I don't know about you, but quite often, once we've finished a project and handed it off to the client with cheat-sheets and video tutorials in hand, we're then moving on to the next project. Often this means that, unless that last client gets in touch again to ask about something, we generally leave them to get on with their business.

However this does mean that once in a while, breaking changes might slip past us; for example this one about the Twitter REST API getting retired from Tuesday 11th June 2013. What this meant is that, for the handful of clients for whom we've rolled out a Javascript-based Twitter feed on their site, it was now broken. After some fiddling, some swearing, and two cups of tea, we've solved it. And here's how! Read the rest of this post »

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NextGEN Gallery, with it's 4 trillion downloads and eleven-star rating is far and away the most popular gallery plugin for WordPress. It's easy to use, simple to manage, and can ride a bike one-handed for almost a whole mile. But one thing that's slightly annoying about NextGEN is it's default lightbox Shutter Reloaded.

Don't get me wrong: it's a great, lightweight lightbox effect, but its user controls leave a little to be desired; there's no explicit close button, and clicking outside of the image doesn't close it either (which is default behaviour for practically every other lightbox in existence).

So let's do something about that, shall we? Read the rest of this post »

This is an update to the previous entry, 'Making sure your footer always sticks to the bottom of the page' - refer to that post for greater detail and explanations of what exactly goes on here.

So, as I mentioned previously, this function comes in really handy when you want to stick a footer to the bottom of a short page; i.e. to ensure that something that's meant to be at the bottom of the viewport actually sticks there rather than floating in the middle of the ether if you've got a short page of content.

However, when working on a new project last night, I noticed this faithful piece of code wasn't working properly in IE. At the same time, I was getting frustrated at some ridiculously slow page load speeds - this is a site on my local machine, so there shouldn't be any delay! I finally narrowed it down to, of all things, the Google Fonts API running incredibly slowly and even failing to load some files at all. This loading delay caused jQuery to miscalculate the length of the viewport, and so subsequently not stick my footer in the right place. Which was frustrating. Read the rest of this post »

I thought I'd show off a super-duper little function that I now slip into practically every site I build without really thinking about it.

A bunch of our more recent sites feature footers that truly book-end the site; that scream: "This is the end! You can tell, because there are shards of broken wood or torn fabric that suggest this page has reached its contentual termination! All change here!". The problem is, of course, that a) you might have a really short page of content (like "Thanks for filling out that form!"); and 3) there's just no accounting for screen size. Consequently your beautiful end-piece might end up floating in the middle of the screen like a sad clown that unsuccessfully tried to hang himself. Read the rest of this post »