork by Mike Mitchell (Store) (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Via: sirmitchell

Going on a rampage

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:34:56 +0000

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 files, these pages insisted on using the standard ‘page.php’ Wordpress template file.

I have literally pulled my hair out and you know what it was? Another plugin. That’s right. Whoop-de-doo. One little deactivation was all it took… @^£&*E£@%(*!!)(*@&£%(*!@

Why is it possible that plugins like this can cause conflicts? Automattic should’ve done something about this a long time ago! I am setting up a site for this as we speak.

But this leads me to another annoyance. While I was playing around with getting things working I noticed that the categories I’d set up in WP eCommerce were conflicting with other pages that already existed. Why? Well this is all down to Wordpress’ obscure permalink system and how some plugins just can’t work with it.

The whole plugin ecosystem really is a mess. It’s the embodiment of a contradiction: it is both the biggest selling point and the weakest part of the whole Wordpress collective. A big black mark against using Wordpress as a full-on CMS in my opinion and one thing (among a few others) that need some serious attention.

The thing that worries me the most is that I don’t think Wordpress will get that attention. And I loathe the idea of touching all that spaghetti code myself…

I think we desperately need a new open source blogging platform that embraces overall better practices, but still exudes the same simplicity and overall friendliness of Wordpress.

Is such a thing possible?

Got the Guts? Get the Girl!

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:35:56 +0000

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 soon, hopefully for the better. Onwards and upwards.

We desperately need a service like this in the UK. I wish someone would stick there neck out and get it done. I promise you’ll be minted if you succeed at it (because I will mint you myself, with After Eights…)

The kind of inconsistencies I hate

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:50:00 +0000

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 an optional parameter in a wrapping function) it appears to treat it as an empty string… except you can never have a valid class name that is an empty string. So why does it do this? Who knows?

ARRGARGAHHGAHRTHAGHAGAHAGHRARARARARAHARGAGAHAAGGR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What inconsistencies do you hate?

paulrandall: Don’t you love it when ads on websites take up 75%...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:08:10 +0000

paulrandall:

Don’t you love it when ads on websites take up 75% of the space

"I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they are really trying to do is..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:20:06 +0000

“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they are really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They are unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation of two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. That’s what I want Apple to be.”

- Steve Jobs (via mrsteveheyes)

Framework Awesome: Hi Matt, Interstate, and Flexible Models

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:52:46 +0100

Framework Awesome: Hi Matt, Interstate, and Flexible Models:

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…

HTML select, Crazy Egg, IE and iframes - UPDATED

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 12:22:00 +0100

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 we tested on IE, we found that the final step of the checkout - the payment page - wasn’t allowing users to fill in their card details; every time you dropped down the inputs was to use your keyboard. So my first thought was that something on the page must be watching/interfering with mouse events. I know that Crazy Egg had recently been installed, because my friend was raving about it being set up just a few days earlier.

Strangely though, other browsers do not experience this problem. So it’s not Crazy Egg’s fault either.

So whose fault is it? It could only be the browser. There must be something in the implementation of cross-domain event management in IE that is having an impact. It might be possible for Crazy Egg to work around this with their tools, but I doubt they will. And it’s highly unlikely that Microsoft will issue a patch for such an edge case for 2- and 3-versions-old browsers.

Ironic really that the very software that should be helping you to discover why your users are failing to complete actions on your website is actually preventing your users from completing the action they want to.

UPDATE
It seems Crazy Egg have a work-around for this scenario by giving your a class of “-ce-ignore”, although admittedly it cripples the full functionality of their software in your iframe.

Ultimately it’s still a “bug” from my point of view, and it’s the browser that’s at fault. Yet another reason not to use Internet Explorer.

Lessons I've Learned from Steve's Apple

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:19:01 +0100

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 afraid to charge a premium
Regular release cycles
Stoke the fires of rumour…
But be cautious with the media
Don’t just give people what they want or even what they think they need
Build a great brand image
Only make things worthy of your brand

I drafted this brief post a couple of weeks ago, originally entitled “Lessons Apple Has Taught Me”. Felt like it needed finishing off and changing a little in light of recent events.

With Flipstorm I’m going to keep all of these in mind!

Don't use .local for local web dev

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:08:00 +0100

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 your hosts file - you can pick any you like - and point it to 127.0.0.1 - your loopback address. That way you can serve any domain from your local machine. Stupid example: if I put google.com 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and go to google.com in my browser it will come up with a page from my local web server service (if it’s on).

Couple this with a virtual host directive and you’ve got a pretty flexible scope for working on projects locally. It’s an age-old trick for sure and I’ve no doubt many developers still use it today.

But we’ve recently been going nuts because all of our local development has been dramatically slow. And today I figured out why.

We’ve been using domains that end in .local. Of course, we’ve seen this before - when accessing a machine on the local network. I don’t know who or what started this trend, but .local is a simple broadcast system on local networks that allows computers to communicate without intrinsically knowing their IP addresses or looking for them through some managed DNS server. It seems to be primarily *nix-based systems that use this.

I honestly didn’t think it would be an issue if we used .local for our own testing purposes… I mean it’s just another domain, right?

Wrong! You see our page requests all seemed to take extra time to load. It appears that (at least on Macs) any request made for a domain ending in .local gets broadcast across the local network regardless of what your local hosts file says. At least that’s the explanation that makes sense of the delay we were experiencing - which was eerily similar on faster machines and slower machines.

If anyone can shed any light onto why this is the case, that would be awesome. But for now, we’re switching all of our development domains over to .dev. It’s amazing what a difference this has made!

Key lesson: don’t use .local for local web development (at least on a Mac)

I just read an amazing blog post by Jon Tangerine. Although I don’t class myself as a web...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:21:05 +0100

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 started being used over here. We got multi-coloured iMacs and a sort of broadband at my school - and we abused it to find and watch bootleg episodes of South Park during our lunch hour. Wonderful, thrilling stuff!

I built basic web pages using (shock, horror) FrontPage and the like. I bought a book on HTML. I studied it from cover to cover. I hand-built web pages for the longest time.

The book had one chapter on CSS and XHTML. This was the future, but little did I realise that this was a future I was already in. So I had a lot of catching up to do and fast. Then I found out about PHP.

I could download a few pieces of software over the Internet for ‘free’. They were precompiled so all I had to do was install them. That coupled with the fact that I could open up a program that comes with every Windows PC - Notepad - and save a text file that could create dynamic web pages, blew my mind.

What an awesome set of tools. This was going to be powerful stuff.

My next book was ‘Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional 2nd Edition’. I still have it. Of course, it no longer gets used the way it once did, but it serves as a reminder of how I got here.

As I discovered more and more communities of people doing the same or similar things to me, I found out about other languages, frameworks, toolkits, operating systems, servers, databases, IP networks and DNS, HTTP - all of these technologies, libraries of information at my fingertips, and all it cost me to learn was my time.

Of course I’ve learned a lot of theory the ‘wrong’ way around - after I’ve built things. I didn’t study computer science or software engineering, so most die-hard devs would probably curse if they heard me call myself a ‘programmer’. But I’m happy with the way I learned things.

Like Jon, there were (and still are) countless nights where I would be tinkering, trying to make things work. All the while I am learning, but the industry keeps speeding on.

Sometimes I think I’ll never catch up. Even now I’ll read articles about programming that refer to ideologies and philosophy from years gone by - things I think I ought to know already. But it doesn’t matter; I will never know everything.

We’re living in an age of clearly defined roles, where people get to specialise and focus on just one key part of producing and running web applications. I’ve touched every part, and I’ve loved every minute, even the moments when I could’ve punched through my monitor in frustration.

What I do know is enough for me to run a successful, growing business on, that keeps a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food in my stomach. I’m extremely thankful to all those wonderful people who have spent their time not just creating the tools that I use every day but sharing their insight into this amazing art.

I’m a web developer. What do you do?

Introducing: Built With Bootstrap

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:21:05 +0100

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

What Makes a Website Big?

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:20:06 +0100

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 in comparison to a the universe - which is made up of countless atoms (think a big number with lots of zeros on the end… then add more zeros… keep going…) - these atomic structures are tiny!

How does this apply to the web? Websites are not physical entities with physical properties. They don’t technically have mass or size. But scale is something that we talk about all of the time.

It really has a few meanings: some websites are big in the sense that they have a lot of content; others have a lot credibility and are therefore ‘big’ in the sense of being popular; still others would say a big website is one that is made up of lots of code.

However, perhaps the most important measure of scale for a website should be its worth, or value - or to fit in with the other 3, compensation.

What is Website Compensation?

Content, credibility and code are heavily debated measures of scale. Depending on your niche, outlook and philosophy, more or less of each of these can be seen as either good or bad.

But compensation is the only one that is constant. Compensation is what each party involved in a website gets back from its existence. For those of you who run websites, this will likely be financial. Of course it could be satisfaction that you are sharing knowledge with others, in which case compensation would be tied in with content and credibility.

For a website’s visitors, compensation will be finding what they came to the website for or accomplishing what they needed to do. If they succeed, the compensation is obvious. This actually contributes to the site’s credibility.

In some cases, the visitor’s desire is to contribute to the content of the site too. A feeling of involvement and improvement of a site can make visitors happy - emotional compensation.

Developers and designers of a website are compensated too. Not only financially (hopefully), but also by the experience of building the website (or app, of course) and dealing with the client.

So What!?

Well the simple lesson here for me is: if your website doesn’t provide compensation of any kind to anyone you need to address this.

So what does this have to do with size? Well I believe a big website shouldn’t be measured by its number of pages, how popular it is or how much tech is behind it; what makes a website big is how well it compensates its various trustees.

This can be in various metrics, but is most definitely measurable. Surveys will help you determine the usefulness of the content. Analytics will prove the worth of all that credibility. And perhaps most importantly, the financial return that can be attributed to that website will most definitely define how big your website is.

So, even if your website only gets a few visitors per day, or your blog only has a few subscribers… take heart - if it compensates those people (and you) it can be bigger than some of the ‘biggest’ websites going!

What do you think makes a website ‘big’? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

CommandQ

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:41:05 +0100

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.