Where shall I start? It's best to begin at the beginning and go on till I come to the end: then stop.
1997 was my first year at university. There, I used the World Wide Web for the first time. The 20th century web was a shallow experience...
This website follows the “mobile first responsive design” philosophy.
The starting points were elements of Andy Clarke's 320 & Up and Mobile Boilerplate and from there I turned it up to 11; including writing a new script, SVG Plug, as a solution for the lack of native support for Scalable Vector Graphics in a number of popular browsers.
Redbridge College Course:
Foundation Internet Marketing
Speakers: Andy Walpole and Rob Keating
Are you starting a business or already running a business? Are you frustrated that your competitors outrank you on Google? If you are unhappy with your current online marketing or just want to find out more come along to our workshop. It has been designed for small to medium-sized businesses and is delivered by two industry experts. The aim of this two hour workshop is to teach you both the theory and practice of some key aspects of online marketing.
There is, of course, an easy of way of targeting certain versions of Internet Explorer by using conditional comments. This allows you to separate your CSS into different files based on browser version.
Another month arrives and more CSS3 comes into play. March was witness to calc() being incorporated into the Webkit engine.
Music, politics and tech. Coder: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob. London Town, kind of. http://andywalpole.me/
The Alan Partridge TV show was in 2003. Doesn't seem that long ago
14:10, May 18th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 18, 2012 TCotton committed 1fdb6ff friday update
16:12, May 16th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 16, 2012 TCotton committed 8f96fb5 may 16
10:52, May 14th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 14, 2012 TCotton committed b785d6c monday update
Freelance coder from the pit bull infested Essex / London border lowlands.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP
Current personal projects include building my own set of Wordpress developer classes, working on my CodeIgniter-based CMS, CodeSharp; and expanding my JavaScript knowledge to include new object methods from ECMAScript 5.
Goals for this year: more Drupal, more Wordpress, tackling Symphony PHP framework and to start using backbone.js / underscore.js
Avante!
Dial-up, not broadband. BBC.co.uk consisted of a TV guide. And nothing more. “By the end of the day users from America will be logging on so you'll notice that the internet will be running more slowly”.
Skip forward to 2003. A publishing company in east London. No takers for updating the company web site, so I was given the responsibility. And that was it. The moment of genesis. Lift off. Houston, all engines are go. I sought union with binary digits. I dreamt in code. Isolation. Expansion. Conquering lion.
The 21st century web is a communication medium for inspiring ideas, innovation and change. It's ultra-modernity delivered at 2000mph.
It's impossible not to feel passionate in return.
Coding is my passion☺
Skillset: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SEO, SQL, Git, SVN, Photoshop, Fireworks, Drupal, Wordpress, jQuery, CodeIgniter
closeBack in the Autumn of 2009 Luke Wroblewski wrote a short blog post entitled Mobile First in which he laid the foundation to a new design approach as an answer to rapidly changing technology platforms.
When Ethan Marcotte penned his seminal article Responsive Web Design during the spring of the following year, this new, experimental creative strategy was fleshed out further.
Today it is a growing discipline that uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 code so as to meet the demands of a complex spectrum of user devices.
As an evolving practice there is still much discussion amongst its participants.
“Mobile first” is more than about code but also about the rationalisation of content – do you really need that long article? Can't you cut it down to a few paragraphs? It is about stripping away the superfluous.
But advanced methods do require advanced coding practices, in particular, the use of CSS3 media queries; and with much of CSS3 comes the lack of support in Internet Explorer versions 8 and below.
There are a couple of polyfills that are designed to plug this gap in support. I tried both Respond.js and CSS3 Media Queries but both are buggy and prone to clashing with other scripts and I wouldn't consider either fit for commercial use. After some frustrating experiences I abandoned any hope of using advanced media queries on the legacy browsers.
A new front for design considerations has also been opened: the increase of dots per inch. On the desktop 72 dpi is standard while for the print 300 dpi rules. Mobile devices can be anywhere up to 326 dpi and which leaves images created at 72 dpi looking fuzzy.
A solution to this problem is using Scalable Vector Images (SVG) which, after 10 years in existence, are finding a reason to be widely adopted.
Again, just like media queries, there is no support in Internet Explorer versions 8 and below.
After examining the various workarounds and polyfills and I decided that all were deficient and so I created a script called SVG Plug. This code swaps images for SVG in non-supporting browsers. For a full explanation read my blog post Using SVG in web design.
So a success then?!
In some ways yes, in other ways no. Experimenting with solutions often leads to more questions. But that's okay:
“Responsive Web Design is REALLY NEW and NOBODY knows how to do it properly/right/appropriately yet! We’re all just experimenting.
And THAT’S FINE!” - Mark Boulton
This project was built with a little help from my friends: 320 and Up, Mobile Boilerplate, LABjs Script Loader, Modernizr, Animator.js, DOMAssistant, Selectivizr and feedback from the droogs on Forrst who pointed out the difference between heaven and hell.
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The default browser JavaScript alert is fine for debugging but awful for users when used in form submission. This script creates a more pleasant means of user feedback.
See a demo here or grab the code on GitHub.
Based upon a CodeIgniter base, this CMS is intended for uses where a full-blown solution like Drupal or ExpressionEngine would be overkill.
There is a heavy dependency on JavaScript in the admin area (jQuery and AJAX) but it degrades gracefully.
A jQuery plugin to create little pretty boxes over an image on page load. See a demo here or grab the code on GitHub.
Lets cut the bullshit and go to some easy accessible recent code examples: PHP, JavaScript, CSS and for HTML look at the source code for this site.
This plugin allows affiliate marketing publishers to import CSV or XML files so as to create individual posts from the content.
It is fully intergrated with Wordpress but uses a number of PEAR modules including XML Serializer, CSV Parser, XML Utilities and XML Parser.
This is a design for an unorthodox insurance web site
Keyman insurance is aimed at businesses who need cover for directors or important employees in the event of a tragedy.
The client wanted a site as a means to generate leads but only had thin content. I worked with them in writing a 2,000 word guide on the subject so as to provide some expansive text for the search engines that could draw people in.
The website is hand-coded from scratch while the fonts used are Salsbury for headlines and FF Meta Serif Web Pro for the body. jQuery is used for the script with the wonderful Backstretch plugin used on the background image.
close 14:10, May 18th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 18, 2012 TCotton committed 1fdb6ff friday update
16:12, May 16th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 16, 2012 TCotton committed 8f96fb5 may 16
10:52, May 14th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 14, 2012 TCotton committed b785d6c monday update
16:07, May 13th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 13, 2012 TCotton committed 8a8bac6 another sunday update
10:27, May 13th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 13, 2012 TCotton committed f346f96 sunday update
12:25, May 12th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 12, 2012 TCotton committed 8c4ac43 remove files
12:17, May 12th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 12, 2012 TCotton committed a06d88f remove
12:17, May 12th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 12, 2012 TCotton committed f113237 new update
6:50, May 10th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 10, 2012 TCotton committed b6611b5 new readme
6:45, May 10th, 2012
TCotton pushed to master at TCotton/Wordpress-plugin-Affiliate-Hoover May 10, 2012 TCotton committed 0820b12 first commit
closeThere is, of course, an easy of way of targeting certain versions of Internet Explorer by using conditional comments. This allows you to separate your CSS into different files based on browser version.
Another month arrives and more CSS3 comes into play. March was witness to calc() being incorporated into the Webkit engine.
Everybody has their own IDE of choice with Sublime Text seemingly the most popular at the moment. A good IDE should be solid, stable software with full features and UX which leaves you, the coder, freedom to concentrate on the job in hand.
Reading and creating XML, RSS and CVS files is essential knowledge when it comes to using PHP because they are all formats commonly used for a wide range of purposes.
Advanced is an adjective used subjectively here because you may be already using the methods below on a regular basis, but in by using the term advanced I am referring to JavaScript from versions 1.6 to 1.8 that are not available in Internet Explorer versions 8 and below.
It could be argued that CodeIgniter is the most popular Open Source PHP framework around. It certainly features heavily on developer and designer sites like Forrst.
In February 2011 Think Vitamin published an article written by me entitled Tips on Learning JavaScript. In 2010 I had added learning JavaScript to my “things to do list” for that year, and the Think Vitamin item offered feedback on my progress so far. Re-reading my article nearly all the advice I gave out is correct but I did write: “I would now classify my skills as intermediate”. I was a little hasty in making that statement.
As CSS3 roars ahead in spite of the old Internet Explorer legacy browsers acting like a drag weight on faster adoption, there have been some really fascinating experiments with CSS3 properties and values which have created design styles far beyond what the original participants behind the W3C CSS modules could have imagined.
close Freelance coder from the pit bull infested Essex / London border lowlands.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP
Current personal projects include building my own set of Wordpress developer classes, working on my CodeIgniter-based CMS, CodeSharp; and expanding my JavaScript knowledge to include new object methods from ECMAScript 5.
Goals for this year: more Drupal, more Wordpress, tackling Symphony PHP framework and to start using backbone.js / underscore.js
Avante!
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/affiliate-hoover/
I can't begin to tell you how many man hours I've put into this
It started off last year when I had a client who had previously integrated some god-awful commercial script with Wordpress. I thought, I can write better code than this with a blindfold on.
This year I wanted to familiarise myself more with the Wordpress codex so I started it as a project.
And 5k lines of code later (written without a blindfold) and here it is.
On a related note, if there are any designers or developers who want to collaborate on commercial projects please get in touch.
A lot of CSS formatters can't handle CSS3, but this one can.
It's comes from Sencha Labs.
You can take a look at one of my CSS files here to see how beautifully it handles CSS animation: github.com/TCotton/Lightbox-Ultra/blob/master/styles/…
I wondered if there was a Sublime plugin for but I can't seem to find one
After trying out various singleton / module formations I've settled on Addy Osmani's module / facade:
var module = (function() {
var _private = {
i:5,
get : function() {
console.log('current value:' + this.i);
},
set : function( val ) {
this.i = val;
},
run : function() {
console.log( 'running' );
},
jump: function(){
console.log( 'jumping' );
}
};
return {
facade : function( args ) {
_private.set(args.val);
_private.get();
if ( args.run ) {
_private.run();
}
}
}
}());
module.facade({run: true, val:10});
//outputs current value: 10, running
What I like about the pattern is that you can use private / public methods and attributes, getters / setters and it is easy to fit in a sub / pub too.
What do you use most frequently?
close 8:45, May 18th, 2012
The Alan Partridge TV show was in 2003. Doesn't seem that long ago
20:49, May 17th, 2012
Good doc: BBC iPlayer - The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer - http://t.co/9CR91nvS
19:55, May 17th, 2012
Anybody who claims "music today isn't as good as the old days" should be forced to watch the 1977 Top of the Pops special
19:47, May 17th, 2012
this track in top of the pops 70s now. It's really bad. Like really bad
19:10, May 17th, 2012
Using the SVN on Wordpress can quite traumatic. It's far easier to make mistakes than GIT
14:11, May 17th, 2012
This is what you end up looking like if you live in LA for too long --> http://t.co/gTsYb9TU
9:01, May 17th, 2012
I'm not sure what's more alarming. Tweets from @RealTimeWWII about the collapse of Europe in WWII or contemp. rolling news about today
6:43, May 17th, 2012
Right, who's got a spare trillion they can lend the British economy? Apparently we are going to need in the need couple of months
17:00, May 16th, 2012
Not sure what high street shop I would compare Twitter to
16:59, May 16th, 2012
Goolge Plus is like Costa Coffee. You'd go in there now and again but once you've drunk your coffee you wouldn't hang around for long
16:58, May 16th, 2012
Facebook has all the atmosphere of a Sainsburys superstore
close