by Alex Holt | May 21, 2013 | Dev, Web |
I’ve been working recently on getting together a responsive design solution for clients that already have a website and just want to add responsive in order to be accessible on mobiles and tablets. Major caveat: this is not a best practice, in fact it’s pretty inefficient and clunky – but it does fill a gap. Basically, the idea is to create a new CSS file that applies the necessary media queries and overrides the styling for the site to make it respond for mobile users. The client prompting this is Costhetics – as a content producer, they have existing practices in place (as well as a pretty big library of content) and needed a way to enhance the experience of consuming their content on mobile without needing to immediately reimplement their site. The results of this process are now in staging and I’ll update this post with links and notes after go...
by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Projects |
So Coda 1.6 has been released. The major change appears to be the addition of a plugin system for adding functionality. Basically this allows developers to write small scripts that manipulate text from Coda. These plugins are then displayed inside Coda in the Plug-ins menu (or with keyboard shortcuts), so that they can be called easily. Now, since i spend half my life in Coda, i wanted to play around with this and see if there was anything i could add to the community. Problem i found was, i dont really have many problems with Coda’s interface – it already does pretty much everything i want. BUT.. while writing an article for Smashing Magazine (which was required in HTML), i noticed that i didn’t have a good way to count the words in my article (since it was in HTML – Coda didn’t have a word count at all). Now, the whole beauty of Coda is in its all-in-one interface, so it kind of annoyed me that i couldn’t get a word count for my article without either opening it in some other program, or copying the content into my terminal and using wc. Anyways, in order to flex my proverbial developer muscles a little and play with the Coda plugin interface, i built a simple plugin that will strip HTML and count the words in a document – it’s simple (like super-uber-simple).. but it does the trick.. and i figure there might be someone out there who might appreciate it. Basically, it strips the HTML tags out and then counts the words and then uses the OSX say command to read the...
by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Dev, Projects, Web |
SimpleTweet is a class to load recent tweets for a particular twitter user. It uses the search API (which requires no authentication) to load the tweets and store them in a simple local filesystem cache file. Note: This functionality has since been removed from the twitter API – this code now needs to be updated to support Oauth in order to be compatible with the twitter API version 1.1. Links: PHP SimpleTweet on github Download...
by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Projects |
Microdata is a proposed feature of HTML 5 that allows semantically relevant information to be embedded within the markup of a web page. This allows one to create a secondary structure and meaning for the content of a page. Why PHP Microdata? One of the most interesting features of the Microdata spec for me, is the idea of API access to data in a web page. Basically, using simple Microdata constructs, one can embed the structure required for API access to the data on the page. The library allows one to parse out the structured Microdata from a page and return it as XML or JSON, essentially meaning that if one builds a site using microdata, one can instantly produce an API that gives people access to the data in that site, without maintaining a separate code base for th e API. At present PHP-Microdata is in its infancy, it’s really the result of an night of coding to experiment, so feel free to take a working copy and modify it. Links: Git Hub Zip...
by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Projects |
A simple node.js proxy server Basic Node.js proxy server that will pass all HTTP traffic through. In the overrides/ directory you can place simple files that you want to override, the proxy will then return these to the browser without requesting from the server. Allowing you to inject different content into your browser locally. This has all manner of interesting applications, but i’ll leave it to you to work out what you could use...
