December 22, 2011
SitePoint’s latest PHP book is aimed at taking your skills to the next level. Looking through the contents there was several tools and techniques I was already using but also lots of others that I would like to start using.
Each of the sections provides a general good introduction with some examples and links to similar tools or further reading. The book finishes by recommending that you implement the techniques / tools over a period of time, e.
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December 21, 2011
I recently found out about Arduino an open-source electronics prototyping platform – as described on the website.
It’s basically a circuit board which can have components connected to it and then “sketches” can be uploaded to the board to control how it operates. The basics, which I am working through this Christmas, are controlling LEDs but if you have a Google or YouTube there are some really impressive projects.
I’ve never really dabbled with electronics before but this looks a lot of fun.
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October 26, 2011
I recently redesigned and coded the website for the Marine Biological Association. I designed the site mobile first as I feel this makes sense to start with the linear nature of a webpage and it’s elements and then see where these elements can best be focused as the screen size increases.
The site also uses responsive design techniques with a fluid grid. I found Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte had some useful techniques in it and also the templates from the 978 Grid System to calculate layout widths.
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October 8, 2011
I recentley discovered a new CMS called Fuel. It is based on the PHP framework CodeIgniter and I feel it has huge potential.
Below is a post I added to the Fuel forums on why Fuel differs from other CMS systems.
When I start a project I tend to go for WordPress if a need a general blog / CMS and then if the project is a little more bespoke I will go for CodeIgniter.
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June 25, 2011
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.
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May 7, 2011
April 13, 2011
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.
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March 21, 2011
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.
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February 28, 2011
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
January 17, 2011
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.
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