Archive of: 2013
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Why I'm using Brackets as code editor
13 December 2013 by
Well, I've been using Brackets as my main editor recently and I have to say that I really like it. In case you don't know, Brackets is an open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers. And I think it has some cool features, not to mention being fast and reliable.
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Why I haven't joined Adobe Creative Cloud
11 November 2013 by
Adobe have moved from a boxed product model for their Creative Suite software to a cloud-based service called Creative Cloud and, over the last few months or so, I’ve been thinking whether I should join. On the face of it, Creative Cloud looks pretty good. You get access to the full suite of Adobe products including, for example, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and InDesign, which is a lot of software for the monthly price of £46.88 (in the UK). And you get software updates as soon as they are published. However, for my specific requirements, it doesn’t feel right for me. So, at the moment, I’ve decided not to join and here’s why.
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Macaw is looking very good
09 October 2013 by
I've seen a couple of demo videos now from Macaw, which is a new web design tool that is under development. I'm very impressed. Not only with the interface but also with the code that it produces. Anyway, here's their latest demo video.
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WordPress themes, incredible work, amazing value
16 September 2013 by
I’ve been doing more work with WordPress for another local web design company recently and, as a result, I’ve been browsing WordPress themes and marketplaces more often.
Anyway, one of the themes that I’ve seen is the Avada theme, from Theme Fusion, as sold on Theme Forest here [affiliate link]. I was amazed by the amount of layout and functionality options that the theme provides….. and it looks bloody good! No surprises that this is apparently the top selling theme on Theme Forest.
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Moving from Textpattern to Perch. Perhaps
05 August 2013 by
I've been thinking about this blog recently and have almost made the decision to move over to Perch as the CMS. I've set-up a local testing server with database and Perch installed and used this Textpattern to WordPress export script
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New posts planned
16 July 2013 by
I've been a bit slow over here recently and that's because I'm busy with quite a few other personal sites. No excuses of course. However, I've been reviewing what I write here and will be posting some new articles soon. Yay!
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New web development software for Windows
06 June 2013 by
I’ve written about LESS and Sass before and I’m not overly keen on preprocessing CSS. However, I can see some advantages so I’m slowly expanding my usage of Sass. One of the things that has deterred me from greater use is the tools/software that are available for Windows – or, until recently, the lack of tools. There seems to be a plethora of CSS preprocessors and web development tools (e.g CodeKit, Hammer for Mac) for Mac but not nearly as many for Windows. However, that’s changing and there is some exciting software available now.
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I've been busy over there
02 May 2013 by
I've been busy on the CVW Web Design site recently where the News section has taken up quite a bit of my 'spare' time. In fact, I've surprised myself by writing a couple of articles a month
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Why I still use Dreamweaver despite all the cool kids using something else
05 April 2013 by
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post for some time about my web design and development workflow and the tools/software I use. So, this post is part of that and ‘in reply’ to many tweets I see every day (it seems) about other web development tools. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a healthy marketplace of web design and development software, in fact I heartily support a wider choice. This post is not intended to be criticism of other software either. It’s just that I feel that Dreamweaver sometimes gets a bit of a ‘bad press’ or is perceived as not ‘cool’ – when, in my opinion, it’s still a great web development environment.
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Responsive Day Out in Brighton
03 March 2013 by
Last week, I attended Responsive Day Out. It was a full day, great value conference that was organised by Clearleft – and Jeremy Keith in particular. All the speakers gave presentations about Responsive Web Design (RWD). So, here are a few of my thoughts about the day.
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Starting a News and Articles section
07 February 2013 by
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.
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Review of New Adventures in Web Design 2013
29 January 2013 by
Last week, I attended the New Adventures in Web Design conference in Nottingham. This was the third and (probably) last New Adventures and the event lived up to my expectations. It was a day full of insightful and entertaining presentations. Here’s my short review of the best bits for me.
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Creating a Perch dashboard widget for Google Analytics
14 January 2013 by
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).