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It’s been a while since I wrote anything on this blog and it’s possible that this may be the last post here because from now on I intend to do most of my writing at my new blog. This site is due for a redesign but the first part in that strategy involved setting up a new site. If that doesn’t make much sense, please read the first post on the new site in which I explain my reasoning.

I’m not ruling out entirely ever writing articles on this site in the future, but it won’t be until after the site has been redesigned and I don’t have an exact timeline for that right now. So in the meantime, if you’ve bookmarked or subscribed to the feed for this site, you might like to do the same for the new one too.

Yesterday I was working on the planning of a new site to be built with ExpressionEngine and was wondering about the best way to let editors link to other entries from within the body of an entry they’re creating or editing. ExpressionEngine doesn’t have this sort of functionality built into it by default so I asked on Twitter to find out if anyone knew of any add-ons that had been created that might do this.

More on Adding a link list to TinyMCE with ExpressionEngine

With ExpressionEngine you give your clients a lot of power and flexibility to update the content of their own site, but at some point in a site’s life there’s going to come a time when changes will be required that the site owner or his/her staff can’t do themselves via the control panel. Changes to a logo or other graphical elements of the site, adding new sections or functionality, giving the site a new ‘skin’ or theme, or completely rebuilding from the ground up will require a designer of developer to get involved.

More on Redesigning ExpressionEngine sites

Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.

More on Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist

Recently I came across a sitution whereby I wanted to call a list of WordPress posts from inside the body of another post, i.e., not coding it into a template, but embedding into the body of the post itself. Not a big drama, I thought to myself: I already have the exec-php plugin installed to enable the execution of PHP from within WordPress posts, so all I needed to do was call the WordPress loop from the point inside the post where I wanted my list of links to appear, e.g.:

<ul>
<php $my_query = new WP_Query('cat=XX');
  while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
	<li><a href="<php the_permalink(); ?>"><php the_title(); ?></php></a></li>
</php><php endwhile; ?>
</php></ul>

More on Calling a WordPress loop from inside a WordPress loop

Håkon Wium Lie’s article, CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing on A List Apart in August 2007 may have got the (snow)ball rolling, but it seems that it was the announcement of Typekit on May 27 this year which has prompted an avalanche of interest in web fonts. Or maybe I’ve just woken up to the issue since then and been taking more notice. But I seem to be adding a lot of font and type-related bookmarks lately and thought it would be worth sharing some of them.

More on The @font-face snowball

It may only be a very small amendment, but I’ve just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.

More on Site updated to Microformats Value Class Pattern

If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE’s Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.

More on Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows

Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a WordPress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could’ve been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I’ve done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go that route on this occasion:

1. With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would’ve been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
2. The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.

More on Fetching posts in WordPress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX

Which is better in links from the search engines’ point of view: plain text or images with an alt attribute that says the same thing? For example, is this:

<a href="">This is a link</a>

better than this?

<a href=""><img src="" alt="This is a link"/></a>

More on Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?

I’ve come across a few little solutions/fixes recently to various problems I’ve encountered when building sites with ExpressionEngine (EE) that I thought it would be worth sharing. A couple of these were tips I picked up from other posters on the EE forums and the third was one I came up with myself to solve a particular problem I had. More on Custom ExpressionEngine template solutions

Dave Shea recently published an article on A List Apart (ALA), CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time‘, about how to use jQuery to create the effect of animated rollovers on navigation items.

The technique he outlines makes use of the same image replacement method as outlined in ALA‘s original Sprites article. The problem with this method however is that it uses a large negative text-indent to remove the default text from screen, and with images turned off in the browser, you don’t see anything. This has accessibility implications not only from the perspective of those with disabilities, but also for those who deliberately turn images off, i.e. people on slower connections or those using handheld devices who are trying to limit the amount of information downloaded to their phone.

More on Animated navigation items using jQuery

If you’re using ExpressionEngine (EE) with a WYSIWYG editor, chances are you’re using either TinyMCE or FCKEditor. I myself use TinyMCE and it seems like a lot of people prefer it to FCKEditor, but for one thing – it doesn’t have good image and file management capabilties built in by default.

More on File and image management plugins for TinyMCE

Recently I wanted to create a page that would list the backlinks to certain sites that I had chosen. Yahoo always seems to have the most comprehensive list of backlinks and luckily they also make available a series of APIs that enables you to access their data. Using the Site Explorer Inbound Links API, and an example of a script towards the bottom of that page, I was able to put together a script that closely mirrors the sort of results you would get if you entered a site’s URL into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

More on Checking backlinks with Yahoo’s Site Explorer Inbound Links API

A while ago I wrote about some of the extensions I use with Firefox which make the job of web development easier. I’ve since added some new ones to Firefox that I use on a fairly regular basis, so thought I should update the list.

More on More useful extensions for developing with Firefox