Posts in the Web Development category

• Starting a News and Articles section

  07 February 2013 by Clive Walker

  I've been gradually refining the CVW Web Design site over the last few months and one of the decisions I've made was to start a News section. There were several reasons for doing this.

• Creating a Perch dashboard widget for Google Analytics

  14 January 2013 by Clive Walker

  Before Christmas, I added a news section to the CVW Web Design site because I wanted to write some articles there. As a result, I was also keen to get a quick snapshot of Google Analytics (GA) data every time an article was published. Perhaps I would get more visitors and page views for some articles and not others? With this information, I can tailor what I write. Of course, all this date is available via the GA system but I wanted a simple way of viewing a small subset of GA data in my website content management system (CMS).

  2 Comments

• LESS or Sass or neither?

  27 September 2012 by Clive Walker

  CSS preprocessors like LESS and Sass are hugely popular – and for good reason! Once you've picked up their syntax, they can shorten the time taken to write CSS, give you all sorts of useful functions, enable CSS compression, and give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside

  5 Comments

• How to show and hide content areas with Perch CMS

  07 May 2012 by Clive Walker

  Perch is a lightweight CMS that I've used quite a lot recently. You can build a website in the normal way and then assign areas or sections of HTML to the Perch system via templates (snippets of HTML containing Perch tags). Additionally, the admin control panel seems to be easily understood by clients. It all works great!

  Even though Perch is a lightweight system, it can still be pretty powerful because you can share content areas between pages and also hide or show content quite easily. This is all explained in the Perch documentation but the ability to hide or show content areas is something that is a bit 'underplayed' (or perhaps I only discovered this after everybody else) so I thought I'd highlight it.

  3 Comments

• From print to iPad, Worthing Digital meet-up

  09 April 2012 by Clive Walker

  At the end of last month, I went to the March meet-up of Worthing Digital where Harry Brignull from Clearleft described the development of an iPad app for The Week magazine. Taking a print magazine’s content and designing a tablet app in ten weeks was, I think, a tough challenge, so it was great to hear the project described in some detail.

• An evening out with Points Brighton

  17 October 2011 by Clive Walker

  I’ve been to a few web conferences over the last 3-4 years and they’re great. You get to see some famous web folks and hear their presentations in large venues and meet with other designers and developers. At the same time, with conferences averaging 500 or more attendees, it’s sometimes easy to feel a little ‘lost’ at such events. For that reason, I also like to attend some informal, more grassroots-style, local events as well. Last Thursday evening, I went to the first Points Brighton event and here’s my short review of the meeting.

• My top five reasons for using Perch as a CMS

  30 September 2011 by Clive Walker

  In 2009, I described the (then) recently launched Perch content management system in this post. Since that time, I’ve used it on 6-7 sites so I thought I’d share why I like it.

  1 Comments

• Textpattern mobile theme

  13 January 2011 by Clive Walker

  If you're a fan of Textpattern, you might be interested in Mobile Textpattern, which is a Textpattern theme that has been developed for mobile by Oliver Ker.

• Form validation with PHP. Help!

  16 December 2010 by Clive Walker

  I was recoding a form the other day and I needed a different form validation method (using PHP). We all know that JavaScript validation provides a neat user experience but it doesn't work if someone wants to circumvent it.

• How to show random text and images with Textpattern

  15 November 2010 by Clive Walker

  Here’s my problem: I want to show a (linked) random image (and possibly a short description) on a Textpattern website. By random, I mean that the image and its link should be different every time the page loads. After a quick search, here’s what I found for displaying some random content using Textpattern.