One thing we talk a lot about is how important it is, for costs, to stick to problems which have already been solved. Get fancy and do something new, and your costs have rocketed away.
A developer has just done a nice little piece on spellchecking. In 1984 it was ferociously hard. In fact, if you wanted a decent spellchecker in your custom application you had to pay dearly for the priviledge. Today it can be accomplished in a few lines of code. Read more
It’s hard to measure the cost of code. Simple stuff can be ferociously time-consuming to develop, and bad coders often produce reams of poorly structured code.
But let’s assume you’re dealing with a typical, decent developer who doesn’t take the long route, or dangerous shortcuts. Read more
Bit of an unusual post this one, but when we uncover kit that my girlfriend says “haven’t you chucked out that museum piece yet?” I tend to call up the Museum of Computing in Swindon. Consequently they’ve got a few random oddities from my IT past including an old Sinclair QL and the very rare QL Monitor that came with it, as well as the tiny and unpopular Rex card sized organiser.
Anyway, the whole point of this post is to raise awareness of their need for a new home by the end of July. If you, or anyone you know, has the capability to offer some real and useful help then they’d love to hear from you. IT industry firms are probably the best candidates.
Very quietly we’ve been building something quite special for WordPress. Let’s just say that we’re not the first with the concept, nor, I’m sure, the last. But it’s going to be about the most professional set-up. And we’ve done almost all of it with WordPress based technology.
What is it, exactly?
Well, just at this moment, we’re not saying. There’s been hints out there, and it’s not a huge secret, but we’re not ready to make any big announcements just yet. Look out for clues in our forum posts around the place, and in some of our work.
Really I had to post simply to explain why we’ve posted nothing on the blog for over a month. There’s been that internal project, but also some very interesting projects for clients. All of which has conspired to keep us with our noses on the grindstone. Soon we’ll look up and return to normal. Maybe.
The current crisis in the world’s banking industry is causing my quite a bit of concern right now. Our web technology business is small but growing. When businesses are doing well they’re more likely to spend money on items such as web design and web applications and we believe we’ve benefitted from that over the past year or so.
But what happens if our clients and potential clients start to suffer as a consequence of an economic downturn? Read more
Two hot topics, in one post. WordPress is the hot blogging tool right now, and the iPhone is one of the hot mobile phones too.
So it’s a shame that they don’t work that well together. In this article I go through the following:
We finally built GPL theme for hosted versions of WordPress! And very pretty it is too…
We’ve been writing custom themes for clients for quite some time now, and felt it was time to give a little something back to the WordPress community.
So we did a fully GPL theme, complete with a Fireworks png, all sliced up and ready to be re-exported in such a way that you can completely change the site’s design without ever touching a line of code. You have to work within the limitations of the graphical elements, but there’s no doubt there’s a lot you can do.
You’ll see variants of the theme in use around the place – on the satirical motoring site Sniff Petrol on Dave Coveney’s site, and in a few other places soon we hope. We have high hopes for the underlying platform of this theme – it brings with it a navigation widget to give you fine control of an elegantly styled sidebar, an easy to customise contact form page template, and much much more. It’s a theme for people who like to expand what they can do with WordPress. It’s also, of course, xhtml 1.0 transition, works on every browser we tested on, and the work of a dedicated team of professionals.
Anvil Theme Official Demo and Download Page
