Centring elements horizontally and vertically with the CSS3 calc() function
Another month arrives and more CSS3 comes into play. March was witness to calc() being incorporated into the Webkit engine. I wrote back in January 2011 about the calc() function and stated it would be...
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:focus pseudo-class feature detection
I'm not quite sure whose idea the CSS3 :focus pseudo-class class was, but including it in the CSS spec was a minor act of ingenuity. When you view CSS-only animation then :focus is usually at the...
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Hide CSS in Internet Explorer 8 and below
There is, of course, an easy of way of targeting certain versions of Internet Explorer by using conditional comments. This allows you to separate your CSS into different files based on browser version....
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Penny Books launched, books for a penny À gogo
I'm pleased to announce the launch of a little side project of mine, Penny Books. It is a quirky book search engine that uses the Amazon API to find books which are on sale for one penny. This idea...
View ArticleUsing the Pomodoro technique for time management
It would be nice to be hyper-enthusiastic for every single job but the truth is that some coding jobs are tedious and the temptation of Twitter, Urban75, BBC news site etc. has a habit of overriding...
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Reflections on developing for Wordpress and Drupal
Both Wordpress and Drupal are widely used and respected by a legion of developers. Wordpress is far more popular than Drupal, but Drupal is rapidly maturing with Version 8 looking likely to be a real...
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Launch of TwtTwt – a Twitter service that uses unicode symbols
I'm happy to announce, at last, the launch of TwtTwt; a service that allows Twitter users to insert unicode symbols into their Tweets. The original inspiration came from my use of a JavaScript...
View ArticleOn using IDs in CSS
This year has seen a polite spat between web design “faces” on whether IDs should or should not be used in CSS files. In the blue corner is new kid on the block and CSS Wizardry owner, Harry Roberts,...
View ArticleResponding to slow page rendering on the mobile network
In London, my 3G network connection often has speeds of between 5 and 7mps: which is fine for casual browsing. But when travelling on public transport or at work, speeds are often pathetically...
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Using SVG in web design
Within a few years SVG, rather than PNG, will be the preferred icon format used in web design. Primarily this is because SVG is vector-based and so holds up well on high-DPI screens. I'm not so sure...
View ArticleCoders! Don't forget your CSS print styles!
I rarely read long articles on the desktop instead preferring to print them out. I don't know if there are statistics out there, but I would imagine that this is a common practice. Thankfully there is...
View ArticleIs using @import in CSS really such a performance roadblock?
Just recently I found myself returning to an old style sheet that I had coded last year. It was vanilla CSS written without the help of a pre-processor. Locating and rewriting the CSS involved far too...
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Creating breadcrumbs for Wordpress without an addon.
If you are creating a Wordpress website and you know PHP then it is good practice to avoid third-party plugins wherever possible. There is only minimal peer review of plugins on the Wordpress...
View ArticleUsing CSS3 animation with the JavaScript CSSOM API
One day IE7 and IE8 will die out and be a distant memory just like Netscape 4. JavaScript libraries like jQuery won't disappear but they'll be a lot less essential when all browsers conform to W3C...
View ArticleBe careful when buying electronic goods from Amazon Associates
Although I use a Mac at home, I also use Windows and Linux. For the latter I use an old CRT monitor. It weighs more than an elephant, but the colours and font-rendering is excellent. When LSD screens...
View ArticleCreating a reusable JavaScript form validation class
Just recently I was looking at some of my old code. For a website build I had used HTML5 form validation with a JavaScript fallback. The form itself was a long one and I had created a module that saved...
View ArticleA PHP class to create a Wordpress custom post type with dynamic metaboxes
On a theme I have been working on there was the need to create dynamic metaboxes for a basic jobs listing section. The listing page had four different fields for every job: Title, description, location...
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A quick way to add a URL redirect feature to Wordpress categories
My last job at a large multi-national company before my contract expired was to code their Russian website. A major problem that their Russian team faced was not having the resources to translate...
View ArticleUsing __autoload() in your Object Orientated Wordpress plugin
These days autoloading PHP classes is the industry standard and if you write your plugins using Object Oriented code then you should look to using it too. I've just re-factored my Affiliate Hoover...
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Books that helped me become a professional web developer
I've been working full-time as a web developer since 2009, previously creating my first website with Microsoft's Frontpage in 2002 (remember that?!). Apart from a taking a few modules on an Open...
View ArticleA complete guide to CSS pseudo-classes
CSS 2.1 pseudo-classes a:link {color:#3344dd} a:visited {color:#804180} a:hover {color:#b50010} a:active {color:#b50010} The above CSS pseudo-classes should already be familiar to you, but if they...
View ArticleBest of the Web for May and June 2010
Hay ho pop pickers this is the best web design and development blog posts from the last couple of months. As usual, there is a mixture of CSS, HTML5, JavaScript, PHP and SEO. I hope you find some...
View ArticleA complete guide to CSS pseudo-elements
Pseudo-elements are fantastically useful as they allow greater control of elements and selectors without extra HTML mark-up. As with much advanced CSS, pseudo-element take up has been slow amongst web...
View ArticleBest of the web round-up – Autumn 2010
The 2000 mile per hour technology drop we all seem to be living in shows not sign of abating. As the European economies stagger from bad to worse we might all be going to hell on a handcart, but at...
View ArticleJquery plugin Little Colour Boxes is launched
Suburban Glory Web Design is proud to announce the release of jQuery plugin Little Colour Boxes and our first contribution to one of the web's must dynamic and worthy Open Source projects. The plugin...
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A Complete Guide to CSS Functions - Part One
Yes, you read that correctly – functions. Commonly associated with programming languages, they are also a feature of CSS. Apart from url(), they were rarely used in CSS2; but they are being widely...
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A Complete Guide to CSS Combinators
Ever since the 1990s there has been a concerted attempt in web design to use CSS as a means to separate presentation from content. Often it was the case that web designers were adding extra classes or...
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A Complete Guide to CSS Colour and Background Properties
The background colour and images are the basics of any website build. The first section of this article, for CSS2.1, covers the more rudimentary aspects, while the second part covers CSS3 and in...
View ArticleUsing PEAR Cache Lite with Drupal 6
The PEAR repository is a well-used and well-loved library of reusable Open Source PHP code. Perhaps in recent years it has fallen a bit out of favour and has become somewhat neglected; but there are...
View ArticleVarnish, Google Analytics and Drupal
If you are using Drupal on a virtual or dedicated server and you haven't yet installed Varnish then make sure you set aside some time in the near future to do so. It is, by far, the most effective way...
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Using HTML5 canvas
Unless you have been in a coma for the last couple of years you would have noticed the upturn in interest in HTML5 and the canvas tag. The Canvas API is a means of creating shapes, graphs and even...
View ArticleIdeas of March
It can be argued that blogging and blog commenting is on the wane because social media – in particular Twitter and Facebook – has captivated web users attention, but none of these services are in...
View ArticleUsing JavaScript to create equal height columns
Creating websites with tables didn't have many advantages over using CSS, but the ability to easily create equal height columns was one of them. There are a small number of tried and tested CSS...
View ArticleAltering the read more link in Drupal 7
How to change the position of the read more link at the bottom of node teasers has been a discussion point for Drupal themers for years. Four Kitchens even created a module to add this functionality:...
View ArticleCreating a pull down (nested) menu in Drupal 7
Special note: Don't follow this tutorial just download and use the Menu Block module instead. Drupal was originally a developers toy but over the last few years the thrust of the CMS has been to try...
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Replace a form submit button with an image using just CSS
There are tons of articles out there on the subject of styling forms with individual web designers developing their own particular coding preferences over time. For developers and designers, creating...
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Review of HTML5 Canvas Libraries
There's been a buzz around HTML5 for some time now with many leading commentators in the online tech community heavily pushing the new standard. With the last version of HTML being released back in...
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Using JavaScript to emulate HTML5 placeholders in Internet Explorer
HTML5 is now the default choice of HTML version for most developers but poor support in Internet Explorer has proven to be a hindrance to the wider adoption of the language. This lack of native support...
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Redbridge College Workshop: Foundation Internet Marketing
Speakers Andy Walpole from Suburban Glory Web Design & Rob Keating from Offline to Online. Tuesday September 20th, 6.30pm – 8.30pm Are you starting a business or already running a business? Are you...
View ArticleAn easy way to use the Twitter API
Twitter, surely, has had one of the most successful developer outreach programmes of all time. Their relaxed attitude to data access has meant that a myriad of superb side projects has sprung up and...
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An introduction to Deck JS
PowerPoint has been the choice of software for corporate presentations since the 1990s. Easy to use and configure, it takes real skill to mess a PowerPoint presentation up. However, for web coders...
View ArticleBarking and Dagenham Chamber of Commerce seminar: Practical Advice for...
Topics and speakers include: Search Engine Optimisation, Andy Walpole, Suburban Glory Web Design How to Maximise your Branding, Ray Calder, Acumen Design Simple tips to increase your £££ Flow and...
View ArticlePushing CSS to its limits
As CSS3 roars ahead in spite of the old Internet Explorer legacy browsers acting like a drag weight on faster adoption, there have been some really fascinating experiments with CSS3 properties and...
View ArticleSome more tips on learning JavaScript
In February 2011 Think Vitamin published an article written by me entitled Tips on Learning JavaScript. In 2010 I had added learning JavaScript to my “things to do list” for that year, and the Think...
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Resources for learning CodeIgniter
It could be argued that CodeIgniter is the most popular Open Source PHP framework around. It certainly features heavily on developer and designer sites like Forrst. Written in OOP code it takes a...
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Using advanced JavaScript array methods
Advanced is an adjective used subjectively here because you may be already using the methods below on a regular basis, but in by using the term advanced I am referring to JavaScript from versions 1.6...
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Using PHP to parse XML, RSS or CVS files which are compressed with ZIP or GZIP
Reading and creating XML, RSS and CVS files is essential knowledge when it comes to using PHP because they are all formats commonly used for a wide range of purposes. I'm just in the middle of creating...
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Checking for unique values in a multidimensional array
There are lots of different solutions to this problem posted on forums all over the web. But here is a very simple solution I came up with the other day. Below was an array whose values were from a...
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Setting up Eclipse IDE for JavaScript and PHP development
Everybody has their own IDE of choice with Sublime Text seemingly the most popular at the moment. A good IDE should be solid, stable software with full features and UX which leaves you, the coder,...
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Using cookies instead of wp_localize_script()
Sometimes the most obvious solution isn't the one that comes to you first. wp_localize_script() is a wonderful little slice of Wordpress code that allows you to easily add PHP-created info into an...
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