Blog - page 14

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...

So far I think I have been rather lucky, there hasn’t been much spam on WPVote, and that’s great. But I know these types of sites can be a haven for spammers, so I have used a few different tricks...

Kung Fu PandaI found Kung Fu Panda in the bargain bin at the local supermarket – and since I am a huge fan of both 3D animation, and martial arts, I had to give it a go.And, surprisingly, I wasn’t...

The latest feature I have added to WPVote is a page that shows you all pages submitted to the site for a specific domain. Below I will show how I created the custom permalink structure without creating custom pages.The process...

Recently I have added some custom content to the RSS feeds on 2 of my websites.Here on Binary Moon I have added a notice that tells people if a specific post is in the Art Directed category, so they know...

Note: We’ve now released a plugin called Browser Shots that wraps up this functionality into something a little more official.When I was building WPVote I wanted to have screenshots of the webpages that were submitted. Clearly I didn’t want to...

Building WPVote has been a really interesting process for me. I have learnt stacks of new things, and through developing WPVote have added a stack of improvements to my WordPress Elemental.From start to finish I have: Building WPVote Part 1:...

In my plans for 2010 I said I wanted to release 3 premium themes, and earlier this week Darren Hoyt and I released the first of the bunch.Accumulo – WordPress themeAccumulo is an RSS aggregation theme designed to imitate sites...

Now that the WPVote site is almost complete I need to prepare it for release.Since I have developed online all I really need to do is redirect the DNS from the current site to my own servers. However there are...

I’m nearly finished with the design of my new WordPress voting site, WPVote, so now need to look more closely at the programming.I enjoy dissecting WordPress themes, and since I also like code simplicity and minimalism (and am working with...

Last time I wrote about WPVote I got a lot of feedback on the design of the logo. I was actually quite happy with how it was looking but the comments got me thinking and I soon realised it wasn’t...

Once I had finished researching similar voting sites I was ready to start designing and building the WPVote theme.To decide basic page structure I went with Balsamiq mockups and knocked out some quick reference designs. I had a firm idea...

Of my ‘goals’ in 2009 I only officially finished half. This year I plan to do better.I mentioned that I wanted to release 4 themes, of which I actually released 2 Mimbo Pro 2 and theme framework. Of the others,...