General News

Can’t afford the hefty price for Adobe Photoshop, or simply refuse to pay it?

I’ve just come across a neat free alternative, check it out!

http://www.sumopaint.com/app/

I’m still playing with it at the moment and it looks cool so far!

If you have a website that allows user comments, reviews or similar features, you will no doubt have been subjected to spammers at some point in time. continue

Nowadays hosting and bandwidth charges are at an all time low. That said, with most people on shared hosting plans, sometimes your host can get a bit bothered if your website gets a ton of traffic in a short space of time.

When designing websites for clients, most of the time your client will want the option to be able to add pages and news posts themselves. Who wouldn’t right?

When we develop a clients site, our Content Management System (CMS) of choice is Wordpress. Wordpress has improved beyond all recognition over the years and is no longer “just a blog platform”. In fact, this very site runs on Wordpress.

If you didn’t know already, Wordpress is open source software. This means that it’s free to use and more importantly, has hundreds of people working on it to make it better. You can extend your Wordpress website by adding “Plugins”. Plugins are code modules that when installed, add functionality to your site that isn’t there in the default install.

There are too many to list for this post, but one excellent example is WP-Super Cache. You can read up on how it works on the authors site, but essentially it stores “cached” pages on your web-server so that when visitors come, your server doesn’t have to query the database each time.

Anything we can do to speed up our websites is a good thing. Thanks to Donncha O Caoimh for this great plugin.

You can download it from the Wordpress plugin repository here.

I’ve been using Analytics since it started really and have only just tested the email report feature.

Previously I had logged in every morning to eagerly check my various website’s stats. Now, after setting up the simple email reports feature, I have an email with a pdf attachment waiting for me each morning in my inbox.

Included in the pdf attachment is:

• Dashboard view
• Visitors overview
• Traffic sources overview
• Map overlay
• Content overview

Basically everything you need to know to know how your site is being used by and found by visitors. If you want a more in-depth view simply log in to your Analytics account!

Apparently, Elton John has said that the only way to stop pirated music etc is to turn off the internet! via

Elton Said “There’s too much technology available and it’s starving musical creativity”. He said it would be an interesting experiment to switch off the internet for 5 years to see what sort of art is produced over that span.

Uh oh, we’d all be out of a job if that happened!

One of the great RSS feeds that I subscribe to is Smashing Magazine. They list great resources for designers etc and here is a nice selection of free fonts.

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader but today something strange has happened. When I log in to check for new items I get 5 new items on the list:

But when I click on the “All Items” link to view them all I get told there are no new items:

Has anyone else had this? If so how do you clear it? I’ve tried deleting cookies etc but it still happens.

You know the situation. You’re working on a project and when testing it you get an unexpected result or error message. That happens to me all the time but one such time last week took me ages to figure out what was going on.

I was using a simple sql statement to select records from a database but I’d called one of the fields in the table “From”. Obviously this will create problems when writing the simple sql statement and it caused me to get a MySQL error telling me to check my syntax.

I found out the hard way when doing something stupid in Javascript a few weeks ago as well.

Lesson learned:

Think before creating fields in a database!

As Homer would say…..DOH!

Yesterday, I was working on my CRM application. To cut a long story short I have upgraded the whole system, added new features and made the whole user experience better.

One of the things I was doing was adding AJAX functionality to perform certain tasks on pages without having to reload the page each time.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m not a Javascript guru but I get by…..almost. Here was my dilemma.  I was using a Javascript “onclick” event to pass a variable into the AJAX routine but for the life of me I couldn’t get it to work. I tried everything (or so I thought) but it just wasn’t happening.

Then, after going and working on something else for a while I came back and found the answer. This will be a no-brainer for you Javascript guru’s out there, but sometimes the smallest things get overlooked. Basically I didn’t put single quotes around the variable that I was passing to the script. Here’s what I mean.

Say my Javascript function was something like:

function displaytimesheet(thedate) {
var date = thedate  ;
var project = document.getElementById(‘id’).value  ;
if(date !== “”) {
elem = document.getElementById(‘calendarresult’).style;
elem.display = ‘inline’;
………………………. etc

And the onclick event passing this variable was:

….onclick=”displaytimesheet(‘variable here‘)”…..

I missed out the bold single quotes above! Just goes to show that sometimes the simple things get overlooked and taking a break and coming back to a problem can be like a fresh pair of eyes looking over it!

I’ve often left a problem overnight and in the morning the solution stands out like a sore thumb!

An article over at Devlounge puts together some interesting arguments with regards to posting full or partial RSS feeds on your blog.

I have had partial feeds on this blog since it started last year, but in the interests of my readers, I am going to switch to full feeds and see how it goes.

It is nice to be able to read the whole article in your feed reader of choice so how do you do yours? Full or partial and why?