The blog

Social sharing widgets are everywhere these days and on a growing number of sites they even follow you down the page just so you're blatantly aware of where they are at all times.

As well as just being visual pollution on a webpage, these widgets are resource heavy too, chocked full of extra JavaScript which needs to be loaded for each individual widget - all of which slows your site down!

In an effort to learn a bit more about the Twitter API I decided to set myself a little weekend project to try and create something with the data available.

I'm used to working with PHP and found this pretty solid PHP library which gave me a good base with which to get started on. If you use another programming language, the Twitter developers site has a comprehensive list of other libraries available.

As a little side project I decided it might be pretty cool to create an online word clock which shows the time as you might speak it.

So, I created: GrammarTime.

I'm pretty pleased with the result, looks pretty nice in full screen mode too.

I also learned a nifty little trick for hiding the navigation bar in Safari on the iPhone, just use the following bit of JavaScript on page load:

Another design I thought would make a pretty cool poster, although that could just be because I'm a pretty big fan of Star Wars.

This one was created for the 'light' brief over on GotBrief and started out as just a design of a lightsaber which then turned into the 'let there be lightsabers' idea:

Enjoy!

Redesigning a logo for any large scale company or product is always going to be a tall order and Microsoft Windows is certainly no exception, the recently redesigned logo for the upcoming windows 8 OS is certainly causing quite a lot of online chatter (this blog post included).

(image source: Windows team blog)

This post talks about the latest iteration of my site design and the steps I took in order to produce it. It’s not really about the code I used to create the theme but more the rationale behind the various decisions made, the thoughts running through my head and some general issues I had with my old design.

The main points will be covered as follows:

Back in November I attended Build 2011.

Without a doubt the talk which stood out the most to me (and I'm sure a lot of others at the conference too) was this one by @WilsonMiner:

Over the past couple of months I've been working on a self initiated project: GotBrief.

After attending Build 2011 I was inspired, truly inspired by the various talks and events which took place over the course of the conference. So inspired infact I decided to actually go out and build something, something which would hopefully inspire and help others to go out and create something too.

*Thank you to everyone who donated! Same time next year!*

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for me to finally try and grow a moustache. For too long now my upper lip has been a barren wasteland of hairlessness leaving me with a bitter mo-envy of the greats: Selleck, Reynolds, Burgandy and most of all the legendary Hercule Poirot.

Why am I suddenly posting about such a topic?

I've been working on the following design recently:

I'm quite happy with the final result, I did have the chevrons of the military insignia as solid colour rather than the vertical lines but I find they add a slight illusion to the piece; can you see the three floating platforms?

If you're trying to find a decent to-do list app then you really need to checkout the task management tool: Wunderlist. As well as a web app, wunderlist is also available for a wide variety of devices and perhaps the best thing about it: it's absolutely free. Incredible really when you look at the key features the app has to offer:

Over the weekend I needed to resize an entire folder full of photos from my brothers graduation so I could upload them to the web without it taking 100 years to complete. I could have simply opened up each image in Photoshop, resized & re-saved them however that would have probably taken longer than the upload so I did a little research into automating the process.

I thought I would share one of my favourite apostrophaces. I found it makes a pretty good background or wallpaper so feel free to save it & try it for yourself!

If you would like to alter/re-post this image then all I ask is that you add a link back to this original design.

I've recently been using the Views nivo slider module for a Drupal project which needed a nice neat javascript slider. After installing the module & getting the slider in place I suddenly came up against a slight problem in that I needed to dynamically change the starting slide on the slideshow.