For years the ancient (and some would say instinctive) art of tweeting was restricted to the avian species of the sky, but recently a service has come about that allows us humans to partake in the practise. You might have heard of this little company, they call themselves Twitter, and have provided an extensive API for us web-folk to play with their service. At this point you might be wondering...
Contact pages are usually one of the basic building blocks of any website, and while many simple feature an email address for spam bots to pick up and use, or even a handy 'mailto' link, the best ones feature a proper contact form. To make a bulletproof one we're going to need some thick glass and a riot shield PHP and JavaScript. Having those bad-boys on our side will ensure...
I recently posted an article on Animating a Site's Loading using jQuery - a handy technique to spice up any site. But an issue that became apparent using this technique, along with some other animation methods, is that sometimes user interaction can prevent loading and other animations from finishing correctly, and possibly lead to pages that look broken because of it. This is the sort of thing that only user-testing...
Using Photoshop to design websites it great - it allows for pixel-perfect designs that can then be styled to your hearts-content using all the powerful tools included in the application. But sometimes it's nice to add a human touch, and have hand-drawn art in our designs. Now I personally don't do this all too often, but the other day when a client asked for a design that I simply couldn't...
Today I came across an interesting problem that no amount of Google searches could solve. So I had to knuckle down and come up with a solution - and surprisingly it was much more simple that it had first appeared. So the problem is hiding an element when a user is scrolling - it might be a menu, a header, or a picture of my cat, Sophie. Either way we...
There are a lot of things we can do as web designers to improve the UX of a site, much of the time subtle animations can be added to add a bit of finesse to a page, and a new trend is that of adding animations to the loading of pages to make it look a bit better. So what do I mean by 'loading animations'? I'm not talking about...
Recently a number of people in the web community, specifically developers have been complaining about Adobe Muse, a website creation tools for people without coding knowledge. And while I agree that Adobe doesn't know what the community wants, I think the reactions to this tool have been a little too big. Here are my musings (I couldn't resist that badboy). First up Muse isn't a new concept. In fact there...
jQuery is the one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks available; it enables developers to write code that is easy to understand but that also allows really powerful functionality. There are a boat-load of tutorials out there on jQuery, and the documentation is awesome, but in this article I'll go over the things that all beginners should know about jQuery. 1) Document.ready One thing that often catches newbies out is...
When manipulating strings in JavaScript a useful method to know about is the replace() method. It take 2 parameters - the needle and the haystack. So if you wanted to replace 'cat' with 'dog' it might look something like this: var myString = "The cat jumped over the fence"; var myNewString = myString.replace("cat","dog"); document.write(myNewString); Great it worked. You can also use regular expressions for the needle if you're into that kind of...
When you've got a great idea for a product its often hard to resist buying up the domain name for it, but what do you put there? A coming soon logo? A paragraph about what you're making? How about allowing visitors to sign-up to hear updates when the products becomes public? The last point is the most useful because not only does it let you keep track of early interest,...
Now the words 'hyperlink' and 'sexy' rarely frequent the same sentence in my household, but something which appears to have come into fashion lately (namely I'm using it ) is the fading in of the hover state on hyperlinks. So instead of simply specifying the :hover state in your CSS, you use JavaScript or CSS3 to spice up the whole hovering thing. Here's what we will be creating, now lets...
A common feature of desktop applications is that when a user prompts a potentially destructive action, the program will display a confirmation dialog to ensure that the user doesn't go and do something silly. To do this we will use some basic JavaScript. In this tutorial I will be using jQuery to display and manipulate our elements, but this technique uses good old' JavaScript to get the job done. So...
Object-orientated programming is a concept that is more likely to pop up when programming desktop applications rather than those for the web. But once you start using OOP you will wonder why you ever used procedural programming (that's simply using a program that calls a load of functions/procedures), well maybe not completely - OOP has its place on the web, and in this tutorial we will explore a practical usage...
A problem that many web developers face is how to protect their assets. Specifically ones that users are supposed to pay for - say a video training site for instance, you don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry being able to guess the URL, or worse crack open the source code to find an unprotected URL. IF this happens companies can lose a lot of money, so it's kind of...
As with most things there are a bunch of tutorials on the internet about how to search a UITableView, but when I was attempting to implement my search I hit a brick wall with it and ended back where I started - Apple's developer docs - the code from which will be used in this here tutorial. I trawled through many tutorials and cannibalised a load of code, but finally...
Calendars are useful for a wide variety of things, least of all planning and recording events that are going to happen in the future, and while it may not be obvious at first, there a are a number of challenges in creating a dynamic calendar with PHP. In this tutorial I will show you the basics of what you need to get started. See an example of what we will...
Continuing the series of learning web development from scratch is my introduction to CSS. In the video I go over how to add style to the killer robots site and introduce simple CSS to enable you to make your sites look awesome! As always leave a comment below if you need anything clarifying, and you can download the source code or view the demo using the links below. View Demo...
I am often asked where to find quality tutorials on beginning learning HTML and all that jazz, so I thought I'd make a video! This is the first in a series I call "From Scratch" that aims to teach total newbies how to make web-pages, I hope the video explains it all well enough and you get something from it. As always comment below if you need any help. You...
Although I don't visit archive pages very often, when I do I like it when I don't have to trawl through pages and pages of 10 posts using tiny navigation buttons at the bottom of the page. A great way to prevent this annoyance for your users is to use AJAX to dynamically append posts to the end of your archive list. To do this in WordPress we need to...
To me .htaccess files are black magic - one letter wrong and you get internal server errors bouncing around everywhere, so when it came to URL re-writing (more specifically removal of file extensions) I was a little tired of getting "Error 500" messages. But I finally managed to manipulate the dark magic that lyes deep within the realms of the kingdom of .htaccess file, and created a system whereby I...
