Blog
The old fashioned world of print
I printed out a web page today. Sometimes I like to do this. It means I can get my colouring pens out and highlight things, doodle immature stuff in the margins, make notes and generally read long articles without staring at a screen for hours. Print is not dead: not by any means. But people […]
WordPress themes: a presentation
Last night I presented at the Cambridge WordPress Meetup on the topic of WordPress themes. Here’s my presentation (.pdf, 63KB) If you have any questions about the presentation, get in touch and I’ll see what I can do to help. Photo: Flickr, NASA on The Commons
Reordering WordPress comment form fields
So, in WordPress 4.4 there’s been an update to how form fields work. In order to help with tab orders, and in a kind of logical step, the comment textarea has been moved before the other form fields. Now, the logic for this does make some sense: when you come to make a comment, you’re […]
Please stop using collaborative tools
Over the years I’ve used a number of different IM, chat, and collaborative tools, and the current trend seems to be to use Slack to work on projects. I’ve got one thing to say about this: stop it. OK, I should clarify. Tools like Slack, BaseCamp, Trello, even Skype, Google Hangouts and others (there’s instant […]
Who hosts you?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about hosting. Hosting is a vital part of your site’s infrastructure. In simple terms, hosting refers to where your website “lives” – the physical computer it’s stored on. In order for your website to be available to your customers when they need it, you need hosting which is reliable, […]
[Solved]: Cannot read property ‘selectionStart’ of undefined – wpLink issues with 4.2
So…. that was a difficult couple of hours! My Javascript has never been my strongest suit (I really should do something about that) so when the trusty bit of code I had to use the WordPress native “add link” dialogue started bumming out on me – on a lot of sites I’d recently built – […]
Making the most of your feature panel: WHY/what
Most websites nowadays have a big feature panel (“hero”, call to action, banner, call it what you will). They’re great for catching the eye and communicating immediately to new visitors. But they have a serious limitation in most cases: they have limited space for content. You don’t want your feature panel to extend below the […]
Multilingual sites and custom themes
Just recently I’ve been doing some work on sites which needed translation. It’s not an uncommon thing, but it’s the first time I’ve really been involved in this kind of job, and I’ve learned a lot. Firstly, I’ve discovered that some SEO people out there are very, very out of date in their thinking. Your […]
Don’t be scared, it’s easy
Some of the most frustrating emails for developers to receive are the ones which start “I’d like to do x, but I’m too scared of breaking anything…”. We’ve put hours or days of work into building a site with a content management so you can run things yourself, and now you won’t even try? Of […]
Making WordPress embedded video responsive
So… making video responsive is a bit of a pain, isn’t it? iframes especially. I’ve been working on a site where this was an issue and I came across the following link: Smashing Magazine: Making Embedded Content Responsive Which is great. Except… well, if you’re using the built in WordPress embed (i.e. pasting the YouTube […]