John Copley has been part of the surf scene since the sixties and now works as an agent for a large number of worldwide surf brands.
Working with Random Badger I created a site to showcase the companies and products that JC can provide for you. The site is aimed at getting the user interested and encouraging them to get in touch.
The site also contains a small profile about the man himself.
The URBANE project is a study of urban coastal defences. The website provides information about the project and those involved. The partners page has a Google map linked to an unordered list that acts as dual functionality to view more details on the partners.
The overlay effect that I wrote for the partners list is utilised again in the image galleries.
The site is built on HTML5 with some subtle use of CSS3.
Dr Michael Cunliffe is a fellow at the Marine Biological Association who specialises in Marine Microbial Biogeochemistry.
The site has been kept clean and simple with the emphasis on Dr Cunliffe’s work.
The Blue Sound project aims to encourage people in the Plymouth area to use the ‘blue space’ around them.
The website aims to involve local youth groups to participate in work groups with myself and the Blue Sound project officer to enable us to provide the users with a site that they can truly feel is theirs.
The site uses HTML5 and CSS3, including CSS drop shadows, rounded corners and transitions.
I’ve done work on Macs before and always enjoyed it but I’ve managed to get my hands on a MacBook Pro which I’ll be doing lots of my work with.
Having read a couple of iPhone developer books I’m very keen to get stuck into a bit of app development and see what I can come up with.
The first evening was pretty much spent installing programs and typing into Google “mac short cut for ……” but after a few days of working on it I can highly recommend it. It’s lightning fast and opening up new programs is almost seamless. This really helps my workflow as I’m not getting distracted whilst the new program opens up.
Not to mention the excellent battery life, it’s really nice to have a laptop that can be used as one and not have to look for a power supply before even thinking about getting into some work.
Newquay based Fore Street Deli provides home-cooked deli food using the best Cornish ingredient, and selling a wide range of quality Cornish produce.
Working with designer Random Badger the site aims to give a feel for being in the deli with it’s wood background and colour theme based on the shop exterior.
I’ve been working on a site powered by Drupal and needed to find the number of rows a database query returned. Simple enough and quite common procedure. But, the Drupal database API no longer offers the db_num_rows() function.
I had a quick Google around and the answered seemed to be to run the query twice but the second time using a count query. Two calls to the database when only one is necessary? Not on my watch. The piece of code is to appear on the home page so it will be called upon frequently.
My solution was too loop through the results set and add the formatted HTML to an array. Then check if there are any items in the array, if so loop through it an output them if not display the message that there are currently no results.
I know it’s still doubling up but I think it is a slightly more elegant solution than the double database call.
I’m really enjoying using CodeIgniter, it’s an excellent framework and has a side benefit of helping to structure your files neatly.
I’ve been working on my first login form using it, and whilst there are lots of tutorials going through this common process I encountered a “problem” with the CodeIgniter sessions persisting when the user closed their browser.
A bit of searching around and I came up with a few recommendations.
The first is to set the $config['sess_expiration'] to 0
This however has the effect of creating a cookie which actually lasts 2 years due to code in the system/libraries/Session.php file
The next was to set the $config['sess_expiration'] to -1
This just didn’t work for me full stop. When I logged in it saved the session variable then when I went to the next page it had disappeared.
The solution I have used came from this page.
http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/70036
It’s pretty quick to implement the code and you can have control over the expiration time as well as choosing whether your cookie should be persistent.
And now it’s implemented I intend to copy the Session.php file into every project I create that requires sessions. I can handle having to paste in one line of code to the config file.
my new iPhone arrived today and like everyone I love it. i’m really looking forward to doing some work on mobile css and optimising sites for mobile use.
any interesting discoveries will be posted here.
I’ve been playing around with PHP frameworks latley and have just started coding my first major project using CodeIgniter.
I’ll post updates as I progress but roughly this project interacts with data from different organisations and acts as a central point for approval of records and the sharing of data.
