A bit of house-keeping (for wont of a better word) first, I’ll be moving this blog in the next couple of weeks to integrate with my website www.bigthingsandlittlethings.co.uk. When I first set this blog up I wasn’t entirely sure what form it was going to take but I’ve managed to keep it quite web-relevant (thus far) so it seems silly to keep two separate identities running when really they are parts of the same thing….

Now, boring stuff over, on with the blog.

This isn’t a hugely technical blog this time but covers a few CSS-related things that I have found make a big difference to workflow and just generally making things a bit easier to organise and manage.

I came across the notion of CSS ‘global resets’ a few years ago, to me they make a great deal of sense, … Read More »

I’ve spent the best part of this morning working out how to add a post’s category to its h2 tag’s class – which then allows me to do category-specific styling. Essentially I wanted each headline to be a different colour based on its category – simple result, slightly convoluted solution.

Anyways, it took a while so I thought I’d share it here to save others the hassle!

You first need to add the following to your functions.php file

<?php
function the_category_unlinked($separator = ‘ ‘) {
$categories = (array) get_the_category();

$thelist = ”;
foreach($categories as $category) {    // concate
$thelist .= $separator . $category->category_nicename;
}

echo $thelist;
}
?>

Basically this takes the results of the usual the_category() query – i.e. an unordered list – and strips out all the list formatting and presents the results as a nice list of the categories, with each category separated by a space.

You can then add this … Read More »

A while ago, on my personal blog, I mused about things you should consider when you have that epiphany…”we need a website”, worth a read I’d say (but then I wrote it, so I would say that wouldn’t I…) http://ashmannblogs.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/so-you-think-you-want-a-website-4-things-to-consider/

Friday saw the launch of the Jane Tomlinson Appeal’s latest charity challenge, a 2,500 mile bike ride across Europe from Istanbul to Leeds – and we designed and built the website which can be seen here www.istanbultoleeds.co.uk.

I’ll post a full blog about it all later this week.

I’m currently working on a new site for a client who requires a CMS. After a fair amount of research and based on my own experiences they decided that WordPress fitted the bill. So I needed to develop a bespoke theme for them.

Now I’ve messed around with tweaking wordpress themes before and it is pretty intuative. Unfortunately last night the whole thing came crashing down and I had to battle with the (apparently infamous) ‘white screen of death’ – which usually seems to be caused by a php bug. These bugs can be as simple and innocuous as an additional line break in your code (WordPress doesn’t like space it would seem). I’ve not yet tracked down the source of my ‘white screen’ issues (EDIT - I have since found the source of my bugs, it was caused by such … Read More »