Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer

Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte review

June 25, 2011
Book Reviews
Book reviews

I’ve just finished reading Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte and really enjoyed it. The book is published by A Book Apart who specialise in “the emerging and essential topics in web design and development with style, clarity, and, above all, brevity”. This made the book ideal for a holiday read. Ethan lays the foundations for responsive design and then goes through each of the principles Flexible grids Flexible images and media Media queries I really enjoyed the flexible grids chapter and found the equation target / context = result formula very useful for calculating fluid width. ...

Google Maps V3 and Geolocation

April 13, 2011
Web Development
Geolocation, Google Maps

In this post I will show how to create a map using Google Maps API V3 and the using browser geolocation we will add a marker to the user’s position. The finished product can be seen at http://ianluckraft.co.uk/demonstrations/google-maps-v3-and-geolocation.php Let’s get started. Create a basic HTML document We need to add a div that will later contain our map. Between the opening and closing body tags place a div with an id of map. ...

Tom Frankham Imagery

March 21, 2011
Uncategorized

Tom is a talented young photographer and designer form Plymouth. Lately he has been working for Prime Delux, who’s online store I developed, taking photos for them and also dealing with the admin side of the store. The images he has added to the site have really improved the overall look and feel as well as giving the user a better view of the products. You can check out his improved portfolio site at http://www. ...

Free 978.gs psd grid templates

February 28, 2011
Uncategorized
design, grids, layout, photoshop, templates

I was impressed with the flexibility of the responsive design demo shown at http://978.gs/demo/ So I decided to make some simple psd files with guides and a grid overlay folder for each of the layouts. Now all I have to do is implement it on my site. And I’d like to share them with you. Download the templates

CodeIgniter allow hyphen in url

January 17, 2011
Web Development
CodeIgniter

I’ve done some reading about hyphens vs underscores in urls and personally I prefer hyphens. I find it seems to keep the words separate where as a underscores seem to join them together in my eyes. PHP functions don’t allow hyphens in their name so I have to use underscores. To solve this in CodeIgniter, so the correct function name is found from the uri segment, only one simple change needs to be made. ...

MARINEXUS website approaching launch

December 21, 2010
My work, Web Development

The website for the MARINEXUS project is approaching a launch date which should be before the Christmas break. In anticipation I created a new holding page to makes things that little more interesting. The website will be developed in the new year to run from WordPress to allow users to adjust the content and add news and events when the project hits full swing.

JC Surf now provides Stormrider Guides

December 13, 2010
Uncategorized

JC Surf has been updated with The Stormrider Guides. Often referred to as The Surfer’s Bible the guides are often an essential part of planning and partaking in a surf trip to some of the premier spots around the world. If you are interested in stocking the guides then get in touch with JC.

Hammock

December 9, 2010
Music, Personal
music

Normally I’m more about the rock music but sometimes I’ll hear something a bit more mellow and really get into it. Hammock are just one of those things. Listenign to their music through headphones makes me feel like I’m living in a film. I recommended them to a friend, Chris Holmes, who likes stuff such as Explosions In The Sky and The Album Leaf and he can recommend them too, with a hat tip to me. ...

Typekit now installed

September 3, 2010
Uncategorized

I’ve now signed up for a Typekit account and have used Ligurino on this site for it’s clean lines. The interface for choosing and adding fonts is fantastic and very very user friendly. The fonts look great on a Mac although there does seem to be a few rendering issues on Windows. I’d be especially keen to use this for logos or headings as the larger font sizes seem to display the best. ...