So far I have documented the basic TimThumb functionality, and how to resize images that are on external domains and now things can get interesting. In this part I will talk about some of the features that have been available...
Of all the TimThumb feature requests the most popular are being able to crop an image from a specified location, and being able to load images from external websites. Resizing images from external images was added at the start of...
TimThumb has always been built with simplicity in mind. However there are a few things it can do that have not been exposed before.Inspired by a comment from RBhavesh I have decided to write a series of posts in which...
Saw an interesting blog post on Twitter today about storing WordPress FTP information in wp-config.php. The article was written in German so I sent the author an email to ask if he’d mind me translating it. Phil, the author, very...
Recently I was contacted on Twitter by Josh Fialkoff how I develop WordPress themes, and I thought the answer would make for perfect blog fodder.I used to work entirely on my local computer, with apache, mysql, and php installed (XAMPP...
Recently I have spent some time trying to improve the page views on my website.Rather than trying to increase the promotion and links I have focused on the site itself, looking at how I could improve the content itself to...
Today I am at the London Facebook Hackathon 2010. A bunch of developers in London are going to build Open Graph apps, and then show them off to some Facebook Execs. The best will be presented to Mark Zuckerberg tomorrow.Unfortunately...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...