Quexim

Add a Google+ button to your site

Written on September 7, 2011 at 4:36 pm, by Al

You can add a Google+ button to your site really easily, with some pre-generated Google code. Visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ to customize your own. Offline developers beware: the button requires a live web environment to render, so won’t display offline.

If you want to remove the ‘Post to Google plus’ message, simply change

to

Simple, free shopping with OpenCart

Written on February 12, 2011 at 6:04 pm, by Al

Choosing an online shopping solution is often a tricky thing.  There are literally thousands of carts, stores, plugins and systems for e-commerce.

There are plenty of high-end systems ideal for large-scale e-commerce, but if you’re just starting, your budget is often limited or sometimes non-existent.

Cheap or Open Source systems have a reputation (not always unfairly) for being a little hard to use. Anyone who’s used ZenCart will be familiar with the feature overload when navigating the back end. When you’re setting up for the first time, the last thing you really need is to spend months trying to convince a system to do what you want it to.

OpenCart is a neat, efficient system. Whilst not overflowing with features, it’s a breeze to navigate, and does contain all the core features you’d look for when setting up a shop:

• Unlimited Categories
• Unlimited Products
• Unlimited Manufacturers
• Multi Currency
• Multi Language
• Product Reviews
• Product Ratings
• Open Source
• Free Documentation
• Templatable
• Automatic Image Resize
• 20+ Payment Gateways
• 8+ Shipping Methods

If you have Installatron or a similar set up on your server, you can install OpenCart with a click of a button.  OpenCart itself has a beautifully clean interface, meaning that you can start using it immediately without having to customise it to look clean or modern.

OpenCart plugs cleanly into PayPal and other commonly-used systems for instant payment setup.

You can have a play with OpenCart on the website’s demo area at: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=demonstration/demonstration

OpenCart is open source and free and you should download it from http://www.opencart.com

RocketDock – a Mac-like dock for Windows

Written on February 8, 2011 at 4:48 pm, by Al

A handly little doo-hickey for Windows users: RocketDock gives Windows desktops a dock, just like on OSX.

You can minimise Windows to it, as well as selecting themes.  On Windows, many program icons can tend to be a little ugly, but you can add new icons to RocketDock by adding PNGs to the ‘icons’ folder in your RocketDock folder in ‘Program Files’, usually on your C: drive.

Download RocketDock: http://rocketdock.com/

Google now sees inside you

Written on February 7, 2011 at 7:49 pm, by Al

What is Google Body?

Google Body, Google’s interactive 3D map of the human body is in beta and available to play with at: http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/

Google Body lets you strip down the layers of the body, peeling back (figuratively) layers of flesh, skin, muscle and bone, right back to the circulatory system.  This sort of technology is very exciting, as it potentially lets us do a lot of things.  Imagine if doctors could plot points on maps of our own bodies which are then accessible in the cloud? Scans and medical records can all be composited to form a complete interactive history of our bodies. This also makes it easier for us to remain in possession of our own medical data.

Look deeper…

One of the best features is the search box in the top right of the screen, simply type in what you’re looking for and it will instantly zoom in. Arteries, veins, muscles, the lot. Very nifty.

At the moment, you’ll need to have a browser with Open GL enabled which means either Firefox 4 beta (though mine doesn’t seem to want to play ball) or Google Chrome.

Log me in: free remote computer access

Written on February 5, 2011 at 3:36 pm, by Al

Log Me In lets you access your PC or Mac for free. Sign up at: https://secure.logmein.com/UK/

Having a tool like this is an essential must-have for any computer user, simply access their website and you gain access to your computer from anywhere in the world.

F.lux – save your eyes, feel happy

Written on February 5, 2011 at 8:13 am, by Al

F.lux does something very simple. It adjusts your screen throughout the day based on the time.  It gives you lots of blue light in the morning and warmer colours at night.  You no longer need to squint every time you look away from the screen. Best of all it runs on Windows, Macs and Linux-based systems!

You can deactivate it temporarily for colour-sensitive work, but for most other tasks, you won’t even notice it running.

There’s plenty more info on the F.lux website: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Getting started with CSS3 rounded corners

Written on February 4, 2011 at 9:12 pm, by Al

CSS3 is very much something that’s being developed live, it’s supported in part on some browsers, though often through browser-specific code.

If you use Mozilla Firefox or Apple’s Safari Browser (read more about browsers) you can appreciate some of the benefits of CSS3, including rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients and clever transformations.  All features that have previously been accomplished with images and JavaScript – which significantly increased loading times.

CSS3 means you can offer far more attractive interfaces and designs with often no need for images.

.welcome-box {
-moz-border-radius:10px;
-webkit-border-radius:10px;
border-radius:10px;
}

Wuh? Why so repeat-y? Well, most browsers are still in the middle of implementing CSS3, and will be for some time.  This means that Mozilla broswers (think Firefox) and Webkit browsers (think Chrome and Safari) have their own prefixes.  We finish of the code with a standard declaration.  This is so that once the standard is completed the most recent, finished declaration will override the older browser-specific ones.  Nifty.

You can specify specific corners like so:

.welcome-box {
border-radius:10px 10px 5px 0;
}

The order is top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left. Don’t forget that you don’t need to specify a unit of measurement when using 0 as a measurement – zero is zero!

Unfortunately, the majority of the world aren’t quite as up to date.  Internet Explorer 9 (in early-ish beta at time of writing) will implement CSS3 rounded corners (using the border-radius declaration rather than another browser-specific one) but 6-8 are still in wide use.  I’ve found DD Roundies to be an ideal solution.  It’s a script you can include which lets you add a rounded class to your rounded corners so they work in IE. Awesome. http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_roundies/

Become a better web developer in 5 minutes

Written on August 8, 2010 at 8:41 pm, by Al

Firebug

If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.

Filezilla

FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.

Download FileZilla

Snippets

Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.

Frameworks

Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.

What does the client need?

The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.

Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Written on August 8, 2010 at 2:15 pm, by Al

You won’t hear any disagreement from me if you say Microsoft Office is good. It’s great, it has a vast amount of features and once upon-a-time most people seemed to have a copy of it. Not often legal ones, but you either had it or you didn’t.

Today Microsoft office is expensive. Amazon.co.uk has the Standard edition at £283.27 at time of writing. That’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t use it every day.

Here I have some credible alternatives to Microsoft office that are hassle-free and cost-free:

Open office org

Open Office.org (the ‘.org’ is included for legal reasons) is my personal favourite.  Developed with help from Sun Microsystems, but still open source and completely free, Open Office.org offers you a seamless switch over from Microsoft Office. With alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, you’ll still be able to open regular Office documents, work on them save them and read and edit them again in Microsoft Office.  Open Office hasn’t always been the quickest application, but it is becoming faster and more streamlined with each release.

Download Open Office.org

IBM Lotus Symphony

Lotus is based on an earlier version of Open Office, but branched off in a slightly different direction. It’s not as intuitive as Open Office but it’s free and again works with Word documents.

Download IBM Lotus Symphony

Google Docs

Google is becoming a contender in many fields, but the one benefit to using Google Docs is the ability to keep your work in the cloud. Just sign up for a free account and you can write and edit documents and spreadsheets from any computer in the world.

The interface is more spartan, the options fewer – to get more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version – but it’s utterly usable.

You can also work live with other users on documents, making real-time revisions and updates by selecting which documents to share with which users.

Get Google Docs

In today’s varied internet ecology, paying for expensive products when you can get free, legal equivalents is just unnecessary.

Best iPhone apps for work

Written on April 17, 2010 at 8:38 pm, by Al

The iPhone is undoubtedly a polarising device. It probably has more fans than detractors (or at least I like to think so), but it is primarily seen as an entertainment oriented phone, pretty much the polar opposite to the Blackberry.

So I thought I’d highlight some of the most useful tools it can provide for business.

Scheduling with Calendar and Google Calendar

I use Google Calendar not because it’s incredibly good-looking, but because it has great methods for subscribing to other applications and systems. The iPhone can subscribe to Google Calendar and sync dates and events back and forth. The magic part is being able to sync Google calendar to other apps, meaning that you can make a date on your iPhone and see it appear across your workflow (mine appear in Lighting in Thunderbird). You can add as many calendars as you like.

http://www.google.com/calendar/

Syncing files with Dropbox

Dropbox is a file-sharing program that uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronise the contents of folders across different systems. You can use Dropbox to sync files between your own PCs (or Macs) as well as choosing to share folders within your Dropbox folder with other people. The iPhone part comes into play when you download the Dropbox app and are able to view copies of your files on your iPhone. Handy, no? You can also view, download and restore files from the Dropbox website.

Dropbox is free for a starter account and gives you a whopping 2gb. If you invite friends to Dropbox you’ll get an additional 250Mb per person.

https://www.dropbox.com/home

Google

The Google App offers a quick portal into it’s services. It’s by means revolutionary and there are more complete apps for accessing Google services, but it has killer speech recognition (ie. It actually works) and a pretty icon.

The Google App links in to many of its services and can prevent a tiresome login each time you need to access a service.

2do

My favourite todo list app, mainly because you can link it without having to subscribe to an expensive system. Version 2 is on it’s way soon, with even more features. Add tasks, lists (collections of tasks), multiple sections for different types of task and sync free with Toodledo.

The interface is not only extremely good-looking, but allows for drag-and-drop, sorting, sharing and different views.

Tabs are used to great effect to separate sections and the application icon can display the number of tasks falling into a category you select.

The official website lists far more features than I can here: http://www.2doapp.com/en/2Do/tips.html