February 26, 2010 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Weekly Round-up
This is my weekly post on some interesting bits and pieces I’ve found…
To kick off, a few good reasons by Davy Sims on why we should blog. I agree with all his points and many of them are the reason why I’ve started to proactively blog more in 2010.
The days of providing clients with a static site with no back end interface are now gone. Every client with any idea of how the web works will wants some control over their content without having to phone their web developer every other day. However, this does not mean a massive overhead of having to build bespoke content management systems. In fact, you would be very silly to try and reinvent the wheel here as there are a plethora of opens-source projects providing light weight CMS’s which can bent and shaped to suit most small scale projects. This week i discovered Silverstripe -which looks very promising indeed and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl for my next project.
Sometimes, it can be quite frustrating to stare at a blank canvas when starting a web project. I’m always on the look out for sources of inspiration and 25 free online magazines for graphic designers is a great start. Don’t forget that some great inspiration can come from unlikely spaces, more than once I’ve found interior design magazines a nice alternative.
Despite preaching above about not re-inventing wheels, in the 9-5 job, I’m currently working on a custom admin interface and found this article on 34 Outstanding Admin Panels a wealth of useful pointers.
For any Javascript solutions, my first weapon of choice is Glow, and as such it can become very easy to put all faith in the framework to take care of everything. Christian Heilmann does a good job pointing out the 7 deadly sins of JS development and how to avoid them on Smashing Magazine.
This year marks Photoshop’s 20th anniversary, and it seems that there are as many blog posts highlighting epic Photoshop failures as there are lauding it’s successes. Do these atrocities ever pass under an editors nose?
Interested in space? There’s some pretty cool video content on the BBC Solar System website, launched earlier in the week..
Now that the iron fist of consumer law has came own on Microsoft, new users of Windows will soon be asked which web browser they want to use? I wonder how many will still click the only icon they recognise as “The Internet“. To prove my point, what’s a browser?
Shaun Inman has released a sneak peek of his soon to be released iPhone/iPod touch game. The idea that the graphics improve as you progress through the game is a nice touch. (no pun intended.)
If you write good blog content, you want it to be read. some tips on getting Wordpress blogs slightly higher in those search engine result pages.
Web forms power the majority of web applications and good form design can’t be emphasised enough, especially due to the many browser inconsistencies involved. Make the user journey as smooth as possible by deploying some of these form tips and tricks.
I was on a course this week focusing on developing web applications with the Zend framework and was introduced to the art of Unit Testing.
I’ve noticed it’s become quite popular for web apps to use their own URL shorteners, helping tie their brand to the link. I wondered how one would implement this, did a bit of research and found this review of 10 PHP URL shortener apps.
Now, if only I could get http://mcg.ee – any Estonians want to help me out? ;)
February 13, 2010 at 11:11 am · Filed under Weekly Round-up
I write this as I’m sitting in Belfast International Airport waiting on a flight to London for a long weekend. It’s been delayed an hour. A mild annoyance but I suppose one has to put up with these things to experience man taking flight to the skies.
Anyway, some cool things I discovered this week..
As I just bought a new camera, I’ve been thinking how I can use my own pictures to enhance my web designs. I found this article on how to use photos to enhance the user experience.
As an iPhone user of two years, I was interested to read of James Cridland’s account of 24 hours with a Google Nexus One
Glad to see someone has scratched this litte itch, its twenty ten, not two thousand and ten! Ask anyone when the battle of Hastings was to prove my point…
Free book on code review – sign up and get yours
As I mentioned last week Palm are so keen to get people developing apps for their phone they are offering $1mil bonuses. One of the plus points is their low barrier to entry as they provide such a capable SDK, you could build an app using HTML/CSS & JS skills. Well this week, I found something similar but to develop for the iPhone and Blackberry. Tools such as these offer a great opportunity as the App Market is clearly lucrative if you get it right though the more accessible it becomes there is a danger that the app stores are flooded with even more terrible apps.
Well, that’s all for this week, I’m off to sample some free aftershave.
P.s I wrote this blog post on the Wordpress 2 app for iPhone, very useful indeed for blogging quickly on the hoof!
February 6, 2010 at 12:30 am · Filed under Weekly Round-up
The first week of February for me yielded this little bounty…
- I didn’t know all of these but picked up some nice little tips and tricks from 64 Things Every Geek Should Know
- The iPhone app development is clearly the big daddy when it comes to mobile apps, so much so many mobile app developers much surely be thinking why would they bother to develop for any other handsets when with the iPhone sales climbing steadily all the time. Well, how about Palm offer $1Mil for top app developers. Interesting, while iPhone development requires quite a deep understanding C# knowledge, all you need to develop for Palm is strong HTML/CSS/JS. Oh, and a killer idea of course.
- As IMAP ports are blocked in work, GMDesk is a great little Air app that runs Gmail from your desktop outside the web browser, WIN!
- We’ve already had the first tweets from Space, now comes the first Twitpic from Space.
- Need a test bench to test multiple versions of IE? This week I discovered IE Tester, although I’ve also heard that it can be inconsistent with bugs in IE6. But a useful tool if you can’t get to a vanilla install of IE6. If indeed, you even still support IE6.
- Part of The Virtual Revolution season on the BBC, The Great Leveling is well worth an hour of your time.
- Perch looks like a useful little CMS for small scale projects though a site license puts me off when there are other excellent CMS’s for gratis.
- I’ve always liked Chrome, it’s lightweight and zippy and does what it needs to do well. However, Firefox has remained my primary browser and a big reason for this is Firebug, which I consider the most important weapon in my arsenal as a web developer. But this week sees the release of Firebug for Chrome, hurrah!
- And finally, 7 tools for better websites makes for good reading for any website owner…
Off to BizCamp in Newry tomorrow so hopefully get a post up about it tomorrow night…
January 29, 2010 at 10:05 pm · Filed under Weekly Round-up
This is a brain dump of some of the things I ran into on the Internets this week. When writing these weekly posts, I can’t help but think of a certain scene from Bo’ Selecta from days gone by. Just thought I’d share that, it’s quite an obscure reference, let me know if you get it. Anyway, the week in links from er.. the Internet.
- Hopefully, I shall be attending BizCamp Newry next week, still time to sign up, nice to see these sorts of things happening in Northern Ireland.
- The training for the marathon continues apace, which the image in this post also alludes to, check out my Runkeeper profile. (Runkeeper review en route..)
- I know you’re dying to know what were the top Twitter Trends of 2009? All is revealed…
- Nicely demonstrated – how to use a semi-colon;
- If you ever needed an example of the power of CSS, check out this pure CSS coke can. Awesome.
- Need to weed out spammers from your site? Look no further than reCaptcha, a recent acquisition from Google.
- I had a play with HTML5 and built a backwards compatible one page site.
- My Smashing Magazine book arrived and looks very pretty indeed. Review coming soon..
- I found this handbags page from Jon Hicks that I’m just dying to use but have yet to get an appropriate opportunity. Clever use of the URL was also noted.
- Oh, in case you’ve been living in a cave outside Bundoran, The Apple iPad was announced. Much hilarity ensued in my head when I discovered this parody from over nearly three years ago, little did they know.
- If you’re from Northern Ireland, and if you haven’t already, you should check out Lookaly, a Belfast based start up which is fast becoming the definitive guide on where to eat/drink/club and whatever else tickles your fancy in Northern Ireland, certainly Belfast. Today, I have lunch in Rhubarb and promptly left a quick review.
- Some interesting stats on the most popular ways to interact with Twitter. Tweetdeck FTW!
- And finally, for a blow by blow account of what Blair said at the Iraq Inquiry, look no further than the excellent Guardian website.
January 22, 2010 at 6:44 pm · Filed under Weekly Round-up
As I traverse the internets each day I invariably come across a shed-load of interesting articles, blog pots, videos, jokes, etc. which I normally post to my Twitter profile but with my new years resolution to blog more often still fresh in my mind, I’ve decided to collate these bits and bobs each week and post them on a Friday. Who knows how long it will last, but let’s be optimistic at the outset and predict that it’ll last from now to infinitely. Probably.
- Ever wanted to play out with the vast amount of data produced by the BBC Programmes application? Have a look at the developer docs and maybe you can put a nice modern twist on the Radio Times.
- Although I’m not a fan of big Flash applications engulfing a website, the deep zoom on The History of The World app from Radio 4 is pretty cool. Also available, an Northern Ireland specific satelite page.
- BBC launches Enhanced Search – a very welcome addition as it’s predecessor was woefully inadequate.
- I got my eyes opened a little by this very informative article on web security by Christian Heilmann
- I’m frankly amazed and also slightly terrified by the story of a guy who was arrested under anti-terror laws for jokingly sending a tweet about blowing up an airport. If he had phoned in a warning, sure. Or announced it over a tannoy in the airport, I get it. But for sending a tweet? Madness.
- I found the daddy of bathroom scales – WANT.
- While fiddling with a Wordpress site, I was reminded of Lee Munroe’s blog post on Wordpress Tips & Hacks.
- Sam Horner sent me this very informative article on dealing typography using CSS.
- While having been tasked with building a large form, I found this standards compliant form builder very useful indeed. Bravo.
- Working with JSON? Here’s a handy little JSON validator
- Disillusioned with David Cameron’s campaign to become next PM? Make your own poster to voice your discontent.
- In the vein of 24 Ways, I found 52 weeks of UX, where a new article on User Experience is published each week, subscribed. (p.s. Aesthetically, anyone else think A List Apart?)
And here ends this weeks link dump. Enjoy.
