Blog
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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…
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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
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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 …
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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.