Mobile devices are growing in usage worldwide. People are buying more smartphones — and tablets — each and every year. Moreover, people are using their mobile devices more and more to access the web. It’s important to take the web experience on a mobile device into account. It’s important today and it will be even more important tomorrow as the number of users is constantly increasing. Progressive enhancement is a philosophy that makes sure that people have an easy access to your information,...
I log every minute I spend at a computer. Ever since I became a full-time freelancer, I’ve been tracking my time, assigning each moment of my day to a project and a sub-task. It all started from a desire to make the best possible return on my time. As a freelancer who charged hourly, each and every minute had a monetary value. I’ve since relaxed my approach, but some positive aspects of time-watching have stuck with me. The over-used Drucker quote goes something like “What’s measured improves”,...
We all know CSS is great. It makes our sites look good, can be used to add animation, and keeps the presentation separate from the content. It can be hard, though, to know everything there is to know about CSS. It only gets harder as we try to make our code cross-browser compatible. This is where third-party tools come in. From simplifying our workflows, to generating actual CSS, these tools give us the code we need, faster, even as we learn to write it ourselves. Pure ... Pure is not quite a framework. Rather,...
The WordPress theme market nowadays could undoubtedly be described as huge. There are tons of offers and new options appear every day. Rarely has a week gone by without any “WordPress theme reviews” in my news feed. But when it comes to the selection of a theme for a specific project, such diversity provides more pain than one might expect. Usually, we just try to find a good looking theme that suits the aesthetic of our project, and has some set of customization options. The problem here is that WordPress...
Transients are such a powerful part of WordPress, yet are overlooked and under utilized. Using the transients API, you can store values in a standardized way, giving them an expiration time. This frees up space in the database and can lead to significant load time improvements. In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to know to use transients, and a few examples to show you just how powerful they can be! Why use expiring data? ... The first question that might be on your mind is, “Why would...
Every day, we, as developers, use a wide array of tools to finish our tasks. And as we all differ in preference, so too do the tools we use. However, there are a lot of tools to choose from and trying them one by one will be counterproductive, and not to mention, difficult. So wouldn’t it be nice to have something like a Swiss knife for developers? You know, handy tools that you could just pull out from your bookmarks section? This saves you the trouble of doing a lot of Google searches that could lead to procrastination....
Good vertical rhythm on a website has numerous benefits: aesthetically the design will appear more balanced and polished; for the reader, the content will be more cohesive and easier to read. If you’ve ever read a content heavy website and found it hard for your eyes to jump to the start of the next line, it was probably due to a poor vertical rhythm. In the old days of print design, vertical rhythm was set using font sizes, line heights, margin and paddings, set in point (pt) size units. Today the same styling...
In this article, I will cover custom taxonomies and how they are created. I will make three custom taxonomies to show how the code can be reused with ease and also adapted to the needs of each taxonomy. Let’s start with a definition of custom taxonomies. What are custom taxonomies ? ... Taxonomies are different ways of grouping things together. A real life example might be TV shows: they can distributed by a number of different variables, like the channel airing them, their genre, or even the hour...