2011 has been a good year for me, in terms of my career. I have made a good name for myself, bettered my skills and met a tone of amazing people. Friends I met some of the best guys I’ll probably ever meet at New Adventures in January this year. You’ll know who you are, and I’m very thankful to have met you, to keep in contact with you and share the… Continue reading

Last night I attended the .net magazine awards in Soho, London. It was a rather amazing evening and I got to meet loads of people I only see on Twitter. So cool. Paul Boag took to the stage, made it his bitch and started announcing the winners for each award. The Young Designer of the year award came up and I started shaking and shivering. It was far to hot for… Continue reading

An awesome guy I used to work with, [Stephen Fulljames][http://twitter.com/fulljames] and a great friend, [Anthony Killeen][http://twitter.com/mrqwest] approached me a couple weeks ago, asking if I was interested in working on a side project with them both. After a little clarification, I excitedly said ‘yes’! Learning more about the project that’s now called 12412, it sounded even better than I anticipated. The idea is, anyone interested can take part and write 12… Continue reading

Here i go again. A chat on Twitter turning into a huge blog post that’s essentially me ranting for a while, pissing off some people and alienating others. My topic today is a controversial one too. Pricing. Someone tweeted a [link to an old study][http://cole007.net/blog/86/freelance-rates-survey-2011] by [Cole Henley][http://cole007.net/] that looks into how much peep charge per day in relation to what they do and where they live. There was a [link][http://www.fraq.info/]… Continue reading

There’s been a lot of talk on Twitter recently about responsive web design, and most of that seems to be very strongly opinionated. I’m not going to name names. I just wanted to get across my feelings and options about it, which I can’t really do on Twitter without being jumped on before I have made my point. Why? My overall point is: Responsive web design is a good thing. Here’s why. I… Continue reading

You know the MySQL query limit thing we all use to only show the first few results of a query? You know, limit 0,5 to show the first 5 items. Simple. But what if you want the next 5 items? limit 5,5. What the… It’s simple really, you start the selection at the 5th item, then get the 5 items after it, so 6,7,8,9,10. I didn’t know this, I had to read up… Continue reading

Controversial. I recently tweeted that I didn’t care how a clients website looked in IE 6. I thought i’d waste five minutes of your time to tell you why. Forward Thinking I like to think that the sites I build and release to the world, my own and my clients, help to push the web forward in one way or another. On of those ways is to use modern web standards and not… Continue reading

In the pursuit of speed and adding more nerdery into my self (plus following the kool kidz), I re-built this blog with a new design and new technology, and for once, it’s not WordPress, or even PHP! From WordPress to Jekyll There’s countless blog posts out there detailing how to migrate WordPress to Jekyll, but I decided to start from scratch and just move the important posts manually, there were only a… Continue reading

Last week, I spoke at a small conference in Brighton with an audience of about 30 people. I spoke about some WordPress theme code snippets with a small introduction on using LESS, the CSS pre-processor. That’s not what I’m going to write about. Instead, I’m going to note down what I learnt about speaking, what I would’ve changed and how I’ll do it in the future. So, I’m no professional speaker… Continue reading

In recent months, I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve not learnt much in technical terms, but more about how development works, what makes a good developer and how to work with others. The one I want to briefly talk about today is ‘What Makes A Good Developer’, which I have touched upon in the past. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some a amazingly talented people in the past year, and meeting… Continue reading

Over the past few years I’ve noticed a growing problem with the web development world. The problem is; everyone tries too hard to be modern & semantic. My issue with that is, sometimes, it’s just not practical and because of this, loads of cool ideas get pushed out of the limelight because they’re using old technology. A good example would be all this talk of media queries being a middle-of-the-road solution. The standards evangelists argument  that… Continue reading

I’ve shown you how to track JavaScript events with Google Analytics (GA) before, but with the rising popularity if AJAX driven websites, standard GA only tracks the one page that’s loaded at the start. Why should having an AJAX drive website mean you loose out on analytical data? Here’s how to get that data. The Code _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/page#sectionTitle']); How To Use It $(function(){ $(".ajax-link").bind("click", function(){ var theUrl = $(this).attr("href"); … Continue reading

It’s an often asked question “What do you want to happen to you when you die?”. As the title suggests, I want to be burned, but not before the NHS has had the chance to harvest any organs they can from me. I’ve never believed in any God and as such by body is meaningless to me when I’m not here. I also believe that occupying 7 feet of space in… Continue reading

I moved jobs again! Well, I moved back to where I was 4 months ago and the 14 months before that, Devstars, but with a small difference; I now work from home whenever I’m not needed in the office. This is awesome in a few key ways. Firstly, I get almost two more hours in bed. I tend to fall asleep around 1am, and getting up at 6:30 to commute into… Continue reading

Here I am, doing some late night freelance work, building a WordPress theme for a massive London brand design agency that you’ve never heard of. It’s just dawned on me that in this job, I have the ability to do amazing things that could potentially change the world. Amazing things that make people get up in the morning, amazing ideas beg the question “How comes I didn’t think of that?”, ideas that even my friends who don’t… Continue reading

Using the up, down, left & right keys to navigate through images is common-place now. I wanted to help this by sharing a quick way to add this to your own sites. What the below does, is simply clicks the links that you would normally use your mouse with, but by the keyboard. Note that this does work best when the page cannot scroll vertically or horizontally. $(document).keydown(function(e){ if… Continue reading

In loads of recent books about web design & development, the writers have said that we should be detecting features, not browsers. This is great for the cutting edge HTML5 & CSS3 stuff but when trying to fix a shoddy implementation of a technology, feature detection just won’t cut it. To solve a recent problem I had with IE7′s poor implementation of fixed positioning, I had to detect IE7 with JavaScript (jQuery… Continue reading