Skeleton, a bare bones WordPress theme
Several months back I wrote a custom bare bones theme. I had tried a few starter themes in the past, but none of them really pleased me. I wanted something as bare bones as possible, so I decided to create my own. It’s worked out well for me and now it’s time to share it. There is nothing but the basics here, this is intended for theme developers who want to bypass the boring part of setting up a starter them.
jQuery: How to get links to work in toggled or dynamic content
jQuery still never ceases to amaze me. The developers of this fantastic library seem to have thought of everything, and the only real challenge for us end users is hunting through the API. Recently I was tasked with creating slide out toggle boxes that had links embedded within them. The problem was that the animation would be triggered before the links, thus rending them useless. Luckily like many things with jQuery the fix is simple and I will demonstrate with two examples.
My newest website
Over the past few months I have been working on a new project. I really wanted to try something different, something I personally enjoy. I find writing about anything you are not actually passionate about can be a real drag, so with that in mind, I picked a topic I knew I could write well for, get excited about and stay motivated for. With that said it’s time to reveal my newest website ThemePassion.
Firebug for IE
Tonight I stumbled across Firebug Lite and was ecstatic to find that all the features I use the most are available not just for IE, but pretty much any modern browser. There are other debuggers out there, but I know a lot of people really love Firebug. This fantastic tool really lets you get under the hood and see what’s going on, it’s saved me countless hours, but what would save me even more time and effort is if it was available for the browser where 95% my problems occur; Internet Explorer. Firebug was also number one on my post “14 killer web design and development tools for the Mac“.
The secrets to using custom web fonts
If you are a web designer then you’re already fully aware of the limitations surrounding the usage of fonts on the web. For years we have basically had two reliable options, use a standard web based font that is included on most operating systems with a few fall back fonts, or images. For headlines, custom fonts and anything fancy images were the only way to go, but that’s all about to change.
How to use Drush with Drupal
I was recently at Drupal Camp Toronto which is a conference on Drupal. It was a fantastic place to learn about what other modules and strategies people are using with Drupal. Having only created a couple of Drupal sites myself, it was great to be around so many people that build Drupal sites for a living. Out of everything I learned at Drupal Camp the single most amazing tool had to be Drush. I still have a lot other modules to research that I learned about from the conference and Drush isn’t even really a module, but it’s still a lot of awesome.
Moving your Drupal site and breaking all the links
This is a quick tip for anyone moving their Drupal site. I recently moved a development site to a live site and have done this on several occasions only to be left sitting their scratching my head wondering why only the home page of my Drupal site works. Each time after a few minutes it hits me that the .htaccess file is the culprit and that I did not move it. Often if you upload your files via some ftp programs you may not actually be able to see the .htaccess file to upload it. To see it on a Linux/UNIX box type ls -la and it will show up. FileZilla is an open source FTP program that will also do the trick.
So remember after you upload the files to your new server, import your database data and change your database credentials to also bring along your .htaccess file or just grab it from a Drupal package. Hope this saves some of you some head scratching.
Zen Coding – a new way to write HTML lightning fast
The other day I purchased a new editor called Coda. I might review this fantastic little piece of software at a later date, but one of the reasons I purchased it was to use some of the many plugins the community has created for it. One of these plugins has been produced for several editors and could change how you code. It’s called Zen Coding, and it will make you write large chunks of HTML a lighting speeds.
What is Zen Coding?
Zen Coding is hard to explain, but if you have been working with HTML and CSS for awhile now you should be able to pick it up very quickly. It’s easy to learn and best shown by example, so lets start with an example.
The Zombie Journal is finally ready
For over a month now I have been slaving away on an idea I have had for quite some time. It’s probably the largest personal site I’ve ever built and it’s my first real foray in the world of Drupal. Let me tell you, Drupal isn’t an easy undertaking, but it’s very powerful. If you don’t know much about Drupal you might want to check out Dries Buytaert’s blog and see who’s using it… in short, a lot of big names.
But this is about The Zombie Journal
This post isn’t about Drupal, this is about The Zombie Journal, my newest site. Consider it still rough around the edges. I have a lot of ideas which I have not yet implemented, but for now I am hoping to see The Zombie Journal grow into a social network for Zombie fans of all sorts. If you sign up for an account you can post your own zombies stories of your fictional encounters with these diabolical creatures we call “the undead”. You can also share zombie resources, rank and vote on content and participate in the forums. If you are even mildly interested in zombies I urge you to sign up today, and follow The Zombie Journal on twitter.
Adium spam comments
Adium is a fantastic instant messaging program for the Mac that allows you to connect to many different chat clients like Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk just to name a few. Unfortunately if you have an MSN / Windows Live Messenger account on Adium you may be bombarded by the parasitic individuals of the web also known as spammers. I’m not sure why this only seems to happen to my MSN account, but there is a simple fix.
