The quality of most of the articles you read on hipster-esque publishing platform Medium.com (essentially a Tumblr for better written, thought provoking and high quality topics) is top notch. I don’t think I’ve ever read a bad article on Medium, everything I’ve read is well-thought-out and written.
So, recently when I was given an invite to Medium I was ecstatic. I had been wanting to gain access to the platform since hearing about it and the moment I finally got an account that I too could publish my own articles on, I came up blank.
When it comes to personal projects you are your own harshest critic. While you’re debating over colour palettes and backend language choice some teen in his dorm room with the same idea as you is focused on getting his product out as fast as possible, skimping on design and just wanting to get something out to the world.
I am in the same boat. I’ve got more personal projects than hands, one project of which has been sitting idle for about 6 years now called WolfPHP. I’ve probably missed the boat on that idea, but I’ll eventually go back and try to finish it.
I often wonder who is running this world. You occasionally hear of stories (mostly involving China) about hackers breaking in to Government networks and stealing information, hacking into infrastructure and things that aren’t mean for anyone else’s eyes. How is this possible in the first place?
Whenever cyber security agenda is being pushed (usually in the US) talk of dams being hacked into, nuclear reactors and traffic lights hacked you’ve got to ask the question: why is vital infrastructure accessible from the Internet in the first place?
When it comes to really long titles the usual approach is to hard truncate the title at a set length with an ellipsis at the end. Harking back to the glorious year of 1995 when the marquee tag was used by every man, woman, child and creepy computer obsessed uncle in their basement Hipster Titles offers a better solution to truncation.
If a title is too long, it will be hidden but when you hover over the top of it, the headline will start to scroll revealing more of the title. You might have noticed the music player on a iPhone or iPod does this for really long song titles except you don’t have to hover, they just start scrolling.
Recently whilst working with Zendesk (I’ve never used it before) I had to implement a fairly basic design that wanted to display all stickied posts on the homepage. While Zendesk offers this functionality out of the box, it only shows five at a time and requires you to paginate through via links (what is this 2002?). Not exactly ideal.
I’ve worked out you can do anything in Zendesk but it requires a lot of hacking using CSS and JS to get it to do what you want. The following code will load in all stickied posts and remove the pagination links from view. It works really well, enjoy.
Most of us Fireworks users knew this day would eventually come. Fireworks although undeniably the only decent UX tool out there and only UX tool Adobe sells has been discontinued. Adobe haven’t cancelled it entirely, it’s just not getting new features and merely security fixes. But we all know eventually once people move on, Adobe will kill the product completely.
The mind-boggling thing about all of this is Flash and Dreamweaver will be getting the Creative Cloud treatment, two products in my opinion that should have taken Fireworks place on the discontinuation chopping board. So the real question here is why?
After years of riding the iOS wagon, I’ve jumped off in search of greener pastures: Android. I’ve been quite happy with my iPhone’s for the last few years, but the Galaxy S4 really had me excited for a new phone and my contract was up with Telstra so I decided to upgrade to an S4.
First Impressions This phone is fast, smoother than butter. You open something and it loads instantly. Candy Crush on my iPhone 4 would sometimes take a good 30 seconds to load, on the Galaxy S4 it loads instantly faster like it already loaded before you even opened it. The build quality isn’t iPhone quality, the back plastic feels flimsy and no doubt will be the first part to degrade. This phone is light, it has more sensors and features than a luxury sports car and if you’re new to Android it might be overwhelming.
The talk of a Linux resurgence has been echo’d for many years now, but year after year it never comes true. While Linux does grow a tiny bit each year no doubt, it hasn’t achieved the commercial success of Windows or even Mac OS just yet and Adobe is mostly to blame.
As a developer who isn’t wooed by Apple’s brushed aluminium rubbish bins, I use Windows. I was running a Windows/Ubuntu hybrid setup for a while but after issues with getting file sharing to work between the platforms and trivial things like running a web server in my Linux VM and being able to access it via a web browser in Windows I reverted back to plain old Windows.
“Oh, you work with computers that must pay alright and be a great job”, as a developer or anyone who works in the I.T industry you’ll get this response a lot when you tell people you’re a developer and to a degree it’s somewhat true but being a developer isn’t the walk in the park those unaware of what a developer actually does it seems.
You spend 9 til working for an employer and although you were hired to work 9 am to 5.30 pm Monday to Friday it’s a known thing in the industry that you’re not always guaranteed to leave on-time nor even start at the time you would like. Some places basically make you feel as though you’re not a team player if you try and leave on time too.
Once upon a time there was a blogging application called WordPress and after a few versions and a rabidl fanbase, WordPress expanded outwards. As the community improved it via plugins and themes, the direction WordPress started to head in was more of a content management oriented one. Now it’s time to start viewing WordPress for what it actually is: a powerful PHP framework that can be used to build serious web applications.