Progress Update #1
A few weeks ago I posted about a theme update I was working on for this site, its still going strong – I’ve started phasing into the development stage. The design is still being finalised, but I like to keep things fresh – and work on another small portion of the project (a JavaScript slider using jQuery) will start to need my attention. I haven’t done much for JavaScript and jQuery before, and I really want to improve on that – so its the part of the project which can feasibly be extracted from WP and worked on externally – and it doesn’t need elements of my design to be produced; I can just use place-holder imagery.
In update #2 I’ll cover the finalised design and post that up, though it’ll probably be another week for that. I’m expecting update #3 to cover some of the JavaScript and CSS, update #4 will likely show some WordPress development stages. On that note, WordPress 3.2 is due to shake up the development process – so I’m being cautious as 3.2 is slated for the end of this month.
Finally, I’m considering releasing CarbonWP as a free theme – I’d consider it fairly basic and certainly with room for improvement, but I think its a nice little showcase of how far I’ve come.
0 Comments »Getting Started: HTML5
Now my studies are out of the way for a few months and I feel like I learned a lot with my last project, I’m going to undertake the task of redesigning this site. Its my hope that it’ll be something I can remain relatively proud of for some time to come. In addition to being a redesign, something much cleaner and favourable in style over this current site… it will also feature HTML5, I will be using the HTML5Shiv script to enable support in earlier versions of Internet Explorer.
Its a task I’ve looked forward to for a while, after producing CarbonWP (which can be seen on my personal blog); which I’m thinking of redoing eventually, it was really my largest project in terms of things learnt and practices put in place. In turn I will go about writing articles when I do that – after this site redesign is done. I’ll put up sneak peaks when the design stage is done, though I tend to mix and mash the design and coding stages a little when I start to feel happy with the former.
0 Comments »Firefox 4.0 Released
Firefox 4.0 was officially released yesterday, you can download it here. You can also see some visualisation on the downloads too, which is rather interesting. So to celebrate it, I thought I’d show off some ideal plugins for the average user and the developer too.
For the User
Most recommended for blocking advertisements, though it might be advisable to unblock websites you’d like to support if you can’t subscribe in one way or another!
Arguably if you have NoScript you wouldn’t need ABP or vice-versa. I like it just as an “extra shield”. Of course, permanently unblock sites you can trust.
Perhaps you want to declutter some of the less used buttons from your bars, or add some which you might not need often. Only just discovering this now, it’s a really nice clean little addon which can be hidden away and acts just like another toolbar. Sweet.
I’ll avoid any further plugins, those are the basics I think everyone should have – beyond customising your own layout (often right click on various bars or the like).
For the Developer
The essential developer tool for Firefox, I’ve combined its Inspect tool with the Vertical Toolbar above, very useful.
An ideal companion for FireBug if you do AJAX development, it can interface with some IDEs too (most notably Aptana in my case). To aide in error reporting.
Ideal for taking screenshots of websites and a pretty simple interface to boot. I switched to this after my previous plugin became incompatible without an update in sight.
That might not seem like many, but I like keeping it lightweight. Don’t forge the Customise option when you right click on bars in various places, it can really help you improve the interface to your liking.
0 Comments »News & Updates
I’m still not happy with the site – as always, I’m my worst critic. I’m working on a redesign currently – and quite looking forward to it. That said one of my intentions was to have a scrolling menu that follows the user as they read – I can likely do this in the CSS or even a jQuery option, but the latter would break given the use of something like NoScript. In addition to that, if the menu becomes bloated users with small screens would be unable to read said menu.
So that rules out putting deep categories or page links there unless I can limit myself, leaving not much else. I guess a further option would be pop-out menus. Then we get the new designer dilemma of the hand-held devices, tablets and smart-phones. Something I am unable to test locally easily or cheaply… I could look into media queries and reactive web design, though its relatively new and something I haven’t toyed with yet.
WP Wonders
I have been spending a fairly large amount of my time getting to know the workings of WordPress, digging deep into the topics of administration page creation. I’m not content with just using a template, even though they can be time savers… it means becoming familiar with someone’s work – and that might deprive me of deeper knowledge.
So yes, at last I’ve cracked my big headache and dug deeper into the mines of backend customisation and creation for WordPress plugins and themes. It seems there are umpteen different ways of doing something in WordPress, slowly though they make methods and options which don’t require complex understanding. Whether the codex has the necessary knowledge is still another matter though.
Expect some articles on this front soon.
0 Comments »HTML5 CSS Reset
I have been a regular user of the CSS reset by meyerweb, an alternative to the universal reset – at the cost of a few extra lines. More as an experiment I did an updated version for HTML5 which you can find below. The purpose of a reset is to remove any browser-centric default CSS when making a theme, this reduces the chances of having slightly differing styles cross-browser – because they do use their own custom formatting.
Anyway, it remains mostly unchanged – I just included some of the new elements of HTML5 which may in the near future be problematic. Click beyond the jump to see the code.
Read More »
Object Oriented CSS
So I caught this thanks to net.tutsplus.com – basically I’ve spent half an hour watching a wonderful lecture about minimizing page load with CSS. Its something I’m seriously considering adopting, I’ve courted the idea of reducing my CSS more often than not – this I think makes more than enough sense. I often catch myself defining things more than once for items, which can be extracted to reduce repetition – which is where my love of databases shines a little; but thats beside the point.
You can watch the video by clicking “Read More”. There’s just one thing which is still perplexing me, gzip – I know I can do something similar with PHP but I’m yet to get it to work properly on Apache, either on my development server or on my hosting.
0 Comments »Site Restructure
I have done a little bit of restructuring, I wasn’t particularly happy with having a blog which seemed to centre strongly around gaming – so now its more general than just gaming by definition, it’ll still have a lot of gaming content in it though. Please update your feeds and bookmarks!
http://www.towerdesigns.co.uk/gaming/ is now http://www.towerdesigns.co.uk/blog/ apologies for the issues it’ll cause with RSS feeds.
0 Comments »New Theme
This has been a while coming – and its somewhat long overdue. I wasn’t pleased with the fluid-width pages – the style didn’t seem to gel well at all and it was something I really wanted to alter. So here is the new and improved theme, I’m thinking of doing some heavy configuring with it and making it distribution ready for the public-at-large.
New visitors shouldn’t have to do anything, but anyone who has visited in the past may wish to press Ctrl + F5 to refresh their browser cache. Chances are this theme is far from perfect, but it should be functional on all types of browsers to some extent. I haven’t fully tested IE6 yet – and I am dreading that moment! I have learnt a fair few new tricks with this skin, and it will get more fleshed out – I have some ideas on improvements.
0 Comments »New Projects and Philosophical Topics
I’m somewhat thrilled to have a few projects now on the go, they aren’t necessarily being paid-for but I will likely end up using them for my portfolio. One is likely going to end up an e-business, the other is a reskin for the Exilers Gaming Community. It gives me a chance to figure out my workflow and build up my processes.
Some semi-personal meanderings beyond the click.
1 Comment »Itch Needs Scratching
It could not have come at a worse time, my college projects have mounted up – when I thought I was doing some pretty good (and fairly quick) progress on them… why does time go so quickly?! Furthermore I have started investigating the Model-View-Controller methodology (aka MVC) – it has now become that itch, the problem being that I only have a matter of two weeks to get most of my college work finished (deadlines weren’t updated from last year on the college site).
So I’m doing college work, that has odours of MVC in it (but much more messy and impractical) all I want to do is spend a couple of days making an MVC and then putting it to the test on this site – which should be noted is also a “big project” for a real company. Yet that large refactoring will just have to wait until after the deadlines, though should provide a lovely experiment (being that it is just a prototype anyway).
I will have to see how it goes, but its proving to be very exciting for me – learning at quite the rapid rate, though its side effect is having too much information going through my head which wants to be put to use. I will likely post on the other-side of the hectic schedule – I’ll try and get a guide to the basic MVC going in PHP too; keep an eye out.
0 Comments »
