Archive for February, 2010
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 24, 2010 at 11:22 pm · Filed under Software, Web Design
I arrived in London tonight for a couple of days training starting tomorrow. Upon arrival and saying goodbye to the nice air hostesses with the interesting headwear, I checked my emails to find a client in a panic as his website was falling apart in IE7 for some unknown reason.
He was quite concerned as, although it’s never good for a site to fall over, this week he received quite alot of media coverage and was getting alot of traffic off the back of it. Not a good time for a site to fail but as with Murphy’s Law…
Anyway, after a quite look on my iPhone I realised that a third party script had failed. I hasten to add, I did not develop this site, I’ve just took over the maintenance recently after the company that built the site went to the wall. Digging into this site, it’s not hard to see why, but that’s beside the point.
Speaking of the point, I suppose I should get to it, I just wanted to let you know about a useful little site, net2ftp, which is a web based FTP client. This handy little web app made it super easy, once I found the nearest Internet point in the airport, to jump in, disable the offending code and get the site up and running again until I can get a closer look.
Also worth a mention is FTP on the Go, an FTP client iPhone app. I have this as well but don’t store any usernames or passwords on it for security reasons*, and can only recall the FTP details of my own site off the top of my head. But, if you have the memory for it, it’s also a great little app that will allow you to edit code via FTP anywhere.
As I was reminded again tonight, this can come in very handy indeed.
*On that security note, always remember to log out of any remote FTP service or risk the consequences at your peril!
February 17, 2010 at 12:00 pm · Filed under BBC
Yesterday saw the launch of a new Global Visual Language for the BBC’s digital services. This ultimately was in response to Seetha Kumar’s task to improve user journey and navigation through BBC Online as a whole, set to her by the BBC Trust.
I really like the look of the new direction and what I’ve seen so far. It’s not unlike a style currently championed online by The Times or The Guardian and I’m particulary pleased to see a new emphasis on typography. This was no doubt due to in the influence of Neville Brody on the project.
Anyway, for a much more through analysis, check out the BBC Internet Blog..
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 7, 2010 at 12:44 am · Filed under Events, Web Design
Today, I attended the first BizcampNewry, which I must say I very much enjoyed it. It was an all-day event & held in the Southern Regional College in Newry, a city about 30 miles from Belfast near the border.
For those of you unaware what a “BarCamp” event is, it’s basically a mini-conference where the attendees arrive and sign up to be the speakers for half hour slots throughout the day. You can generally talk about whatever you want but from experience of attending similar events, it’s wise to have done some preparation before hand, rather than jump up on a whim. It’s also advisable to speak on a topic you are very well versed in as you never know who may in the audience, and you could find yourself out of your depth very quickly.
It was billed a business conference but the talks I attended were very online business orientated although this may have been due to the effect that I was drew to the webby sounding talks. I did see, for example, a talk on auditing which I’m sure was business agnostic.
Of the talks I attended, I particularly enjoyed Niall McKeown’s (ION Online) talk on why you shouldn’t (should) start an online business, Lee Munroe’s presentation on the growth of Lookaly and Mark Nagurski gave a great insight in the afternoon on how to monetize your online brand.
There was also a presentation in the morning (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the gentleman’s name, if anyone remembers, please let me know in the comments), who told of how he had successfully built a business online selling inflated balloons. An amazing idea and he passed off some very useful tips and tricks to consider when distance selling physical products online but he did however advise people with an idea of selling products to start off by building their own websites. I disagreed and why I disagree will be the topic of a blog post later this week…
These events can sometimes be blighted by people only there to promote brand numero uno, but thankfully that didn’t seem to be the case today with many speakers clearly just giving up their time to pass on the value of their experience which was appreciated. If you were one of these speakers, I thank you.
All in all a great event so close to home, and big props to Chris McCabe & Nichola Bates for making it all happen, these things don’t come together magically and I’m sure there was a lot of hard work went on behind the scenes.
Incidentally, I found out about this event through the Digital Circle network and also see that there is a BizcampBelfast on the horizon. I shall certainly be there.
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…
