Journal
Some ideas, advice, information and the occasional rant
14Dec
When developing a website I have always worked on a live development server. This allows me to build the site on the exact server setup to that the live site will run. When developing this of course can be a slow process due to the constant uploading of changes to view their impact on the website.
I’ve always viewed installing a local server such as Apache to be a complicated and messy affair. However after reading the Installing WordPress Locally post by the WebDesignerWall the process did not seem as complicated as I once imagined.
Continue reading “Premium WordPress Theme: Installing XAMPP”
9Dec
Back in July I finally decided to sign up to twitter, since then I’ve tweeted 486 times, followed 44 people and have 31 followers. For Twitter these figures aren’t much but this is one social network I’m glad I signed up to. Below I’ve highlighted some of the benefits and limitations I’ve come across since using twitter:
Benefits
1. Knowledge Base
Twitter is full of bright minded people with more specialist knowledge than can be easily accessed via Google. When asking a question on Twitter you can expect a near instant reply. This is best observed with a large number of followers, but for the right answer all you need is one.
Continue reading “Twitter: Is 140 characters enough?”
4Dec
As a Web Designer living in North Yorkshire I’ve been caught in the fantastic disruption caused by the overnight snow. After spending well over an hour trying to get to work, I finally gave up and headed home after travelling only a mile. I now have a day free, and have to find something to fill it.
Below are the things I thought I could do and thought I’d share:
Continue reading “A Web Designer’s Snow Day”
3Dec
This October (2008) saw the SitePoint publication of ‘Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong’ written by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank. Though I’ve yet to read the book its contents have been making there way onto an array of web development sites such as thinkvitamin.com. What the book essentially aims to promote is a way of building web layouts using a techniques known as CSS Tables. Without getting into too much depth the techniques allows you to use CSS to define layouts in the same way you’d expect to code a HTML table but using CSS attributes such as display:table-row and display:table-cell.
It is hoped this technique will make it easier for those people still building websites in tables to move to CSS but it’s also seen as an alternative to using float. Floats in CSS were primarily for wrapping text around images, and not for layout. As such this led to issues such as the IE6 double margin issue and the clearfix problem when people started using them for layout.
Continue reading “Why is all I know about CSS Wrong?”