Testing VoucherPress

Fri Feb 5

This is a test of my new plugin for Wordpress. It’s called VoucherPress. Can you tell what it does yet?

Try this on for size: Voucher 1

And this one should ask you for your email address: Restricted voucher

And a test of a voucher link with a preview:

Voucher 1

Technology and creativity

Thu Dec 31

Confession time. When I was a child I was a big fan of Mary Norton’s Borrowers books. These little people were almost real to me, to the extent I would look for clues to their actual existence. I suppose I thought something that engrossed me so much must be based in reality. (By the way, forget the travesty of a film, the books are MUCH better.)

I had some Borrowers myself. They were Star Wars figurines, which were a little smaller than the real Borrowers, but suited my purposes well. Up to an embarrassingly mature age, probably 12 or 13, I would create worlds for my Borrowers out of shoe boxes, book covers, string and anything else I could find. I built houses and vehicles, systems for defence, drawbridges, pulleys and trapdoors. I stopped short of using dolls house furniture to furnish rooms (hey, I’m not *that* sad) but still, I remember spending far too much time playing with my Borrowers.

When I was a little older electronics took over. I would take apart old radios and try to put them back together. I always failed. In fact I never remember anything working better after I’d tinkered with it – in fact I never remember anything work at all after I’d tinkered with it. So I made pretend devices. I got into no small amount of trouble once when I built a fake bomb including a large lump of Blu-tack inside a box. I didn’t know there was an IRA bomb scare that day, and I certainly didn’t intend my device to be found. I grew up a little bit that day.

Looking back I see that – like everyone – I’m a product of my past. Those years spent building things out of bits I had lying around were teaching my brain to develop in two directions: technology and creativity. And tinkering with stuff to make something new is exactly what I continue to do today.

You see, the art of being a web developer is about the creative use of technology – taking bits we have lying around (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, SQL) and making something new. Both sides of the coin are as important as the other. You can start with the technology – the lines of code, bits and bytes – and apply some creativity to make them into something useful. Or you can start with creativity – an idea, a vision of a finished product – and then use the technology to make it happen. But you can’t have one without the other. they rely on each other.

A how developer makes thousands of tiny choices every day, from how to construct a block of code to what kind of button to use in a form. Sometimes lucky people may have UI designers to work with who make some of those decisions for them, but I would guess most web developers have to wear lots of hats at the same time. Database schema designer, UI designer, backend developer, front end developer, graphic designer, documentation writer and project manager are just the hats I’ve worn today.

Having both creativity and technology on your side helps you to wear all these hats, and stay sane. Creativity helps you make those small decisions that move a project in the right direction. Technology helps you put those decisions into action. Technology helps you know what options are available to you at every decision point. Creativity gives you the inkling you need to choose the right path.

It seems my brain, because I’m a product of my past, fits this technology/creativity mix quite well. For the same reason I love jazz music, as it is based on the two pillars of technology (chord structures and sequences, scales, arpeggi, melodies and more) and creativity. I’m sure there are many more things that have a similar mix of these two elements (architecture and cookery, for example).

As we start a new year I want to help develop my skills in these areas. I want to develop my technological skills by learning more about the technologies I use every day, and possibly some new technologies. And I want to develop my creative skills by looking closely at how other more advanced developers have used technology in creative ways. Hopefully by the end of 2010 I’ll be able to say I’ve moved forward.

Performer for Wordpress

Wed Dec 9

The worlds best CMS just got better, with the creation of a plugin for Performer. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll have heard me waffle on about my JavaScript mini-library which allows you to use those cool effects that your favourite JavaScript library (such as jQuery, Prototype and MooTools) allows you to do. But without writing a single line of JavaScript. Yes, it’s true.

Here’s a simple example. Click here to be amazed.

If everything went to plan this text came pleasingly into view. You might think "Yeah, I’ve seen that JavaScript stuff before", but look at the code I wrote to make that work:

<a href="#" class="toggler targetEl-performerdemo1">Click here to be amazed</a>
<div id="performerdemo1" class="hider"> ... </div>

Yup, just CSS classes.

If you want more information please visit the main Performer website, or download the Wordpress plugin here.

Internet Explorer bug with cloneNode()

Thu Oct 8

I just spent the best part of an hour bashing my head against a keyboard because Internet Explorer wasn’t doing my JavaScript right, but Firefox and Chrome were. Turns out it was a simple solution. I had code like this:

element.innerHTML = element.innerHTML + '\n';
var clone = element.cloneNode(true);
targetElement.appendChild(clone);

But for some reason, despite the true parameter being passed to cloneNode() so it would clone children, no children would appear. Even stranger, this:

element.innerHTML = element.innerHTML + '\n';
alert(element.innerHTML);
var clone = element.cloneNode(true);
targetElement.appendChild(clone);

Alerted the element.innerHTML without its children. Turns out this line:

element.innerHTML = element.innerHTML + '\n';

Messes everything up, even in Internet Explorer 8. All I wanted to do was make the modified HTML source a little nicer, but it screwed up in the web developers nemesis.

Hopefully this helps someone else.

Share your stats

Tue Sep 22

There’s a meme on Twitter at the moment entitled Share your Stats where web guys are sharing statistics about the browsers viting websites. I’m not sure who started this meme, but I guess they are trying to get a feel for how prevalent Internet Explorer is, particularly version 6. You know most web developers don’t like Internet Explorer 6, right?

Anyway, I have a few sites I can share the statistics for. Here they are:

Share Your Stats meme results
Website Browsers Operating systems
Firefox Internet Explorer Safari Chrome Opera Windows Mac Linux
stillbreathing.co.uk 51.47% 29.11% 9.55% 5.04% 1.79% 75.88% 16.87% 6.55%
wibsite.com 69.68% 18.28% 4.81% 4.15% 1.10% 77.50% 15.62% 6.28%
myjournal.com 34.58% 51.40% 8.41% 2.80% n/a 86.92% 8.41% 0.93%
performerjs.org 65.73% 11.32% 8.45% 9.77% 2.88% 73.52% 16.72% 9.11%
beatsbase.com 45.40% 33.97% 12.06% 5.71% 2.86% 80.95% 17.14% 1.27%
comp-unlimited.co.uk 16.91% 75.21% 3.83% 2.23% 0.46% 93.45% 4.73% 1.14%
Large business website 7.52% 81.22% 9.01% 1.63% 0.35% 90.28% 8.71% 0.26%

That’s pretty much what I expected, with a very large proportion of visitors to the more commercial sites weighted towards Internet Explorer and Windows. For the other sites, particularly those with a heavy web development slant, the statistics show a wider spread of browsers. It’s good to see Chrome making inroads, but these kind of results must be somewhat disheartening for Opera.