Archive of: 2012
-
Reviewing 2012 and learning new stuff
09 December 2012 by
About a year ago, I wrote about Learning New Things for 2012 and joining the 12412 project – which was intended to be a starting point for me to learn new things during the year that’s now coming to an end. So, how has that worked out? Well, not that great actually although I have started some new ‘learning subjects’ and increased my usage of some things that weren’t completely new (cheat!). Here’s my summary of the year in that respect.
-
Trying out Audioboo and VoiceBo
12 November 2012 by
I've joined Audioboo and VoiceBo which are apps/websites that allow you to make short audiologs/recordings via your desktop or mobile phone. Part of the reason for joining was to try something new but also I wanted to take part in #audiomo for November.
-
Jetpack for WordPress
30 October 2012 by
I’ve developed and managed a few WordPress websites for myself (and for clients) and recently I’ve been using the Jetpack plug-in. It’s actually a collection of plug-ins that provides additional functionality for your WordPress blog/website. I like it!
Jetpack supercharges your self‑hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.
Jetpack is made by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, and was orginally only available if your site was hosted on WordPress.com. Now, it’s available for self-hosted sites as well. So, what does it provide? Here are some of the options in the Jetpack package.
-
LESS or Sass or neither?
27 September 2012 by
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
-
Starting a coworking group
30 August 2012 by
This year, I’ve started a local co-working group in Horsham. It’s always a good idea to regularly review an initiative like this. How is it going? The pros and cons. How do I develop it further? I’ve been thinking about these recently so this post is a good opportunity to summarise and assess progress.
Firstly, a little back story…
-
Things may look a bit strange round here...
27 August 2012 by
With the release of Textpattern 4.5.0 I'm taking the opportunity to update and modernise this site, both on the admin side and the design/build of the site itself
-
A personal project
11 August 2012 by
I like to run a few personal websites and really enjoy writing articles for these. The articles are not about web-related technical stuff but describe things I get up to in my spare time. I guess this is a bit of a ‘diversion’ for me and one way to get away from my 9-to-5 job as a freelance web developer/designer.
One of these websites is Clive Goes Cycling …
-
What do you do with old websites and domains?
08 July 2012 by
I’ve bought quite a few domain names in the last ten years and also created websites on many of them. Some of these have been personal projects where I had an idea for making millions on the Internet (like we all have) but, no surprise, they failed in that respect. I’ve made some pocket money with Google Adsense on a few of them so that’s been good but I won’t be retiring from my day job as a web designer/developer any time soon.
-
Making it easy to read more
13 June 2012 by
One thing that I've found difficult recently is reading interesting articles outside of my usual working hours. So, I've been looking round for apps/websites that would make reading easier for me
-
At the Port80 Web Design Conference
28 May 2012 by
Last week I went to the Port 80 Web Design Conference (Twitter) in Newport. The conference was organised by Joel Hughes who wanted to have a web design conference in South Wales. Great credit to him for deciding to do something like this – and then doing it! Here’s my take on the conference.
-
How to show and hide content areas with Perch CMS
07 May 2012 by
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.
-
From print to iPad, Worthing Digital meet-up
09 April 2012 by
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.
-
How to show Popular Posts on a Texpattern site
12 March 2012 by
I wanted to add my most popular posts (as measured by visitor logs) to this Textpattern site and display them. After searching through the Textpattern forums, it seemed that several plug-ins were available but most of these were now defunct. Until...
-
Learning about HTML5 Geolocation
05 March 2012 by
I wrote about the 12414 project a few months ago. It’s an initiative to encourage you to learn new things over the course of 2012 and I signed up so that I would have to set aside more time for personal learning over the course of the year. That’s been partly successful but I haven’t done as much as I would have liked in the first few months. However, what I have done is read up on the HTML5 Geolocation API, which is a subject that I didn’t know much about. Here are a few of the articles and tutorials that I have been reading.
-
My five favourite web design and development books
19 February 2012 by
Recently, @MikeStreety wrote a blog post called My Favourite 5 Books, started a #bookstobuy hashtag on Twitter, and suggested that a few other folks could write blog posts with a similar theme. Here’s my contribution to that.
I found it quite difficult choose only five from my bookshelf so I’ve chosen five books that I found easy to read. My concentration span for reading seems a lot less these days so if I find a book easy to read, that’s quite a compliment! Anyway, without further ado, here are my #bookstobuy book suggestions.
-
Responsive web design is easy with fluid layouts
23 January 2012 by
So, I have been thinking a lot about responsive web design recently. I’ve been reading about some CSS frameworks and recoding some of my core files so they can adapt to any grid system that I choose to use. As a result, I’ve decided to use fluid or elastic layouts or hybrid layouts wherever possible from now on.