I finally received my suit in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It came beautifully packaged and the suit looks amazing, the quality is so good. So what ended up happening?
After a million emails back and forward with the non-existent customer service about why my order wasn’t showing up in my order history (to this day my order still doesn’t show up), my suit just randomly turned up. I wasn’t sent any email giving me a tracking code, nor an email to say it was on its way. I’m not sure if the trouble I went through was just unfortunate timing during server issues or if Indochino is always like this. The bottom line is I got my suit and on time as well, there were no delays. It would have been nice to know it was on its way so I didn’t keep sending emails to the one person customer support team though.
Recently while doing my daily trawl through Hacker News I came across this blog post titled, Sim Cards Must Die. The article claims that one day we’ll choose phone networks like we do wireless networks and can change plans whenever we want. The sim card is quite possibly one of the best things to have ever been produced and used in the telecommunication industry. Could you imagine buying a phone, then choosing a network like it’s a wifi hotspot only to find your new shiny Apple phone deliberately comes with lack of support for that provider you wanted to use?
Recently on a client WordPress website I needed a simple way to get Vimeo video thumbnails via video ID. I couldn’t find anything readily available or even a snippet, so I created a function that helps out and even has a return or echo option as well.
[code]function get_vimeo_thumb($videoid, $size = “large”, $return = false)
{
$imgid = $videoid;
$hash = unserialize(file_get_contents(“http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/$imgid.php"));
$the_thumb = “;
switch ($size) {
case ‘small’:
$the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_small’];
break;
case ‘medium’:
$the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_medium’];
break;
case ’large’:
$the_thumb = $hash[0][’thumbnail_large’];
break;
}
After wanting to order a suit from online store Indochino for a while now an upcoming event made me decide to take the leap and order one. I had only read great things about Indochino so being sceptical or worried about forking over a few hundred dollars wasn’t an issue.
Choosing and creating your suit is quite easy. Providing measurements is a rather tedious process but you only have to do it once and then save your measurements. Each different measurement is a step in a modal box with a helpful guide video showing you where to measure. It’s a beautiful process, well thought out and easy to understand.
Recently I was working on an e-commerce website that had a custom modal box show a Youtube embed. The Youtube video is embedded using an iFrame (seems to be the best approach for embedding) and a close button need to be absolutely positioned above the video to close the modal.
After scratching my head for what felt like ages, reading documentation I found the solution. Append ?wmode=transparent to the end of your video URL, see below for an example.
I recently worked on a project where the wonderful jQuery Isotope plugin was needed to sporadically reposition items for depending on the height of the browser and the size of each item being positioned (in my case, unordered list items). Everything was going well, looking great in Firefox and surprisingly IE until I had a look in Google Chrome.
Basically what was happening is that some of the items are being stacked on top of each other and looked completely broken, sometimes several of these items would stack. The fix? Well after much trial and error the following code in the main JS script on the site within a DOM ready call was all that was needed. The issue is due to the fact that Isotope applies before everything has loaded, so waiting for the page to load before applying fixes the issue in Chrome and any other browser.
There seems to be a lot of outdated code out there from WordPress 2.x days on how to redirect a user to any page of your choosing after logging in, the below code will redirect a user to the homepage directly after logging in without taking them to the usual admin panel (in-case you have a custom page you want users to see).
This post is more of a self-reference for future projects, but thought I would share.
I am a developer, not a designer/developer which to me is a fallacy. There is no such thing as a designer and developer, you’re using two different parts of your brain for both tasks. You’re either a design or you’re a developer. Anyway, that discussion is for another time.
Having said that, recently a music blog I operate needed a redesign and because I am cheap and like making things hard on myself, I decided to re-design the entire site myself. You all know my stance on web design, so naturally I used Adobe Fireworks and not Photoshop to design the site.
I think the last straw has been drawn and I’m no longer going to use Firefox as my default web browser any more. The rapid release cycle decision only played a small part in my decision, the main reason is the fight to remove versioning numbers from the browser about box, seriously?
Instead of talking about things of substance, there is a current debate whether or not to make Firefox a versionless web browser and just show if you’re using the latest version or not in the about dialogue instead of the version number, the version number will still be available but not shown in the about dialog any more.
If there is one thing that I could name besides the extensible plugin system that I love about WordPress it would have to be the theming and templating system. Most of my projects consist of using WordPress or Codeigniter, and one thing that I find myself wishing Codeigniter had was a template and theming library that worked similarly to how WordPress works.
WordPress works on the premise of the following files’ header, footer, sidebar and index page as well as the existence of a style.css file that defines the themes meta info such as the name, description, author and descriptive tags. If Codeigniter had something like this in the form of a library, that would be awesome.