Matthew J Richards - Freelance Web Developer North Wales

Who's got all the oil?

mattr — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:46:00 +0000

"[its] funny how good infographics can tell you more than they claim to..."

- Dave Shea of Mezzoblue via Twitter referring to this infographic over at the Sietch Blog.

I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions.

Programming can ruin your life

mattr — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:20:00 +0000

According to a post over at devizen.com; Programming can ruin your life.

Being a seasoned web developer I'd have to agree. Programming can ruin your life.

I started my career in software development; and after a 12 month stint of intensive programming I was pretty sure I didn't want to continue down that path, at least exclusively, for the rest of my career.

Writing code day-to-day does change the way you think. You become over-analytical; easily frustrated by inelegance and inefficiency; both being situations you will encounter, and must deal with appropriately (if you want to live a happy life) on a daily basis.

These days I find myself in a much more varied, wider scoping role; that of a web developer; and I'm much happier for it. I find the role covers such a wide scope that it's almost impossible to become too far removed from reality. You simply don't have the time.

So, like I said, programming can ruin your life; it's all about balance.

If you want something doing...

mattr — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:37:00 +0000

...Hire Me!

Now. I'm not usually one to blow my own trumpet, but this opportunity simply couldn't be missed.

A few weeks ago I was contracted by Dave Foy of Definition Design to carry out some client side DOM/Javscript coding. Dave had been let down by an existing contractor and desperately required the services of an honest, competent web developer. To make matters worse, Dave was due to preview the site to his client the following day.

In his desperation and I imagine somewhat in vain; Dave did a Google web search for 'freelance jquery developer', and guess what, muggins here came up tops.

Dave contacted me via the contact form on this site, I replied as soon as I recieved the message and 45 minutes later we were on the phone discussing requirements, a few hours after that the work was complete, tested and fully documented.

As far as I can tell, Dave was and still is "over the moon" (excuse the pun) with my work and in particular the level of service I provided. So much so it spurred him to write about it on his personal blog, quite possibly reinstating his faith in humankind at the same time!

You can read his article in full: 'Service is not dead' over at his web site.

Dave was a joy to work for and I very much look forward to working with him again in the near future. From the work I've seen he is a cracking designer and I will more than likely be seeking his services in the future. The pint is most certainly half full.

In my eyes the whole episode was a perfect example of Karma working. Remember folks, "What goes around comes around".

My Top 10 (contributed) Drupal Modules

mattr — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:06:00 +0000

I use Drupal on a regular basis, both at work, with and for my clients and of course; on many of my personal projects.

Over the last few months I've been finding myself install the same core set of contributed Drupal modules over and over again. Here's a run down, in no particular order of my top 10 contributed Drupal modules.

Views - Provides super flexible control over the display of your nodes without the need for programming.
CCK - Content Creation Kit - Allows creation of custom node and field types.
Imagefield - Provides and "Image field" for use with CCK.
Event - Provides an "Event" node type and Event API. Personally I choose to customise my templates to markup event data using Microformats as vEvent/hCalendar. Would be nice to see this as part of the module.
Webform - Provides site wide "web forms"
Marksmarty - Provides a Markdown with Smarty Pants ASCII to HTML filter for your Input Formats.
Pathauto - Automatically generates "URL Path aliases" for specific node types, taxonomy vocabularies and terms.
Global Redirect - Prevents duplicate content for nodes with path aliases by redirecting.
Simple News - Provides a simple newsletter user interface
XML Sitemap (Previously GSitemap) - Provides a site wide site map in XML Sitemap format.

jQuery Perciformes - the entire Suckerfish familly under one roof!

mattr — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:23:00 +0000

(Photograph courtesy of Copleys)

The original Suckerfish Dropdowns article published over at A List Apart quickly became my/the favoured method of implementing lightweight, standards compliant, semantic and "accessible" drop down menus.

This clever little method makes use of the CSS :hover psuedo class, however, no suprise here, IE doesn't support :hover on elements other than anchor tags.

The sfHover() function was born:

sfHover = function() {
var sfEls = document.getElementById("nav").getElementsByTagName("LI");
for (var i=0; i<sfEls.length; i++) {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function() {
this.className+=" sfhover";
}
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function() {
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(" sfhover\\b"), "");
}
}
}
if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", sfHover);

Now, it doesn't take the brightest spark to twig that we can use javascript to mimic other CSS pseudo classes unsupported or ignored by certain browsers... Which is exaclty what the Sons of Suckerfish provided us with. A javascript method of mimicking :hover, :target, :active and :focus pseudo classes.

However... It's just not pretty enough! And if you like me, have adopted (and fallen in love with) the jQuery Javascript framework, you know there's a much nicer way of doing things!

I present to you:

jQuery Perciformes v1.0 - The entire Suckerfish family under one roof!

A jQuery plugin housing methods to mimic :hover, :focus, :active and :target psuedo classes.

Alternatively you can:

The Original Clownsteppah

mattr — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:53:00 +0000

Check out Monsta's awesome drum and bass parody cartoons over at Dogs on Acid

Switch - BAILEY @ Hendre Hall, Tal-y-bont

mattr — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:46:00 +0000

June 9th 9pm, 2am 2007 — Switch - North Wales Drum and Bass Presents Bailey — at Hendre Hall, Tal-y-bont

Room 1 - Drum and Bass

BAILEY (BBC 1xtra)
DJ DEVAL (World of drum and bass)
Miss Morgan B2B Maff C (Switch)
KLANG (original bassment crew)
HOAX (madlabs)
SWITCH MC
MC DEFICIT (Switch)

Room 2 - Electro House

Jo Cocolucci (Essence)
Steve / Kez
Dave Morgan
John Scudamore

Room 3 - Dub, Dubstep, Reggae

Lucy Q
Axis of Dub
Dubwise Deficit (Deficit does Dub)
+ More

Limited Edition Tickets available from Cob Records - Bangor 01248 353020

Bass Instinct Presnts... Goldie @ Amser/Time 29/05/2007

mattr — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:23:00 +0000

May 26th 9pm, 2am 2007 — Bass Instinct Presents Goldie — at Amser/Time Bangor

Arena 1 BASS INSTINCT

GOLDIE (www.metalheadz.com)
DANIEL KILLA & ADZ LEHANE featuring DJ M
KEZ & COLAK
MAFF C (Swtich)
MC DEFICIT

Arena 2 LIVE LOUNGE

OWB1
JOHN SCUDAMORE & GBH (www.manipulatemusic.com
ALEX K
ESBY & FRIENDS (Loco)

Tickets: £8 NUS/Student, £10 other, M.O.T.D.

CPR - Rhos On Sea 01492 545599

Cob Records - Bangor 01248 353020

www.ticketweb.co.uk

Spring Forward. Plus the odd fall back.

mattr — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:05:00 +0000

So, it's official. Spring's here. The Daffodils are lurking, the skies are blue and the sun is shining. The summer's on its way and I can't wait. The clocks have gone forward and April fools have had their fun, but in amongst those spring Daff's and Bluebells a nasties lurk; welsh smokers have had there right to smoke in public places removed and Malarkey has packed in the blogging game.

But I suppose it's all just swings and roundabouts. And as I said; The sun is shining. So it's all good ;)

Smoking Ban

I quit smoking tobacco over a year ago on the 31st December 2005 which left me with the difficult conundrum of what to give up this year. The one saving grace being that I'm not seeing my arse over todays welsh ban on smoking.

Yeh, fair enough, it's yet another one of our rights being stripped from us by Blairs' "Nanny State" and I will admit, I was very tempted to get pissed up, spark up some fat cubans and cause some trouble, but in all honesty my heart isn't in it. I've spent my fair share of time in pubs, both working and socialising and one thing I won't miss is coming home stinking of other peoples fag smoke, nevermind the health implications. I'm all for people exercising there right to free will but should this be at the expense of others?

Stuff and Nonsense

So, I logged onto Stuff and Nonsense, Andy Clarkes' web log for my usual Monday morning perusal to find that he's throwing the towel in... In the Blogsphere that is.

Whilst being deeply saddened by this decision I also fully respect it. Although I've only met him once, Andy has been a great role model for me as a great source of inspiration, his blog being a key resource. Something that will be greatly missed.

I look forward to checking out the latest incarnation of the Stuff and Nonsense site and reading inspirational articles that are bound to pop up (24 Ways?) around the web courstesy of the cow shed studio. Keep up the good work Andy.

How to stop IE6 background flicker

mattr — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:42:00 +0000

Update:

After an upgrade to Apache 2.2 (on Windows) this fix caused errors preventing Apache from starting. I have not had chance to investigate. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

Whilst working on my latest project, a web portal for an e-learning environment, I was presented with the issue of screen flicker in IE6 for elements using CSS to specify a background image.

Whilst this may be annoying, irritating or just plain ugly to some. For others, particularily those with epilepsy, it could be potentially life threatening.

Being a strong believer in the web being for everyone I set out to fix this issue. A quick google brought up some promising results. Dean Edwards' blog provided me with all the information I required whilst providing some humour based light entertainment at the same time.

this is a browser problem not a server problem. Unfortunately the only way to fix it is by configuring your server.

Luckily I'm a Linux kind-a-guy so setting up Apache took no more than a couple of minutes, a quick reboot of the server and everything was sorted.

Dean also mentions in his blog that there's now a Javascript alternative. However, I tried this solution with out success.

So in summary, for those Apache users like me who want to prevent flickering in IE6 but can't be arsed to read the whole of this blog article.....

Either add to or uncomment the following line to your httpd.conf


LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so

Then, in either your httpd.conf or a relevant .htaccess file add the following:

#this stops screen flicker in IE
BrowserMatch "MSIE" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Mozilla/4.[0-9]{2}" brokenvary=1
BrowserMatch "Opera" !brokenvary
SetEnvIf brokenvary 1 force-no-vary
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A18000
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

Restart Apache. Voila.

If you're stuck with IIS, check this out