Photo Credit: “iLove” by julian-

As a programmer/web-designer I dip into a diverse range of programming languages and frameworks. I often find that I get locked into a specific coding grammar/syntax and that it is then difficult to switch to a new one. This is when I find the following cheat sheets invaluable (and indeed comforting).

• Subversion (SVN) - 293 KB PDF
• Regular Expressions (RegEx) - 648 KB PDF
• mod_rewrite - 563 KB PDF
• PHP - 556 KB PDF
• CSS - 316 KB PDF
• HTML - 563 KB PDF
• Ruby On Rails - 753 KB PDF
• HTML Character Entities - 959 KB PDF
• JavaScript - 453 KB PDF
• MySQL - 348 KB PDF
• RGB Hexadecimal Colour Chart - 199 KB PDF
• OS X / Linux / Unix
• Photoshop CS3

Photo Credit: “404 sign, Love Hotel, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan” by gruntzooki

After reading Ian Lloyd’s The Perfect 404, I’ve revamped my “Not Found” error page to be a little bit more useful because, as Lloyd writes, “a user-friendly website will give you a helping hand.” Previously my 404 page simply stated that an error had occured and offered links to the home-page and archives. I knew I could do better than that! Continue Reading…

Daily recipes to cook with WordPress.

One of the great things about WordPress is that it doesn’t limit how content is displayed, but provides a ‘framework’ of ways to do so. Even better, it’s possible to change the display according to the content. This tutorial describes how to make posts be displayed within ‘the loop’ according to their content - or contextual differences.

Photo Credit: “Last Days of Autumn” by don2g

It’s that time of year when the trees turn golden, the sun stays close to the horizon and the early morning mist rolls down off the hills. That’s right folks, autumn is here again (fall for our American friends). The days are getting shorter and the nights longer and you’re likely to spend more time indoors than out.

In short, it’s the perfect time to “reboot” your weblog with a new design or feature set. Why not take inspiration from nature’s glorious autumnal colours and refresh your website. To help you along the way, I’ve put together this little list of website design “thingies” that you might want to integrate into an autumn reboot.
Continue Reading…

JavaScript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user’s experience. Here are 10 simple and clever JavaScript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any website.

Make your WordPress-powered website even better with these great sidebar widgets.

I’ve made some (more) tweaks to the design of this website over the past few days. They’re mostly little things and, unless you visit the site often, you probably wouldn’t notice them unless I were to point them out. In fact, in comparing the design today with the template I relaunched with on the 28th June, 2008, it’s amazing to see just how much the design has changed — while still sharing a common overall aesthetic. But then this is how web-design should be isn’t it? A website evolves with small, subtle, incremental changes, yet retains its “brand” by remaining true to its original design.

While I was applying the revisions I started thinking about web-design. I considered the current state of the art, how far we’ve come (I started building websites right back in the beginning when IBrowse on the Commodore Amiga really was cutting edge), standards compliance and the W3C, etc.

The catalyst for these thoughts was my adoption of a simple little CSS3 property known as border-radius, which is used to produce the RoundRects that, depending on which browser you’re using, may or may not be visible to you when you visit this website. If you’re using a Gecko or WebKit based browser, then you’ll see this website exactly as I intended - complete with RoundRects. With other browsers you’ll only see an approximation of the design I intended.
Continue Reading…

Apple is one of the coolest brand names in technology, so no wonder their site should adhere to modern web design standards. Divs, classes, no tables, media types, ajax libraries, separated stylesheets, extensive code organization, interesting varying layouts, it’s all there for you to learn from.

Creating tabbed interfaces suddenly becomes a piece-of-cake when using the Tabs function in the jQuery UI library. It can be utilized to create completely unique interfaces without having to be a coding God - using only one line of code!