Free customised live chat on your website with Google Talk

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
7 Comments

googletalkcustomisation

There are many live chat apps out there, and they’re mostly very expensive. Good old Google have of course created a live chat functionality, but not particularly advertised it. In fact you have to do a little searching and wrangling to get it to work properly for you.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to

  1. Integrate the Google Talk / Live Chat functionality into your own website
  2. Customise the visuals for if you’re on or offline
  3. Display the chat window on your own site with a nice lightbox plugin

Here’s what it will look like when it’s finished:


read more…


TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor with TinyBrowser file browser in ExpressionEngine

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
33 Comments

expressionengine-tinymce-tinybrowser

Extending ExpressionEngine with a WYSIWIG is a fantastic way to make edting your weblogs a lot easier.  There are also some powerful file browser / management plugins out there too and in this post will see how to add both to your expressionengine site.

You’ll evetually have the TinyMCE WYSIWIG editor which looks like this: read more…


Extending the jQuery Sortable With Ajax & MYSQL

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
36 Comments

jquery

I’ve had a lot of response to the jQuery sortable list post I wrote a while back, and a lot of them ask how to send the results to a database. I’ve often said the best thing to do would be to update it by AJAX, but I’ve never really explained how. So here it is!

read more…


Random RSS items with Magpie Expression Engine Plugin

Thursday, December 18th, 2008
8 Comments

Expression Engine and Magpie RSS

The Magpie RSS feed plugin for Expression Engine is ace, but there’s no support for displaying a random feed from the source.  The following snippet shows you how. read more…


Adding a file type for syntax highlighting in Dreamweaver

Monday, November 10th, 2008
2 Comments

I’m using a proprietry open source Ecommerce system to complete a project at the moment all it’s file extensions are renamed to *.phtml.  This means I lose syntax highlighting in Dreamweaver, to add a new document type for syntax highlighting you can do the following: read more…


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Custom Made Notebooks / Journals

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
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notebooks

I recently took up part-time residence with my new friends the Dandy Collective and to mark the occasion I made them each a little notebook. Very easy to do and I’ll follow this up shortly with a how-to, thought I’d share them though. read more…


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Website in a day

Friday, October 17th, 2008
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A friend of mine asked me to help him with his website a long time ago, and he was really keen to have it done before he went away travelling to use as a blog. I’d been really busy and as the date he was leaving approached I was feeling more and more guilty. I finally set aside some time to do it between clients, and that time came to one day.

Long story short I designed, refined and built the site in 24 hours.  Actually not as difficult as it sounds if you use open source loveliness like Wordpress, Vimeo and all the wonderfull Wordpress plugins. Take a look (opens in a new window) and see what you think, but just don’t look too hard (there’s still content to go in etc.)

To achieve some of the more complex CSS without making the CMS too hard for him to use I added some jQuery to build them up based on class names.


Simply Baselayer website goes live!

Monday, October 13th, 2008
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This is my latest site produced for Simply Baselayer (opens in a new window) who produce clever clothing that does magic things with temperature. They look good too! I put in an intro video built in After Effects, in fact I’d like to add to it time permitting so it may well develop further. It’s an Expression Engine site with some custom jQuery development – mainly the gallery.

Simply are running a competition at the moment, so if you fancy kitting out your sports team with some state of the art baselayers, you can enter here.


Led Zeppelin iPhone / iPod Touch Wallpaper

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
2 Comments

I have just combined my love for both Led Zepellin and my iPhone by making a wallpaper in Photoshop.  Feel free to download it and use it yourself!

The best way I’ve found to keep all your wallpapers tidy is just to create an album called iPhone Wallpapers in iPhoto then tick it for sync in iTunes.

Left click the image to the left to preview the image, and right click / ctrl click download linked file / save target as to save it to your computer.


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Apple’s Advertising: The Holistic Synergy

Monday, August 11th, 2008
1 Comment

I was until fairly recently a Windows user, the only reason being because of the ubiquitous nature of the software when I was first getting into computers. My decision to move to Mac was based on a very delicate and ingenious advertising campaign by Apple that I failed to recognise until after I had spent close to two and half thousand pounds on their products.  Don’t get me wrong though, even though I’m conscious of this wrangling of my own will by a corporate giant, I still embrace it lovingly. read more…


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