I would usually do a wordy overview of my year, detailing some ordinary yet complex things that happen to most people. I think I can skip the details and just write a rather long list. :) January New Adventures opened my year, introducing me to loads of new people and reacquaint me with many firmiliar faces. I went skiing for a week in France with Devstars (the last agency I worked with) and… Continue reading
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to add meta boxes for a specific page template in WordPress. Let’s say you have page-about.php, which obviously only works on a page with the slug /about/, and you want to add a sub-title to it, but it needs to be editable from the back-end? This is how I implemented that. I’ve created a file called about-meta.php and included it in my functions.php file.… Continue reading
Say you wanted to add a settings page to a custom post types menu, so the settings in it are grouped with the posts. Here’s the code to make that happen, which you need to add either in your functions.php or wherever you have the code that registers your CPT. I’ll briefly go through each chunk, bit by bit. This is what initiates the menu. add_action('admin_menu' , 'register_service_settings'); function register_service_settings() { … Continue reading
Every day, we all try and improve how we do things. I’m working on two projects at the moment that need to be fully responsive and resolution independent. I looked at other retina workflows, but this one works best for me, so I thought i’d quickly share how I do this, in a plain CSS way. It’s worth noting here that I do use icon fonts where possible. Ok, suppose we’re… Continue reading
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or don’t follow my every word on Twitter and the like, you may or may not know my old car died, so I bought a new one the other day, albeit new to me. It’s 2003 BMW 318 coupé, but what it is isn’t the point. It has a few things in it which aren’t integral to the driving experience but are just… Continue reading
I learn about the toFixed() method in JavaScript. Turns numbers like 1234.5000009 into 1234.50 like this: return number.toFixed(2);. It’s just trimming the string after the decimal point. I finally launched the new Code By Monkey site, and wrote about it. Seems well received. :) I started working on a simple but very useful web app aimed at mobile use with Tom Ashworth. It’s gonna be good! Ever wondered how to set the number… Continue reading
So late last night, I got a question on Twitter referencing a section on my portfolio site, Code By Monkey, this section in particular. Who are my clients? I work with freelancers and agencies, where the main goal is producing a great website. Concept, user experience, design, interactions and build all being well thought out. I like topics like this, so I thought I’d expand on it a bit… Continue reading
My portfolio at Code By Monkey has been the same since I started freelancing in April, and even then it had old and outdated work in it. The implementation wasn’t the best and the site was static, so updating it took a bit of time. Something had to be done, so I decided to re-build it with a WordPress back-end. I spent a lot of time on the design changes and… Continue reading
Finally, NB Flowers went live! Go check it out! Huge thanks to design agency Karoshi for getting me in on the build. Try the gallery on your iOS device. I attended The Digital Barn and left with the biggest hangover ever. Getting up at 2am after 2 hours sleep to do a 7 hour drive didn’t help. My beautiful Audi A3 died. The clutch slowly died on the way home from The… Continue reading
Most people who have any kind of creative skill have found a way to make money from it. Typically, there’s two kinds of people like this; those who do what they do because they love it (left side), or to earn a living (right side). Of course there’s those who fit in the middle who love what they do, but earn a good living from it. I fit in the… Continue reading
Mr James Brooks did a quick interview with me. If you want a little snapshot into my daily routine and stuff like that, give it a read. I’m learning that I have zero respect for anyone until I see, with my own eyes, what makes them so great. So many people fall into certain positions in jobs and societies, yet lack the true ability to be there. I’ve seen companies die… Continue reading
It’s been a quiet week, largely spent traveling, drinking beer and nursing hangovers. But the world doesn’t stop moving. Here’s a piece of wisdom: The longer you search for something, the lower your standards & expectations get. If you don’t find what you want quickly, move onto the next thing that needs doing and come back to it. I went to, and enjoyed the hell out of dConstruct, which is a sizeable… Continue reading
The subject of WordPress workflows has been rife on Twitter today, and as a hardened WP developer, I thought I should chime in and share my optimal workflow. In this little writeup I’ll show you how to: Handle multiple URLS Support for dev, staging & live databases Source control Deploying scripts Before I get started, I just want to say that I’ll gloss over anything that isn’t WordPress specific. No particulars in version control or deployment… Continue reading
I’ve been trying to find a way to efficiently get my Instagram posts into my blog for a while. The way I was doing it before meant getting the fresh data from their API on each page load, which isn’t efficient at all, so I made this, which caches the results in the database, and refreshes it once an hour. To make this work, you’ll need your own API token, which… Continue reading
If there’s one thing I’ve wanted to do more, that’s write on this blog, but being a developer, I’m inherently lazy. Writing long posts requires a lot of thinking and posts that contain one nuggets of info are too short to really be published on their own. So when I saw Chris Coyiers CSS-Tricks Chronicles start, I thought that was the perfect template to take inspiration from. I’ve done just that,… Continue reading
I’ve worked in three agencies in my time and I’ve only ever had one 3 month review. The fact that it caused me to leave that agency should tell me I shouldn’t do this write up, but I know this freelance lifestyle is miles better than any agency I haven’t started. I’ll get back to that at the end. I’ve taken a template from somewhere and I’ll go through that, in… Continue reading
Glad you asked, Sam! I have many things to say about freelancing. Before I get into it though, I’d just like to say that the below has worked for me, there’s no saying it’s the right way to do things. It could have all been an accident. So, in no particular order… Have a (proper) website Seems obvious, but these days, it’s kind of integral to a freelancers life. Lets imaging you’re looking for… Continue reading
I was asked to blog about how life is going since I went Freelance at the beginning of April (2012, for legacy), so here goes. Life as a freelancer is just fucking awesome! I get to wake up when I want, work when I want and only accept the work that interests me. That’s the meat of this post to be honest, but I want to talk about a few things… Continue reading
Let’s jump right in. My friend and all round nice guy Stephen Fulljames decided to go, so we flew out together and were pretty much glued together for the couple days we were in Warsaw. We stayed in a nice hotel, which turned out to be where the speakers were staying, which I’ll come back to later. I’ve been to many conferences before, but this was my first international conference. I have many… Continue reading
This is more a rant than an informative piece. You have been warned. I read earlier that Opera are going to adopt the Webkit prefix to combat the potential monoculture created by Webkit not being shit and designers loving the direction it’s going in. This, as I’m sure you already know is absolutely fucking stupid. All this means is designers will use the -webkit- prefix even more as it’s now used in… Continue reading
As a new freelancer, there’s many things I’m embracing. There’s too many to list here, but one of those things is filtering who I work with. My ideal client would be somebody, or a company, that want my time, expertise and value my opinion. They care about the code I write, the designs I do and interactions I create. Do also don’t care that I charge what I do, which is… Continue reading
For a man in his position, being the figure head for the web, Jeffrey Zeldman‘s recent work on his own blog scares me a bit. This tweet is what worries me most: The beauty of big type on modern devices. One layout to rule them all.— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) April 20, 2012 What this says to me, is he’s skipping the whole point of responsive design, but simulating it’s effects for mobile… Continue reading
Recently, I’ve had the chance to talk with other speakers about what they find easy, hard and what they could offer to help me. The tips they’ve given me are just great! One of those tips was doing some sort of video blog. So, yesterday, I purchased a suction cup cradle thing for the car, in hops that I’ll do video blogs in there as I drive along (I drive… Continue reading
I’ll be honest. The reason I got into web development in the first place was not to make a difference or contribute to the web, but because it was something I could kind of do and it paid fairly well compared to other job options I had. I had grand ideas, but deep down I knew I was thinking bollocks and saw myself trapped in an agency for the rest… Continue reading
I spend a good portion of my time wondering what would happen if I did something, either in terms of work or personal things. I can anguish over a simple question for hours, days, weeks and even months. I know I’m not alone. I decided late last year I wanted to go freelance, just after my .net award actually. I knew I had to do the difficult thing and tell my… Continue reading
People like to talk about WordPress being bad, the wrong choice and it not being a CMS. I’m going to say, in defence,m that for me, it’s the right choice, every time, and why. This is obviously subjective, but it’s relative to me. So here goes. My career began because of Chris Coyier‘s early WordPress series of three videos. They helped me understand HTML, CSS, PHP and WordPress much more than… Continue reading
Today, I was doing some interesting z-index stuff for a new feature on the Devstars site. I had it working to spec, but I thought a nice touch would be bring the currently hovered item to the top of the thumbnail stack, with without breaking the above other elements which needed to be above it. See the gif for what I mean. Now, a quick caveat: This may not be the… Continue reading
Something I’ve said for a long time is; Life it what you make it. For me, that has never been truer than it is now. The last several months have been life changing for me. Specifics of what happened don’t matter, that’s not the point, but each and every one of these seemingly little events has shaped my life in profound ways. An example would be getting nominated for the .net… Continue reading
A reader emailed me asking about the ad network I have on this blog, how it works compared to ad-spot selling services and what the pay is like. It’s a good question and one I’m sure a few people might have, so I thought I’d bring my answer here. Before I go on, I should say, the reason I have ads on this blog is not to become a millionaire, but… Continue reading
For years, my long-term goal, was to work for myself, set my own deadlines, do more open source stuff, travel more, speak more, run workshops but most importantly, choose the work I do. Unfortunately, being 19 and having no client list when I first wanted this, meant it was just impossible. Two years later at 21, with much work done, names under my belt, experience gained and award won, it’s… Continue reading
It’s common practice these days to disable server-side errors on a production site, so much so that most major frameworks (Rails, CodeIgniter & more) all have switches for what is essentially live & dev. One of my major issues with Internet Explorer, is making a meal out of JavaScript errors. Even if something works properly, it’ll still throw in some errors. I would prefer to hide those on the production site,… Continue reading
All too often, a simple, mindless tweet makes me think a lot. For a long time, I’ve felt that the proverbial body of water between good and great design is increasing. If I had to be given a class, I would say I was a good designer, not a great one. Let me explain why. Good design is something that fulfils a purpose, it gets the job done. It can look pretty,… Continue reading