jonny's blog

Ramblings of a northern webdesigner living in London

July 27, 2010
by jonny
0 comments

New theme…

I’m in the process of updating my site, with a new design and a few other things, because I realised that the content on this site was getting wildly out of date!

So in the the mean time i’ve moved over to the pretty sweet WordPress theme from Press75

January 22, 2010
by jonny
0 comments

Friday Links

There seems to be a trend popping up at the moment, in the same vein as twitters follow friday, that people suggest their favourite links/sites/videos of the week.

Time to jump on a band wagon me thinks…

Sites of the week:

  1. Squashed Pixel
  2. Melissa Hie
  3. Twelve South

Reads of the week:

  1. 11 Myths about flash that won’t die
  2. Finding the right Javascript solution
  3. 10 stages of social media integration

Videos/funnies of the week:

  1. Honda Eveything Ad
  2. Why printers were sent from hell to make us miserable
  3. Joke of the day: Liverpool vs Arsenal

Twitter follows:

  1. @tomgatenby
  2. @chrysius
  3. @smashingmag

Reckon that probably calls for a brew, laters.

December 16, 2009
by jonny
0 comments

mobile blogging

This may be my first post in nearly 6 months, ill rectify that soon! This is just a test of the blackberry wordpress app!

February 16, 2009
by jonny
1 Comment

Does crying wolf ever work out?

Simple Answer – no. For a while, at work we’ve been having a little bit of fun with one of the IT dudes with the old blue screen of death joke. “Arrrrgh my computers died… HELP!” etc etc. Thing is though, its never dead, we just think its funny to watch IT look at what is essentially a desktop wallpaper until they get mad and walk off, usually to hilarious consequences, see article a.

ARRRGH - WOLF - kinda

So, what happens when you get a genuine problem on your machine?

ARRRGH - WOLF - real

The answer isn’t surprising at all, suffice to say that computer still gets this error.

Outcome:-  DON’T F*** with IT.

February 3, 2009
by jonny
0 comments

png fix with wordpress

So, WordPress 2.7′s out. Perfect time to update the ol’ site. “I know, while I’m at it, let’s make use of the old twin helix PNG ie6 htc fix, not used that much before. No way can it possibly be that hard.” Wrong.

Getting it working is pretty easy, but when it came to slotting it in the themes folder everything became a mystery.

I tried setting up a new parameter in wordpress to no avail, i could’ve just linked directly to it i guess, but i didn’t really wanna do that, so I went searching.

Turns out that the best way to get it to work in wordpress themes is to put it in the root of the wordpress folder, not the theme folder, along with the blank .gif file. Everything else then stays the same.

img, div, body,h1, p, a { behavior: url(/iepngfix.htc) }

Odd, but for some reason it didnt seem to like being in an inlude folder.

January 14, 2009
by jonny
1 Comment

Spam goes religious

This quaint little wordpress blog doesn’t see the light of day much, but it does seem to find its way into the path of good ol’ friendly spammers.

I’m generally OK with spam, because my spam filters are working pretty well, but when you skim over the endless invites for blue medicine and blue websites, you find little gem’s like these, I’d let the spam through, if there was one single prayer on this website.

“These prayers help me to keep God in my life, especially with the many distractions I encounter”

“This website is very nice and colorful too. Its nice to have something to show others where you attend church and to show all the smiling people filled of the goodness of the Lord. You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always..

“I like this website. This website helped me with prayer learning. Good job. Thank you. Please provide more French prayers. Bye-bye.”

God bless you, one and all.

November 17, 2008
by jonny
2 Comments

Music Challenge.

Who can honestly say they’ve listened to every single song in their itunes library? I don’t reckon I can, so I’ve set myself a rather daft challenge.

I’m going through the lot of my music, in alphabetical SONG order.

The rules I’ve set myself.

  • Its my work music only
  • During Work
  • NO SKIPPING.

As above, it is only the music on my work HDD, and i have got a lot more music at home, but i did recently copy my whole full ipod. here’s what itunes says at the bottom:

5978 Songs, 15.9 days, 27.18 GB

I’ll keep you posted how i get on.

UPDATE!

It’s over!!!! – only took 8 friggin months!

June 18, 2008
by jonny
1 Comment

Firefox 3 hits the shelves

Well, not shelves exactly, but its arrived. Mozilla have tested the new firefox with everything they can throw at it and it’s been moved out of beta testing and its now available to download to everyone. They’re pretty conifident its gonna be the most downloaded thing on the interweb that they’ve got the guiness world record people in to get involved with firefox download day! pretty smart advertising ploy!

So what’s new?

More Secure – They’ve spent a lot of time, and probably effort, into increasing they’re already pretty secure browser, so there’s much less chance of being attacked!
One click bookmarking – Great if you bookmark A LOT, easy to tag and organise your bookmarks.
Smart Location Bar – a tool that works with your browser history to help you get to the right site quicker, sounds pretty basic, but its quite clever really, it can use content as well as addresses to work out where to go
Its a shed load faster – self explanitory but definatley worth a mention.

There’s much more but my fingers are starting to get tired.

One thing remains to be said though, if you use firefox a lot, for work and what not, its probably best to hold off on the downloads until all the add-ons have been updated, otherwise you might be in a tad of bother!

March 25, 2008
by jonny
1 Comment

Ctrl+Click in flash.

I’ve recently been writing a news ticker at work in flash, which works really nice, it links news stories to parts of the site that are worth a look at. That’s all great, but what if you want to stay on the page you’re on? With Flash the answers usually simple, “change the target to ‘_blank’ and you’re on your way. But if you actually want it to act like a normal part of the website, you need another answer.

Firefox and ie7 let you use the tabbing system for this, click ctrl while you click and it opens in a new tab, but how would you go about it in flash?

Here’s my function to fix it:-


function ctrlClick(link)
{
var window = "_self";
if(Key.isDown(Key.CONTROL))
{
window = "_blank";
}
getURL(link, window);
}

That way you’re sorted. click ctrl when you click the link, it opens in a new window/tab, click it normally, it stays in the same window, job done.

March 10, 2008
by jonny
8 Comments

php with fasthosts.

So i was doing a php email form the other day for ilikehammocks.

I was sure i wrote the code right but it wouldn’t work. For the life of me i couldn’t figure out why.

Enter google.

I went wandering round google until i was lost in the realms of uber geeks. It turns out that fasthosts (my domain provider) forgot about the email function in php, and to get around it i had to add this to the first line of my code:

ini_set("sendmail_from", " email@somedomain.com");

score!

For some reason fasthosts like to dismiss the simple things, so if you’re having a problem with getting emails to actually go anywhere, like i was, this seems to be the way to fix it. All the rest of my code could then stay the same but it then knew what it was doing in terms of carrying out the send function.

I dont think any more explanation is necessary, but get in touch if you need more help.

March 6, 2008
by jonny
0 comments

iLikeHammocks

Have you ever been sitting in a chair thinking, I wish this was a hammock? no? well you should have!

It’s a site, it’s a laugh, it’s done, it’s live.

go there. now.

iLikeHammocks

February 22, 2008
by jonny
2 Comments

Top 5 add-ons.

I quite like the idea of this top 5 malarce, so I’m gonna make a series of it. Here I present my top 5 firefox add-ons, with hilarious consequences.


  1. Firebug.
    • Useful for designers and developers everywhere, live css editing is more useful than a cup of tea first thing in the morning and twice as productive.
  2. Web developers tool bar.
    • This add-on does have a lot of the advantage of firebug, although some aren’t as good, but this little blighter has extra additions like the ruler, and the tag displayer.
  3. ColorZilla.
    • This is great when you see a colour used on a site you might want to use elsewhere, has a full pallette and everything. Better than an artists elbow.
  4. Site Indicator.
    • Shameless plug of a mates application, great if you work in an environment that uses local directories and live ones, saves a lot of panic time. I’ll have a brew for this vince.
  5. Dummy lipsum.
    • This one’s just snuck on my list, generates lorem ipsum text from firefox, and can add text directly into text areas for you, nice.