Author: Tom
-
CSS From Scratch
Continuing the series of learning web development from scratch is my introduction to CSS. In the video I go over how to add style to the killer robots site and introduce simple CSS to enable you to make your sites look awesome! As always leave a comment below if you need anything clarifying, and you…
-
HTML From Scratch
I am often asked where to find quality tutorials on beginning learning HTML and all that jazz, so I thought I’d make a video! This is the first in a series I call “From Scratch” that aims to teach total newbies how to make web-pages, I hope the video explains it all well enough and…
-
WordPress: Load more posts on page scroll
Note: This article has been marked for a quality review and will soon be updated. Although I don’t visit archive pages very often, when I do I like it when I don’t have to trawl through pages and pages of 10 posts using tiny navigation buttons at the bottom of the page. A great way…
-
Elegant URL Rewriting
To me .htaccess files are black magic – one letter wrong and you get internal server errors bouncing around everywhere, so when it came to URL re-writing (more specifically removal of file extensions) I was a little tired of getting “Error 500” messages. But I finally managed to manipulate the dark magic that lyes deep…
-
Build an uploader for S3
S3 is Amazon’s “Simple Storage Service” for hosting content on the web. It allows developers to offload static content to their powerful content delivery network at low cost, to improve site performance. I’ve used S3 on a number of projects to host content, but one thing that only recently cropped up wad the notion of…
-
Adding subtle user feedback
We all hate waiting for websites to load right? It’s annoying to watch images download and wait for Twitter streams to render isn’t it? Well it’s a fact that 99% of websites have this issue – that is, that load time is about 1 or 2 seconds. Now for companies like Google it isn’t an…
-
Adding Vignettes to Images with CSS
Vignettes are something we’ve been able to add to images in Photoshop for many years – it describes the technique of reducing clarity towards the edges of images by reducing things like saturation and brightness, and can often give an image a different quality. It was for that reason that I decided I wanted to…
-
Trimming the Fat
In light of the recent redesign of Tom’s Big Box I thought I write a post about some of the design choices I made with regard to ‘trimming the fat’. I want to look at the attitudes towards certain aspects of websites, and more specifically blogs. In re-designing the site I was constantly asking myself…
-
Site Redesign 2011
Well I finally got around to it! For months I’ve been procrastinating and finding other thing to do, but today I am proud to announce that I have successfully redesigned the blog and built a new theme. What you see before you is the result of many hours working on design and coding (as most…
-
Updates are coming!
I’ve not blogged in months, I know, I’m lazy. But things are going to change. I am in the process of redesigning the site and have a number of articles that I’m working on, so this is just a post to check in and let you know I’m not gone and am going to return…