When building Elemental (WordPress Theme) I decided to develop my own, very simple, caching plugin to help speed up the theme.There were a few reasons why I did it but the main ones were: I was doing things with public...
Part of improving my website involves me wanting to write about the sort of things you want to read about.If you could take 1 minute to answer 1 quick question then that would really help me to work out what...
The other day, a post was published on Hongkiat showing how to make a button using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) only. However, it was misleading as the CSS-only button also used JavaScript and an image or two. It was actually...
As I mentioned in WordPress caching part 1, WordPress has built-in caching that can be hooked into by plugins such as W3 Total Cache and Batcache (developed by Andy Skelton who is employed by Automattic).In this article I am going...
Anybody who has been following my website will know that I like to use free services to reduce my development time wherever possible – and this post is no exception. I am going to show you how to use a...
If you want to make WordPress themes, for clients, to release for free or to sell, then there are a lot of factors you need to take into consideration. Below are some hints and tips that should help ease your...
A comment on my post about cURL mentioned that file_get_contents is a simpler method to use, and in many ways it absolutely is.file_get_contents is a PHP functions that gets the contents of a file. Unlike cURL it doesn’t require any...
Last week Twitter released @Anywhere, a system for more easily integrating Twitters features into your website. I’m a bit of a fan of Twitter so decided I wanted to add it to Binary Moon, and on Saturday I released the...
Adding widgets to a WordPress theme is a fantastic way to make things really easy to customise for the people who use the theme. Below is a really quick explanation of how to add them to your own themes.Creating widget...
I was recently asked how I built the sitemap on Binary Moon so I thought I would share the code. The sitemap layout is actually one of the many custom page templates available in my WordPress theme, Elemental – however...
I’ve never been interested in business. I’ve been interested in creating thingsParaphrased from Richard Bransons book “Business Stripped Bare”.The act of creating something, whether it’s a website, a video game, or a lego model, is one of the most satisfying...
Recently I wrote about how to use the Yahoo! weather api with WordPress and in the comments I was asked how to use it without relying on WordPress. The answer – is cURL.In this post I’m going to show you...
As post apocalyptic movies go, things don’t get much more apocalyptic than they do in the movie 9. In a post war-time, when the only things left are some golems made by an old man, and a bunch of distinctly...
Caching (on the internet) is the act of storing computationally expensive calculations in a way that can be recovered very quickly with the smallest possible impact on the server.Or, in short, ‘speeding stuff up’.In this series of posts I will...
I watched loads of films last month. Most aren’t worth mentioning – but below are some short reviews of the ones I enjoyed the most.Hellboy 2Call me weird but the original Hellboy is one of my favorite films. It’s up...
I have written a really brief query_post tutorial before, and it did quite well, but both WordPress and my own skills, have advanced considerably since then. So I thought it would be interesting to revisit the query_posts command and see...
I’ll be honest – I’m posting this because I was sent free copies of the recently re-released Toy Story 1 and 2 movies (Blu-Ray and DVD of both films). I was very close to turning it down – I don’t...
Recently I was talking to my friend, and fellow blogger James Woodcock, about his website and somehow I ended up suggesting I spend an hour or so tidying it up.James is a video game and tech journalist… and an endless...
Adding a list of popular posts to your website is a great way to increase user engagement on your site. It shows your readers what people are reading and interacting with the most – which in turn should encourage people...
When developing our Hyperlocal WordPress theme called The Local Darren came up with the idea of adding the local weather to the themes header. After a bit of research I decided that the Yahoo! Weather api was the best solution.Before...
Recently I have been doing a lot of work with API’s and these often involve loading text content (rss/ xml/ json etc) from another website and then displaying the results – for instance the Twitter feed at the bottom of...