I’ve stacked up a fair few design, development and marketing/business books in the past few months. In this post, I want to share with you the ones I’ve enjoyed most, in case you’re looking to improve your knowledge in any of these areas too.
Around this time last year, I wrote a post on how to create an Upcoming Events section on your WordPress blog.
The events can be displayed as a list of posts, ordered by the date in which they occur (And events that come and go will automatically be taken off the list of course).
As several of you found out this January though, that code had an issue in it that meant it stopped working with the new year. In this post, we’re going to fix that (Sorry it’s taken me to now to publish a tutorial with the solution!).
There are several objects in WordPress that we use all the time, namely $post, $comment and categories/tags. If you’re like me though, you never remember everything that’s in there, or the names of the values you want.
This cheat sheet will be a reference which you (and I) can refer to the next time you’re using one of the WordPress objects.
When it comes to blogging, for a designer, the art can feel somewhat lacking in, well, art. So it is natural for the designer inside us to begin craving a new approach to this task, which can at times feel a bit tiresome and trying. Blogging can often feel this way for a designer, because we are not necessarily the best at expressing ourselves through our words. We tend to be much more visual creatures.
We are better at finding the right look than at finding the right words, so blogging can move us a bit out of our comfort zone, even though we tend to have a firm enough grasp on the topics that we tackle.
Art directed blog posts are posts that are designed individually to match the subject of the post, and they tend to break from the usual look and setup of your site. This allows you as a designer to keep a proverbial fresh coat of paint on your site, without having to take the time and make all of the considerations that come with a complete redesign.
The Transients API is a WordPress feature that I had never heard of until a few weeks ago, when I wrote a post on getting your Twitter follower count in plain text.
On that post, Otto left a comment with a different way of getting the same result, using the Transients API. Instead of using cron, which can be complicated, transients allow you to use just one or two lines.
In this post, I want to show you how to use transients, and to do that, we’re going to build a simple script that will list the latest commenter on your blog, along with their avatar. The end result will look like the image above.
WordPress makes it straightforward to create a gallery from the images attached to a post. Just a couple of clicks and the gallery shortcode will be inserted into your post for you.
Why not make it even easier though? In this post, I will walk you through adjusting your theme to automatically insert a gallery after every post.
We’ll also limit how many images show up in the gallery (The rest can be shown on the individual image pages themselves), and exclude our post’s featured image if it has one.
This day last week, Walter of Web Designer Depot fame launched his newest venture; MightlyDeals.com. One week in, we’re going to take a look at the site so far and see what we make of it.
Mighty Deals is a site aimed at saving designers and other creatives a fortune on the tools and services they use every day. They offer one product at a time, at a massively discounted price (Around 50% so far), and each deal lasts only 24-48 hours.
Work With Us. Psst... we build awesome websites. Click here to see what I mean.
12th March 2012
12th July 2011
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