Tablet devices really irritate me, I can’t stand them. I own an iPad, but it just lays around collecting dust occasionally it’ll be moved to a safe place, otherwise it just sits on my desk and sometimes even my cat will sit on it.
The iPad was a gift for Christmas from my employer, I had every intention of using it to use on the train rides in the morning on the way to work instead of carrying around my Dell XPS 15z laptop, but I never actually ended up doing that for you see, all tablets have one problem: they’re touch screen devices. While the Surface from Microsoft has an optional keyboard cover, it’s still a touch screen device at the end of the day.
Every web developer you will mostly encounter (a good portion of them anyway) is a liar. They’re lying to themselves, they’re lying to their colleagues and family, they’re lying to their employers. The biggest lie is being told since, “No honey, your butt doesn’t look big in those tight jeans”
What am I talking about? Javascript. Most developers if asked would tell you that they know Javascript quite well, but don’t know it as well as they should and actually really only know the frameworks they’re using, usually jQuery. This leads me to these questions: do many people actually know Javascript and have frameworks created a generation of developers who don’t know the underlying language they’re using? You’ve learned the framework, but do you understand the language?
If you’ve ever had to develop a form in WordPress before then you’d know without Gravity Forms it’s a very painful process. Recently while using the Gravity Forms plugin I was asked to develop a form with infield labels instead of the standard HTML label on-top. Out-of-the-box Gravity Forms supports no such functionality, so I did what any good developer would do and created a plugin and uploaded it to Github.
There’s a universal hate for Flash amongst many web developers and it has had a bumpy ride over the years and it’s completely understandable given the headaches that is known for causing, but rumours of Flash’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Just because Apple doesn’t support Flash doesn’t mean it’s dying, Adobe are doing great things for HTML5 and CSS3 including changing and adapting Flash to the current state of development.
In the last year and a half there had been a trend of creating single page websites and navigating within the sections of the page using anchor links and some clever Javascript to add in parallax effects and smooth animated scrolling and although the resulting combined effect of a single page layout with clever use of parallax effects does look nice, it is SEO murder.
When a search engine comes along to your site they’ll see one massive page stuffed with content and not a site comprised of more than one page. While you can write a clever description for your page and use title tags, alt tags and every other trick out of the SEO handbook a search engine will still be indexing just one page: it’s a relatively fruitless effort.
This is an annoying bug that has plagued WordPress for as long as I can remember, it’s rare that I run into it because I rarely need to have individual parts of a site control the number of posts I need to display with paging.
The Problem: I have a custom post type called “project” as well as a blog section which just uses the default “post” post type. For projects I enabled archive support and then created a custom archive file called archive-project.php. I want to limit the number of projects being displayed per page to just 1 without changing the value in the WordPress reading options screen because I need that for the blog section, so naturally you’d expect to be able to do the following before the loop.
When I say popular I mean 17,000 visitors a month which to me is a lot of traffic for a blog I sometimes don’t update for a week or two at a time, I am of course talking about the music blog Kill Hipsters of which I designed and built all by myself and I’m not even a designer. In the space of roughly a year and a half I’ve managed to take Kill Hipsters from just another music blog to something decent without any promotion or effort, just commitment.
A while ago I wrote a blog post comparing Codeigniter with FuelPHP (a framework that was spurn from some popular Codeigniter developers), that article has since become outdated so I thought I would do a follow-up to my original post to see if anything has changed and the gap has been lessened between the two frameworks.
Since I wrote that post I’ve used FuelPHP for quite a few personal client projects in place of WordPress. I’ve also used Laravel and even attempted to revisit Kohana which I’ve never been a fan of in the time-frame since writing the original comparison.
It’s no secret that adding in custom fields functionality to a premium theme (if you’re a premium theme developer) is sometimes a pain in the ass, especially if you’re not using some kind of third party custom fields framework.
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress gives you unrivalled custom fields functionality for an alarmingly low price of $0. There is also the option of buying addons for the plugin which cost $25 each and allow for unlimited use/bundling with a plugin.
WordPress already has an in-built function for determining if the current page is using a particular page template using the function “is_page_template()” while this function definitely serves a purpose.
Sometimes in an instance where you are using one loop file as opposed to multiple loop files you want to check if you’re on a page that is using a page template but don’t care what type of page template it is, this is where the function I’ve created below comes in.