Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Skype Annoyances

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Ok Skype, I finally caved in and installed your poxy app. Thing is though, you also allow calls to non-Skype numbers so I’d really appreciate it if you allowed it to be set as the default application to open href=”tel:” links. Y’know, RFC 3966? Because believe it or not, some people still use those old-fashioned…

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Web Fonts, Anti-Aliasing and @font-face

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@font-face is the new darling of Web designers. With it, we can break out of the traditional web-safe font stacks and explore the full range of typography available to us in print. Of course, @font-face isn’t the first technique available to us, we’ve progressed through a number of others over the past few years so…

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Localhost slowdown: cracking poor performance in TortoiseSVN and Zend Server

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Continuing from my previous post on troubleshooting SVN setup on Windows, I’ve recently encountered (and solved) quite a serious performance hit that’s been affecting my main development machine. Since I spend a lot of time on the move, I do most of my development on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D430. It’s a fantastic little…

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The Real WTF is…

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If you’ve never read The Daily WTF, it’s a fantastic site run by Alex Papadimoulis highlighting the horrors that readers have found and submitted in real production code. Reading it is a heady blend of “oops, I used to do that” mixed with some absolutely abysmal stuff that you’d swear couldn’t possibly be real. Just…

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On Interfaces, Plugins and the finer points of Application Design

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I’ve been thinking a lot about interface design recently. Around client projects, I’ve been working on a premium WordPress theme called Bauhaus, which I’ll shortly be releasing on ThemeForest. I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling options in the WordPress admin interface, done a lot of research across the web and I’ve come to a startling conclusion, a lot of people are doing interface design wrong. Continue reading…

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Installing and Configuring SVNServe and TortoiseSVN on Windows

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After you’ve been working with code for a while, source control is a godsend. It provides a way of tracking changes, prevents conflicts and generally saves your bacon. Here’s how to set it up on Windows 7. Installation First grab the latest SlikSVN and TortoiseSVN packages for your platform – x86 and x64 versions are…

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