That constant drive to just make it “that” much better!
Wrapping my head around this whole WordPress thing when you’ve been a web-dev for 15 years can really take some getting used to. When you are used to cutting your own code you tend to do thinks in a very straight-forward manner. Over the last little while I’ve been adapting my brain to the Ultimatum theme which is a “meta-theme” if you will. It allows you to actually create your own layouts and themes with a “drag-n-drop” interface. I’m really starting to get the hang of it (finally) but I think I’m going to have a play-around with building my own themes from scratch and see how that compares. Perhaps I’ll be able to create some hybrid-theme which will give me what I’m after … I’m sure I won’t be the first one to try.
As for this blog I wasn’t 100% happy with my initial base template – the HTML + CSS was just a little bit kludgy and I’ve learnt a massive amount in the few months since I put it online so I’ve given her a slight make-over :) Mostly just tidied up a whole lot of bad CSS and structure that was unnecessary, but I’ve given the content area a bit more breathing room, adding some nice touches (well I think they are) to the post view such as the date “tag” hanging off the side.
I haven’t done a whole lot of cross-browser testing as yet so I don’t expect it will play nice with anything but the latest browsers. I’m also looking forward to thinking my way through how I will make the layout responsive, right now she’s not all that good on a mobile device.
My final upgrade for this round was the header. I think its a def improvement – really loving the font (thanks Google Webfonts!!!) After posting the header up on the site I realised it was kinda perfect for a Facebook cover pic … bahahahahaha … so I combined it and the team.LUCiD chalkboard motif to come up with the following :-P I wonder what the reaction will be to it … hee hee hee.
Finding that new corporate style – an adventure in design-land
Been doing quite a bit of design work of late which is truly a joy. I’ve been wanting to refresh the team.LUCiD site for quite some time but hadn’t found a design that clicked … until tonight. I wanted something fresh but that I hadn’t seen before. The idea of a chalkboard popped into my head and so I went with the inspiration and I’m glad to announce that the refresh is almost complete.
Part of the process was creating a new Facebook page for the company and I wanted to use the new style across the board. With that in mind I created a header image for the Facebook page and also one for my Twitter profile. Now here’s hoping someone notices the changes :-P
Well hello TDD you sexy minx … finally we meet!
Learning TDD has been on my hitlist for quite some time – and today I finally forced myself to take out an hour and actually take the first step! Having never actually used a testing framework before (yes yes … rather shocking I know) its all seemed a little imposing.
Thanks to the Ruby Weekly I found this great video featuring Jim Weirich. In the video he does a live coding session showing the basics of how it works. Now I realise there must be thousands of videos/tutorials/articles out there that cover the same topic – but this one worked for me. Jim also introduced to me the concept of a “Code Kata” – an idea that I’m quite excited about and want to integrate into my dev habits.
So – if you have 45mins and a desire to actually get a quick but practical demo of what TDD is and how it works then this is the video for you!
jQuery.deferred – my new thing for the day
Just read this fantastic rundown of jQuery.Deferred and some of its most useful features.
I’ve seen it mentioned in the API docs but never paid much attention. I knew it was invoked when I did an AJAX call and left it at that.
Seems its actually got some really powerful and handy features for combining asynchronous events with “when()”, allows you to track events progress and more.
In this article Matt Baker explains the basics so simply and clearly that even after a long night of coding it still sunk in. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for situations where I can make my life easier with deferred.
The Quest for the Ultimate Editor
So I’ve been using SublimeText for a couple of months and I’m loving how simple, quick and powerful it seems. I’ve got some great ideas as to how it could be built upon to truly create an intelligent and very well integrated IDE for building Rails apps.
The one complaint I’ve heard most is that all the preferences are basically edited as a text file. Now there are obvious reasons for this which I completely understand. I do think I’ve come up with a solution though which would provide the GUI many are looking for whilst still allowing for the openness and extensibility which makes SublimeText so powerful.
I’ve started a project on GitHub and I gotta say I’m a bit excited. This will be my first open source community project and I’m hoping it will allow me to give back. Fingers crossed its picked up and used by the community once I get it up and running. Either way it should be an experience.
