Blog

You may have recently noticed that lots of Google search results now show profile pictures of authors alongside the result for the page. I think this adds a nice element of trust to the link, as you can see the person who wrote the page and you can be pretty sure the content comes from a person as opposed to a content aggregator or such like. As always, there’s no exact formula to controlling the search result information, but Google has published some advice for setting this up for your blog or website. ...

The jQuery UI library doesn’t support touch features by default, so trying to use the slider or drag and drop on the iPad won’t work. Fortunately, all that’s required to get this working is a small hack - enter jQuery UI Touch Punch. ...

I decided to write an extension to the CodeIgniter core Output library as it’s great for working with cache but doesn’t contain any mechanisms for clearing or managing the cache. ...

OpenCart isn’t a system I’ve used before but Packt Publishing asked me to review OpenCart 1.4 Template Design Cookbook by Tahsin Hasan for them so I thought it’d be a good opportunity to learn more about an ecommerce shopping cart system. I spend a lot of time working on PHP/MySQL applications, including Drupal and CodeIgniter, but I haven’t used OpenCart before, so I’m coming to this book and application completely new. ...

It’s very rare that I come across a web app which allows me to close my account. Granted, it’s not a feature you want to encourage people to use but if people want to stop using your app then they’ll probably just abandon the account anyway. From a user’s perspective I like to feel in control so being able to close an account, even if I don’t chose to do so, can be quite reassuring. However, I think there are also some advantages for developers and stakeholders to benefit from by implementing a ‘close account’ feature. ...