Archive for the ‘Web Development’ category

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Revisiting (and refactoring) old code

Last week, in a moment of unusual quietness on the work front I decided to go back over some old code (on some personal projects) refactoring —where possible— as I went along whilst generally feeling disgusted with myself at how awful some of that old code was.

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WordPress plugins

WordPress, is my CMS of choice for nearly all web projects (where I have a say) and over the years I’ve got to the point where I’ve written some pretty useful and generic plugins for those projects.
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HTML5

It certainly seems that HTML5 is starting to take hold with more and more websites launching that make use of HTML5 but how good is it?

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Removing typographic widows in WordPress page titles

A widow in typography is the one lowly word that gets displayed on a line of its own within a heading. Typographers and designers often go nuts when they see the main headings on a website have widows so here’s an easy fix to appease them:

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PHPNW Conference 2008 Review

Last weekend, I opted not to spend time with my friends, nor did I choose to perform DIY on my (never finished) home; instead I decided to geek-out at the first ever PHPNW conference at Manchester Central.

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Creating a web app’s folder/file structure

I’m convinced that folder/file structure plays an instrumental role in ensuring a downloadable app doesn’t confuse people and is easy to install.

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How I debug CSS in IE6

I make my living as a Front-end Web Developer, which means I spend quite a bit of time making websites look as good in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) as they do in other browsers. It isn’t rocket science and I’ve honed my technique to make bug fixing as quick and easy as possible.

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Hello Google Chrome, welcome to the internet

This week saw the launch of the internet’s newest web browser, Google Chrome and what kind of frontend developer would I be if I didn’t give it a quick review?

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Should you test your web developers before employing them?

These past few weeks, I’ve been doing some work for a new client. Prior to getting the gig, I did the all the usual things: sent my prospective email, went to meet the client, etc. However, this client, a big web agency, did something I’ve not experienced before – they gave me a programming test.

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Take 2 web apps into the shower?

Since announcing the launch of Cart45 last week, I’ve had quite a few people asking how I’ve managed to create an ecommerce app and another web app (Bean Counter) simultaneously. So here goes…

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Lessons learnt from beta testing

Last week, saw the completion of the first round of beta testing for Bean Counter. Was the beta testing a success? No, not really.

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{curly brackets} versus :colons/semi-colons; in PHP

Current and former colleagues of mine, will attest to my intense hatred of poorly written code and by poorly written code I mean code that is hard to follow.

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A simple PHP HTML/CSS templating system (REDUX)

It is beyond silly to repeatedly copy and paste the same HTML into the top and bottom of every HTML file that you create. That’s why god invented include() but, the humble header/footer HTML include file needs to be extended slightly – that is, unless you want all your pages to have the same title/meta description/CSS files etc.

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Newsflash: Manchester web developer beats Google Checkout API to death in frenzied attack

Two weeks ago, I wrote about wasting my time trying to integrate Google Checkout into our top secret web app. You may be glad to hear that my time is no longer being wasted and I seem to have finally solved my Google Checkout conundrum as of this week.

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Caching PHP objects: how to do it in 4 easy steps

This week, my work for our top secret web app, has mainly revolved around caching. This is work I really enjoy. I can sense the user experience of future customers improving each time I create a useful cache of information that speeds up a page’s load time.

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