Mark McCorkell, Rick Nunn, Inayaili de Leon and Aaron Bassett were all planted in the no camp. With recordstyle, Nick Edwards, Cole Henley, Simon Davies and Michael Byers all stating they would judge purely on portfolio pieces.

I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer to this question but here is where I stand.

If you are a web designer then making sure that you have your domain name is a must. Whilst I understand that if you have a fairly common name like John Smith then being able to purchase your domain name will prove to be quite tricky but you should still be able to get an alternative like John Smith Designs.

I also understand that some people simply do not have the time to commit to things such as a blog or portfolio but this isn’t really what I was getting at in my original question. If you have a domain there’s nothing stopping you putting up a lifestream, buisness card website or your CV. We all know that creating these ideas don’t take too much time, so why do people still decide against doing so?

Would you really want to hire somebody who hasn’t bothered to do a quick site for themselves? I’m not saying that you have to constantly up date your website but putting something up that I’ve suggested above at least shows that you have a bit of gumption.

For a few days after I visited the aforementioned site I could think about nothing else than bringing my bookshelf back to life and I have decided that it’s time to relaunch the bookshelf with all of the books I have found useful in learning web design and design in general.

Why have I brought it back?

It’s all well and good utilising other services such as Readernaut and Shelfari but I like to be able to have more control. Another reason I decided to bring it back is due to the amount of traffic that it used to generate, and the fact that I have now been able to get back into my reading since leaving Uni.

The bookshelfs appearance

Due to the sheer number of books that are on the page I’ve decided to incorporate a navigational filter that will only display books tagged under the category that you have clicked on the navigation. The sections in the navigation are; design, development, layout, motivational and typography.

Any questions?

If you need to ask any questions about the literature listed on my bookshelf then feel free to send me an email and I’ll be more than happy to get back to you. All I ask in return is that if you do decide to purchase the book, after asking for an opinion or whatever, you do so by clicking on the image of the book as they have all been linked up to my Amazon affiliate.

Go and have a look, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

If you haven’t heard of this feature before then scroll down either a page or post, in the back-end, so long as you haven’t reordered any of the elements using the drag and drop feature, then post revisions should be five boxes below the content area.

I know I’m guilty of pressing the save button every couple of minutes due to the various computer crashes I’ve had throughout my life, so I know that I will have a lot of revisions for pages and posts. However, one thing that you may not know about this feature is the huge amount of information/duplicate content that it will add to your database. So how do you get rid of all these revisions?

There are several different ways you can tackle this:

Turn off post revisions

If you do not need this feature you can turn it off by adding the following code to your wp-config.php file define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); however I wouldn’t really recommend this as it’s always good practice to have back-ups of your work.

Deleting older revisions

If your a dab hand within the confides of phpMyAdmin then you could execute this query DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;. This will delete all instances of revision from your database but please take a copy of your database before you go about doing something like this.

Use a plugin

One final option would be to install the Wordpress revision control plugin which gives users more control over the revisions. The plugin allows the user to set a global setting for pages and posts where you can enable, disable and limit the number of revisions which are saved for each page and post.

Three weeks ago, I took myself out of my client work and set aside the Monday and Tuesday evenings to get everything up and running and on that Wednesday Tweet in the Park went live to a pretty good reception.

If the folks over at T in the Park don’t have a problem with it, then neither do I.

A few people had asked why I had decided to launch this app a full five months before the festival started but my reason was pretty simple. The final batch of T in the Park tickets went on sale on Friday the 26th of February and I wanted to be able to see if the app could handle the amount of tweets that would be coming through and also to see if there was a need for such an app.

The answer to both was a resounding yes with the app handling over 200 tweets a minute at it’s busiest point and with over half of the people tagging their tweet with the hashtag "#titp".

So, what is Tweet in the park?

Well if you haven’t been able to guess it’s an app combining two of my favourite things; the UKs best music festival, T in the Park and the social networking site Twitter.

If you’re a Twitter user then you will have no doubt used it’s excellent real time search feature. Infact the search functionality is so impressive that the likes of Google and other search engines have moved to incorporate it into their search result pages. Creating apps that utilises the Twitter API have started popping up all over the place since Twitter published it’s own documentation on their libraries page.

Tweet in the park utilises the API to pull out all instances of "#titp" or "T in the Park" that are mentioned on Twitter displaying them on a timeline within Tweet in the Park for end users to view.

Why did I create Tweet in the park?

I’m quite a regular to T in the park however three years ago I was unable to attend and no matter how many text messages and phone calls I received from friends just didn’t make up for that fact that I wasn’t there. However, this probably had something to do with the fact that the majority of these calls were fueled by alcohol and totally indecipherable not to mention the fact that they were few and far between.

Unfortunately it is looking likely that I won’t be able to attend this years festival, even though I have already purchased my early bird tickets. So instead of having to go through the same torment of three years ago I decided to build an app that would let me see what everyone was tweeting about and chances are that quite a fair few people out of the 85,000 people that attend T in the Park will be Twitter users, so I’m thinking that updates should be fairly regular.

Give it a go and see what T in the park related things people are tweeting about.

a, a:active {
	color:#4FCDFF;
	left:0;
	position:relative;
	top:0;
	text-decoration: none;
	text-shadow:1px 1px #004F6F, 2px 2px #004F6F, 3px 3px #004F6F;

}
a:hover, a:focus {
	color:#4FCDFF;
	left:-3px;
	text-shadow:1px 1px #004F6F, 2px 2px #004F6F, 3px 3px #004F6F, 4px 4px #004F6F, 5px 5px #004F6F, 6px 6px #004F6F;
	top:-3px;
}

After playing about with this it seems to work better when you’re putting this code on a large bold element ie, a heading. It also looks pretty good when you’ve also set the text to text-transform:uppercase;

Give it a go and watch your hrefs *pop* | Example

Update: As pointed out by Mitchell in the comments, I forgot to add an :active state, so this has now been rectified.

A couple of months ago, I went out seeking advice on how I should go about rewriting my CV and boosting my portfolio. Unfortunately this proved to be quite tricky because I’m sure like many of you, when you’re starting out in the web game, there just aren’t that many people who you can seek advice from. Thankfully, it didn’t really matter that I only had a select few people to turn to because the first person that I did speak to gave me a cracking piece of advice. The person in question was Mr. Bruce Lawson.

I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting Bruce twice but feels like I’ve known him a lot longer due to many emails about the HTML 5 Doctor. The fact that he was willing to give me advice even though we don’t really know eachother speaks volumes about the man. Anyway, enough praise, time to get on with the rest of this post…

One of the options we spoke about was working for free and why more people don’t do it. You might be reading that line again thinking I’m crazy, I know I did. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Let me explain

• You now have a platform to showcase your skills
• There’s a fair chance that you will be allowed to have more say, if not all, in the design than you would for a paying client
• It shows just how willing you are to show your worth
• It expands your portfolio

We all have to be realistic, it’s highly unlikely especially after just starting out that you are going to get the same amount of clients as leading industry experts such as Mark Boulton or Simon Collison. But by adopting this approach you will at least have these all important “real world” examples that future clients or employers are supposedly looking for.

To help give you some ideas here’s what I decided to do. I identified a few Scottish businesses with poor websites; I decided to choose one Scottish charity, one major Scottish business, one Scottish event and one mystery project. Upon each projects completion I’d would then contact the buisness in question and ask them if they would like to implement my new design. You could of course decide to go down a different route at this stage and charge the client if they decided to take you up on this offer, depending upon how much work you had done etc.

Of the four mentioned above so for I have launched one, Tweet in the Park. I’ll write more about this in my next blog post, if you are interested in finding out about more on this project then add me to your RSS.

As I outlined in the first paragraph, this won’t be for everyone and some people will just not be able to be in a position to do so but if you get a chance, even if it is just one site, I’d throughly recommend it. So far it’s proved to be a great experience. Let me know in the comment section below if you have ever contemplated doing something like this or indeed if you already have some published free work out there and what other people have thought about you for taking this line of action?

UX is an area that I’ve been keen to get into for a while now, sure I know bits and pieces and have read a few books on the subject but I don’t think I could ever call myself an expert in the subject. Therefore, when I found out this information I jumped at the chance to register for the next event through their wiki.

If you think this is something that you would be interested in and you are located in or around the Glasgow area, then please feel free to use the Amazon affiliate link, from the UX book club and purchase yourself a copy of this months book, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and take part in the discussion.

Here’s mine from August 2008

I’m sure you are all aware of the <?php previous_post_link('%link','Previous Article') ?> and <?php next_post_link('%link','Next Article') ?> wordpress links that you can use on your single.php pages when you want to offer a form of navigation between posts.

The problem

In these projects I’ve set index.php to display the most recent post but I wanted the ability to use the next and previous post link, to help users cycle through other blog posts. However because index.php is a page and not a post I wasn’t able to use the regular method mentioned above. Therefore the only possible solution for the user to navigate through posts using the wordpress navigation was to click on the post title to enter the post page and then click through the posts using the navigational link but as I’m sure you will all agree isn’t very logical.

The solution

Chris got back to me very quickly with his solution.

<?php query_posts('posts_per_page=1&offset=1'); the_post(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Previous Post</a>
<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

Chris then went on to explain how the above code works

WP_Query is just another form of query_posts that is a little more advanced and by nature doesn’t interfere with other loops. We could have used that for this too, but I just like query_posts better. And if there was a regular loop, that’s why I put that reset_query() call, so it wouldn’t mess with it.

The Kudos

I just want to say thank you to Chris once again for taking time out of his day to help me with this problem that has troubled me for a good few weeks now. If you haven’t heard of Chris before then I’m assuming you must have been living under a rock. You can check out his great multipurpose site called CSS-Tricks or you can read his Wordpress dedicated site called Digging into Wordpress to receive a series of great hints, tips and tutorials.

At the turn of the year I decided that it was time to refresh things on this site, the previous design had been present since it was pushed live in August 2009. But if the truth be told, I was never really that happy with it. In the end I felt that the last design iteration just didn’t fall in line with my own "personal brand" that I had created with the previous iterations. My specification for this site has always been simple; clean with plenty of white space, the design conforming to use of a strict grid, use of whites and greys and the typography being the main focus point, I didn’t want my design to be shifting the users focus away from what they were looking at; whether that was a blog post or part of my portfolio. Ultimately, I felt my last design fell down at a few of these hurdles.

One of the main reasons I decided to push through this redesign so quickly was because I have decided to take part in Project 52 and for that reason I have decided to move the style of this blog back to being more content focused. The content area is now much larger than the previous design, almost twice the size.

However, in my urgency to get things pushed through, I’ve still got many loose ends to tie up, so please bear with me whilst I get on with them. Some of the things at the top of my list are; styling of comments, getting my portfolio section up and running and refining my HTML5 code, as this was a bit slap dash and can definately be improved. Infact, I felt that my HTML5 code in the last design was spot on, one of it’s redeeming features. If you can think of anything that needs urgent attention then please feel free to get in touch with me.

On the logo front, as I know this will cause some controversy, let me explain. Those of you who have been regular visitors to this site will have no doubt become accustomed to my laurel logo but for this design I have decided to switch to a laurel wreath as made famous by the tennis clothing brand Fred Perry, as you can see the resemblance is quite close. I would like to design my own laurel to use for my personal brand but for now I think I’ll be sticking with this one.

Oh, I’ve also finally got round to incorporating Typekit, after buying it some six months ago and check it out in a webkit browser, you might find a couple of little surprises within.