Archive for June, 2009

If you’ve been reading the blog recently you will have noticed that, it has been more focused on all this HTML 5 stuff. It all started back in January when I noticed Bruce Lawson documenting his journey converting his site from XHTML to HTML 5 and as I was later to find out, it seemed that I wasn’t the only one interested in it.

When I attended Future Of Web Design London, in May of this year, I had agreed to go to a pre-arranged meet up organised by Bruce where he was eager to hear the opinions of people who had experimented with this new language. After an hour or so of discussing the spec and our problems interpreting it, a few of us decided to take the discussion further and decided that the best court of action would be to talk it over a beer or three.

The Alcoholics Anonymous were:

After some rehydration therapy we discussed the fact that there wasn’t a one stop shop resource for HTML 5 and as someone had mentioned earlier, during the pre-arranged meet-up, that reading the spec was just unrealistic due to the size of it, and that they wished that someone would produce a straight to the point site, explaining everything that they needed to know.

After we left the pub and headed in our different ways we kept in touch through many emails. Now, nearly three months after the event we are ready to put this project live. Please note that we still have some work to do with the site, so if you find an error or something you don’t think is quite correct please contact us through the site and we will do our best to get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope that many of you will find the site to be extremely useful, as I know that when I was converting this site a few months ago I found it very difficult to find HTML 5 resources or indeed information that was correct.

Also, a few weeks ago, our little group increased by one, when the excellent Remy Sharp joined the revolution. Yes, that Remy Sharp, pretty cool eh?

* Some of you might already be familiar with Richard as he runs the increasingly popular HTML 5 Gallery

Blur Tickets for Sale

Friday 3rd July 2009 – Hyde Park
Ticket RRP – £50
Number of Tickets – 4

First of all let me apologise for this random blog entry, I promise I’ll keep it short. I’m in a bit of pickle and I’m hoping my blog/readers will be able to help me out.

At the start of the year I waited patiently for the Blur reunion tickets to go on sale and I was chuffed to bits when I got them and I immediately started counting down the days until the concert. However, due to a turn in events I am now no longer able to attend this concert and as such I am having to sell my tickets.

If you are interested in purchasing these tickets, please get in touch with me through the contact form. If you are a regular contributor to the site I’ll knock some money off the price of the ticket for you.

Support includes Vampire Weekend, who I’m sure we are all familiar with after last summer. And my new favourite band, who I’m actually more upset about missing than Blur – Florence and the machine.

Disappointment

Before I start writing I’d just like to make it clear that this article is not aimed at anyone other than myself and I hope that by publishing this I won’t allow it to happen again.

A few weeks ago I agreed to start working on a project and although it wasn’t paying anything it managed to get me very, very excited. It was one of those rare occasions where before you have even sat down with a pen and paper you know exactly the route you wish to take.

Immediately I knew this project was going to be a pleasure to work on and before long I had already mocked up the page using some lovely CSS3 elements, infact I’d probably go as far to say that it was my best piece of CSS work to date. After a few hours of constructing the page I was very happy with the outcome, which was apparent due to the fact that I wasn’t spending hours tweaking parts of it.

However for a combination of different reasons I was unable to continue at the pace I had set at the start and when I entered the second week of the project, it had sadly almost ground to a hault. Thankfully, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, I had in-fact been able to incorporated a few more elements into the site and spent a little time refining some aspects that I wasn’t completely happy with.

With the end of week two approaching, I decided to show what I had created, letting them know that it still wasn’t completely finished. The feedback I received was very encouraging and the design seemed to go down well enough. However, as with many thing, especially when you think you are progressing nicely, a setback cropped up. It turned out that the highly customised pages that I was working to were to be altered and that I would have to edit my CSS to get everything to fall into place again.

I spent the the next couple of evenings, altering my CSS to fit the template but due to the amount of changes it proved to be very time consuming. However, on Monday, two weeks after starting this project, I recieved an email stating that another template would be going up for now due to time constraints as the event was edging ever closer. I was gutted, my code was nearly finished and I didn’t think I was that far away from sign-off.

On a positive note, there may be another chance for me to showcase this design, as it was still under debate whether the the design of the site would change for each event. For now though, I’ll need to keep my fingers crossed.

WordPress Live Comment Preview

I’ll keep this as short as possible. I’ve been utilising the wordpress live comment preview plugin on my site for a few months now but since my redesign I haven’t been able to get it working again. I don’t think that I’m too far away from getting this to work as I haven’t changed the code I was using when it was working previously.

One thing I cannot get my head around is the fact that the comment preview works perfectly when I’m logged in and posting a comment through the form as usual. But as soon as I log out the preview stops working. Immediately you might be thinking that this will be down to my comment preview tag being outwith the wordpress loop but after checking several times I’m postive that this new form follows exactly the same layout as my older one. Besides, the comment live preview installation file clearly states that you can call the preview anywhere as long as you use the appropriate php tag.

I’ve tried fiddling about with a few parts of the plugin and my own comments.php file but because my knowledge of php is still somewhat limited I’m not entirely sure if what I’m editing is correct, it’s all a bit hit and miss. Hopefully someone out there will have had the same problem as me or will know how to fix it.

I’ve stuck up this query on the wordpress forums but as yet I’ve had zero replies, which is more than a little disappointing. I also decided to email the plugin developer but again I’ve received no response, he probably gets alot of questions and in truth I never expected a reply anyway.


<form action="#" method="post" id="commentform">
     form fields and textareas appear here
</form>

<section id="form-extras">
    <section>
        Comment Preview
    	<?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?>
    </section>
</section>