Blog
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Checking out responsive grid systems
27 December 2011 by
Over the last few weeks I've been browsing a few responsive grid systems/CSS frameworks, partly as a means of learning new responsive web design methods
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Learning new things for 2012
01 December 2011 by
The last few months have been pretty busy round here with client work so it has been tough to set aside any time for learning new things