Allowing visitors to leave comments has many benefits Article
29th January 2010 17 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/418
The Comments vs No Comments debate has been a hot topic for some time and is something I have never really been able to get my head around. I am absolutely in favour of having comments enabled on blogs, especially on sites that are writing and promoting great content worth discussing further. Not wanting to kick up another big debate about it here, but I did feel compelled to write about why I have them enabled and the benefits that have come of it.
How-to register an International Domain Name Link
24th January 2010 4 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/417
John Sutherland a fellow Edinburgh Refresher has written a fantastic little guide on:
How-to register an International Domain Name →
I had been meaning to look into this after seeing Gruber's fantastic http://✪df.ws short URL. Thanks to John's how-to guide I picked up http://ɯɐs.com/. Let me know what you nab.
The importance of teaching your clients and being the boss Article
20th January 2010 50 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/416
What I have come to realise over the last few years is that too many people are trying their best to please the client over the visitor. The client is not the primary aim, the visitor is. Of course the client has to like and approve the site but you should not be letting one persons clouded judgement determine the outcome of the entire project – design is personal and subjective – the sooner you realise that and the sooner you teach your client that, the better off you will be.
Helping Carbonmade keep their finger on the Pulse Article
13th January 2010 22 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/415
Web apps generate a lot of data, popular and successful web apps even more so, and when you are at the helm of one of these applications you need to be able to peer in at a glance and get a good overview of how things are doing on a daily basis. Carbonmade hired me towards the end of December 2009 to design and build a backend interface for them to view what activity was happening on the Carbonmade site each day, let me explain what we created, Pulse.
How to stay sane when freelancing from home Article
5th January 2010 22 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/414
Freelancing from home can be a lonesome job fraught with a multitude of interruptions and distractions but with the right setup and a bit of discipline it can be a very enjoyable and fun environment to work in. Here are some of my top tips to help keep yourself sane and help you be the best work from home freelancers around.
Project52 - A personal challenge Link
3rd January 2010 9 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/413
Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!
Find out more about Project52 →
I have decided, along with some 500 other people, to take part in Project52, writing an article a week on my site for 2010. There are a whole host of other great people taking part in this and I can’t wait to read what they have to say on a regular basis. Be sure to sign up and take part.
Bulletproof Rounded Corners with Border Radius Notes
22nd December 2009 8 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/412
I was rather pleased to see that not only does the latest version of Opera (the 10.5 pre-alpha) support border-radius but they made the smart move and didn’t prefix it with a vendor specific property -o- like Gecko (-moz-) and Webkit (-webkit-) do.
If you have not already been writing your border-radius statements with progressive enhancement in mind, now is most definitely the time to do it:
.box {-khtml-border-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius: 5px;-webkit-border-radius: 5px;border-radius: 5px;}- Download this code: /code/border-radius.txt
The latest Opera pre-alpha includes a whole host of new properties from the W3C’s CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders spec including background-clip, background-origin, border-radius, Multiple background images, background-attachment, box-shadow & border-image. This version also includes the ability to add CSS3 transitions and 2D transforms for richer user interfaces.
My delighters.css stylesheet now includes the Opera specific transitions and animations. Thumbs up to Opera.
Our Snowy Christmas Tree Photo
11th December 2009 2 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/411
It’s that holiday season again and we just put up our Christmas Tree! Have you done yours?
Learn To Fucking Spell Quote
11th December 2009 9 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/410
“You can be the greatest designer on the planet, have the most intriguing concepts out there, create wonderfully thought provoking experiences for your users, but if you type something like ‘I’ve been freelancing for a number off years’, you honestly look like a five year old.”
Paddy Donnelly vents his frustrations at the common and simple spelling mistakes that plague the web in Learn To Fucking Spell → another wonderfully crafted blog post.
Getting rid of the dotted border around links the right way Link
9th December 2009 Be the first to comment... http://sam.brown.tc/409
I heard Patrick H. Lauke from Opera speak at the FOWD Tour Glasgow on Keyboard Access Essentials and today’s 24 Ways article (which I hope everyone is reading) by Patrick does a great job of summarising one of the key points that he spoke about.
Removing the dotted line that occurs around clicked links in Firefox and Internet Explorer can be achieved with one super simple CSS rule :focus {outline: none;}. The big problem is accessibility, people using anything other than a mouse need :focus to see where they are within the page. Patrick’s solution to this problem is simple, and what I really took away from his article is that I should be applying :hover styles to :focus as well, something I have been neglecting to do.