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Posted on March 8, 2011 by Chris
@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 let’s take a brief recap.
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Posted in design |
Tagged CSS, design |
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Posted on December 28, 2010 by Chris
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 machine, but suffers from a storage bottleneck due to the PATA interface and 1.8″ disk, exacerbated by the requirements of a development environment – a web server, database server, IDE and SVN server & client place a lot of demands on the storage subsystem.
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Posted in code |
Tagged Apache, code, source control, SVN, tools, tortoisesvn |
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Posted on December 27, 2010 by Chris
With the release of WordPress 3.0, the multisite functionality of WPMU was rolled into the main WordPress codebase. Before this, I hadn’t done any work with WPMU, so I was utterly dumbfounded to discover that when adding a new site to a WordPress network, WordPress adds another set of tables for each blog. That’s right. Rather than doing what you or I would do – adding a blog_id field to the existing tables – it creates an unwieldy mess of tables. As an example, one site I’ve been developing currently has 32 blogs, which all together add up to an astonishing 318 tables.
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Posted in WordPress |
Tagged development, WordPress |
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Posted on October 27, 2010 by Chris
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.
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Posted in code |
Tagged code, development, source control, SVN, WTF |
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Posted on October 21, 2010 by Chris
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.
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Posted in design |
Tagged design, UI, UX, WordPress |
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Posted on October 5, 2010 by Chris
Twitter is rolling out a new UI for its web client, and I think they’ve got it right. 78% of users are using the website to post and read tweets, and the updated interface incorporates a lot of features previously only available in third-party clients.
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Posted in design |
Tagged design, Twitter, UI, UX |
1 Comment
Posted on September 10, 2010 by Chris
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.
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Posted in code |
Tagged development, source control, SVN, tools, tortoisesvn |
17 Comments
Posted on September 4, 2010 by Chris
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently in small business startups, especially those started by young people. A lot of these entrepreneurs, when launching their businesses, are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and using a Facebook or MySpace page instead of a traditional website. It could be because it’s a natural extension from the tools they’re used to in their personal lives or because it’s self-service and can be live in minutes, but I’m here to say they’re doing it wrong. Here’s why.
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Posted in marketing |
Tagged Facebook, marketing, MySpace, social web, Twitter |
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Posted on August 18, 2010 by Chris
We’re used to using browser sniffing to work around incompatibilities, to serve different stylesheets or scripts to different User-Agents with different capabilities. Of course, that approach has fallen by the wayside in recent times, with best practice now dictating that we test for capabilities rather than browser/OS combinations in our rich UIs.
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Posted in design |
Tagged design, UI, UX |
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Posted on August 11, 2010 by Chris
A designer by the name of Matt Earnshaw thought he could get away with ripping off the work of David Airey. Here’s what happened…
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Posted in design |
Tagged design, industry, plagiarism |
3 Comments