You know you need a coffee when…
…you spend half an hour trying to work out why a simple change you’re making to a PHP class is having no effect on your code, bang your head repeatedly against the desk in bemusement and then finally spot the problem.
You’ve been reviewing the effects of your change at the wrong URL.
Slap! I’m putting 3 spoonfulls of sugar in this one, might wake me up a bit. And yes, I did stop giving up cofee.
If like me you often have ideas for blog posts but never get round to actually writing them, you’ll have a bunch of ‘drafts’ in your CMS of choice.
Well, it’s time to clear out the drafts, but before I delete them all for good I though I might summarise some of the less pointless topics in a little blog ‘medley’.
Opera is kinda good; spawned by the realisation that this ain’t a half bad browser when I recently downloaded the latest copy sans banner ads, although I can’t see it drawing me away from Firefox, there are way too many great extensions for that spunky little thing.
Ditching Skype in favor of a fixed line; What I’m in the process of doing right now, to cut a long story short(ish)… I bought a Skype handset, bought a SkypeIn number and thought hey, technology is great, this will do my business proud. 3 months later I’m wishing I’d not been so ambitious, the line quality is very often below acceptable and on many occasions clients simply cannot get through and resort to calling the mobile. Goodbye Skype, Hello BT (Although there’s another whole story about why I went with BT over my local Cable provider).
Challenging Mamories Memories; I stumbled across some old websites I designed way back when I started out in the industry (1997). These sites were all based aroud ‘challenges’ and were mostly done as freebies by the agency I worked for at the time to help build a portfolio. I guess you could say these are the sites that I cut my teeth on (espeically considering I was using Frames, Tables and Frontpage – Oh how things have progressed!).
Drew beat me to the punch; writing up a nice article about Auto Selecting navigation for 24 ways. A trick he tought me at Mirashade and one which I like to refer to as The neatest CSS trick in the book.
Setting up my LAMP server – Part 1, well I wrote that some time back, I started writing Setting up my LAMP server, Part 2 but got bored. Sorry guys, maybe next year.
Well, this will probably be my last post now until the new year, I’m taking next week off to spend some quality time with the family before getting stuck into 2006. See you all on the other side. Have a good one. :)
Great news today for anyone who’s fancied giving the Expression Engine CMS a shot but has never been able to swallow the rather reasonable price tag. pMachine have just released a free ‘Core’ version which includes many of the great features included in the full commercial version.
I’ve been using Expression Engine for a couple of weeks now on a new project and I must say I’m very impressed. It has it’s nuances, but it’s a rock solid approach to Content Management which allows you to easily mould it’s form to your clients requirements. Oh and I almost forgot to mention that they released a new commercial version too, 1.4 features over 70 improvements and bug fixes.
So, things are getting pretty busy over at Nine Four and I’m on the lookout for freelance ASP (urgh!) developers for a possible upcoming project.
No doubt many of you will deny that you can write ASP, wanting to be cool and trendy and all that, you’d probably much rather tell me that you’re using Ruby on Rails. However…
If you think you have the skillz, and have some great ASP examples in your portfolio, drop us an email [studio at ninefour dot co dot uk] and please include an indication of your hourly rate.
A while back the lads over at salted gave us a sneak peek at CSSVista, their standalone Windows application for web developers which allows you to edit raw CSS whilst live previewing the results in a tabbed IE and Firefox browser interface.
Well CSSVista is now available, even better, it’s free. Go grab yourself a copy and give it a whirl. I think this liitle application has some great potential! :)
