Stay Organized with Anxiety
A good friend of mine showed me a nice little Mac application called Anxiety a couple years ago. At that point I was playing around in multiple applications to try and find a really simple tool to help with project management. After playing around with apps like OmniFocus and Things (which I really did like, by the way), I was finding that many of the applications had just a little bit too much going on. Now that doesn’t make these applications bad or anything, actually both those listed above are really great applications that I would highly recommend. However, they weren’t what I was looking for.
Using PHP to Update Your Copyright
Being that we are on the verge of entering a new year, I felt that this was an ‘on topic’ little tutorial to share! Any developer who utilizes PHP should know that it can help save time, which in turn increases productivity. PHP offers a wide variety of tools to help you to create smart, dynamic website. Here is a little trick to help you to not have to go to every single website you design and develop to manually update the copyright information to the current year. Depending on how you have a site setup, that could be a pretty decent task, especially if you’re not utilizing any sort of global variables.
The Dream Kids CD Artwork
Recently The Dream Kids asked us to come up with a design for their new Christmas & Patriotic CD. From the one sentence asking us for a design came the idea of a split christmas tree / american flag which ended up being in the final design. This was a really fun project from start to finish and we’re pretty proud of the final outcome. Part of the artwork came directly from our holiday cards (scroll through the print work) that we send out to clients.
Running IE6, 7 & 8 on Your Mac
As a web designer it’s extremely important to be able to test projects in multiple browsers. We want to try and ensure that people get the same experience whether they’re looking at a project in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. Now any web designer should be able to tell you that Internet Explorer is the biggest issue with our jobs. To be honest, if we didn’t have Internet Explorer things would be so much easier, in particular Internet Explorer 6. According to Wikipedia, IE6 was release in August of 2001. That’s more than 8 years ago! When you think about that in computer years, it’s a lifetime! So why are so many people still running IE6? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you for certain that when it comes to web development that tons and tons of money is wasted on making sites work in IE6!
WordPress Parent Navigation
For those beginner developers out there working in WordPress, here’s a little trick that you may have not run into yet. If you need to build out a website in WordPress that will load the navigation dynamically, meaning that any pages that are added in the backend of WordPress are automatically placed in the navigation on the front end of the website, there is a nice piece of code that will do that for you. You have the option to edit that code to render out the displayed navigation in almost any way that you’d like, which is a great plus when it comes to having control over a website.
