I realise I haven’t written anything useful for ages, and I’m not about to break that run now.

However Chris Unitt writes lots of useful things all the time, e.g. http://www.chrisunitt.co.uk/2012/11/links-for-november-2012/

Some things I’ve found useful of late:

Crowdbooster (http://crowdbooster.com/)
Social media insights

Sparrow Mail (http://sparrowmailapp.com/)
A really good, lightweight, email app for Mac

Crazy Egg (http://www.crazyegg.com/)
Heatmapping etc

So, the weekend before last we held the first ever Culture Hack North at NTI Leeds. We played host to about 35 developers, 7 speakers and 30 talk attendees. I think it went incredibly well, of course there are things we could’ve done better/different and I’m determined to be ruthless in identifying what those things are so that next time the event can be event better, but for a first go I think it went pretty damn well.

So, some quick thoughts, these are just my thoughts – I’m still in the process of gathering and collating feedback from all the attendees.

The Good:

The venue; was awesome, seriously, I cannot thank Linda Broughton enough for letting us use Old Broadcasting House. It was perfect
The developers; bloody hell these people are clever/creative and then some.
The hacks; there were some absolutely amazing ideas executed … Read More »

The entire event is being live-blogged (partly by me, partly by some entertaining people who can write) here http://culturehacknorth.co.uk/

I spend a lot of time moaning about things so I thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth is and did something constructive. As a result I have spent the last few months putting my energies into organising Culture Hack North.

What’s a Culture Hack? Well, I’ve done my best to answer that (in my usual succinct, to-the-point style…) here http://theculturevulture.co.uk/blog/radar/what-is-a-culture-hack/

The event which takes place on 12-13th November at NTI Leeds will bring together developers from across the region with data and representatives from organisations including, Opera North, Sheffield Theatres, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Manchester Museums, Leeds Museums, Pilot Theatre, Museums Sheffield, Cornerhouse, Breeze Festival, Leeds Libraries and others.

You can find out a whole lot more info here: www.culturehacknorth.co.uk

Oh and here are some more news articles and blogs on the matter:
wired.co.uk
Read More »

I had intended these to be far more regular than this, must try harder. A mixture of tips/tools/reviews/articles that you’ll hopefully find useful, I did.

20 cheatsheets for designers and developers http://designshack.co.uk/articles/freebies/weekly-freebies-20-awesome-cheatsheets-for-designers-and-developers/
Review of cross-browser testing tools http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/07/a-dozen-cross-browser-testing-tools/
3 rules of thumb for web development http://my.opera.com/karlcow/blog/3-rules-of-thumb-for-web-development
How loading times affect your bottom line http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
How to make users scroll down your page http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/scrolling-tips/
50+ useful CSS tools and generators http://www.noupe.com/css/50-useful-css-tools-and-generators-for-developers.html

Right, I’ve realised that I spend a lot of time reading ‘interesting stuff’ and thought it might be useful if I share some of the best things here on a semi-regular basis.

To start off with are some useful CSS things;

Nth-child CSS selector: http://css-tricks.com/useful-nth-child-recipies/
Check to see if things like nth-child CSS selectors are supported in a particular browser: http://caniuse.com/
Provides feedback on your CSS code: http://csslint.net/

Useful little piece of WordPress code, plays a particularly useful part of a dynamic featured post slideshow that I was going to detail at some point. To reference the  set upload directory url in your WordPress theme:

<?php $upload_dir = wp_upload_dir(); ?>

<?php echo $upload_dir['baseurl']; ?>

more info here http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_upload_dir

Wow, how’s that for a snappy blog title!

Ok, I realise it sounds slightly dull but utilising RSS feeds can be a useful and relatively straight-forward way to include dynamic information within a site.

I’ve searched far and wide for various RSS integration tools and my favourite is by far and away a RSS parsing class written in php called Simplepie (http://simplepie.org/). Although this hasn’t been developed since version 1.2 was released in 2009 it remains the most straightforward and robust solution I’ve found.

Once you’ve downloaded and included the simplepie.inc file it’s so simple (excuse the pun) to use (here is a very good tutorial on how to set up a simple page featuring one feed). If you want to include multiple feeds there is some helpful info here.

But this is the best solution … Read More »

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 »