I've been working full-time as a web developer since 2009, previously creating my first website with Microsoft's Frontpage in 2002 (remember that?!).
Apart from a taking a few modules on an Open University course, I've gained 99% of my skills autodidactically.
To do this...
These days autoloading PHP classes is the industry standard and if you write your plugins using Object Oriented code then you should look to using it too.
I've just re-factored my Affiliate Hoover plugin
My last job at a large multi-national company before my contract expired was to code their Russian website. A major problem that their Russian team faced was not having the resources to translate everything on the English language website or to be able to keep abreast of updates if the content on the English l...
On a theme I have been working on there was the need to create dynamic metaboxes for a basic jobs listing section. The listing page had four different fields for every job: Title, description, location and date. The user needed the ability to add, edit or delete jobs.
Coding this feature in...
Just recently I was looking at some of my old code. For a website build I had used HTML5 form validation with a JavaScript fallback. The form itself was a long one and I had created a module that saved the individual form values into an objects memory which was then validated in the next method. Something like...
Although I use a Mac at home, I also use Windows and Linux. For the latter I use an old CRT monitor. It weighs more than an elephant, but the colours and font-rendering is excellent. When LSD screens first appeared the picture quality was generally very poor, but new models, if you pay the right money, are fin...
One day IE7 and IE8 will die out and be a distant memory just like Netscape 4. JavaScript libraries like jQuery won't disappear but they'll be a lot less essential when all browsers conform to W3C standards.
However, what won't die out is the need for a JavaScript animation library. This r...
If you are creating a Wordpress website and you know PHP then it is good practice to avoid third-party pl...
Just recently I found myself returning to an old style sheet that I had coded last year. It was vanilla CSS written without the help of a pre-processor.
Locating and rewriting the CSS involved far too much scrolling through 2,000 lines of code for my liking. It stuck me that if the code w...
I rarely read long articles on the desktop instead preferring to print them out. I don't know if there are statistics out there, but I would imagine that this is a common practice.
Thankfully there is the wonderful Readability browser plugin that lets us change an article into a beautifully...