Blog | bnks.xyz

York House photoshoot

28 - 11 - 11 by Phil

Last weekend I had the pleasure of staying at York House in Tetbury. While they won’t be opening until spring 2012 – just in time for the Gold Cup – this boutique bed & breakfast was ready for it’s first photoshoot. After spending an evening with the proprietor Brock Bergius discussing plans for the website…

Tracking downloads in Google Analytics with jQuery

25 - 11 - 11 by Phil

Google Analytics (and other similar services) aren’t 100% reliable, but they give a valuable insight into what the visitors to your site are up to. One thing they won’t do is track clicks on download links, unless you specify an onClick action for each link.

But here jQuery comes to the rescue – just a few lines of code will have all links to whatever filetypes you need tracked in Google Analytics as Events. Another common use of the same technique (with a few minor changes to the code) is to track clicks on outgoing links.

MediaElement.js Joomla plugin updated

01 - 11 - 11 by Phil

The MediaElement.js plugin for Joomla I released on GitHub has now been updated to v0.4. Significantly it adds support for more file formats and fixes one annoying bug. Find the post about the original release here.

Please don’t steal images

14 - 10 - 11 by Phil

I’m quite flexible with copyright, with regards to my non-commercial work at least. I also fully support releasing back to the community – there is a huge wealth of tutorials and code examples provided for free that help us all, and I feel it is our duty to give back in our own ways when we can. That’s why I maintain a GitHub page, post interesting links on here and Twitter, and even write short articles when I have time.

However, I also believe in respecting copyright. Even in the “internet age”, if you see an image (or anything else), and simply replicate it on your site (or anywhere), at the very minimum you should credit the original author. Ideally you should contact them to ask first but that seems to be asking too much of many people…

MediaElement.js Joomla plugin released

13 - 10 - 11 by Phil

Just a short announcement that I released a plugin to enable use of MediaELement.js in Joomla on GitHub recently. It is in it’s early stages – functional but lacking a couple of features. Hopefully I will be able to add more support for non-core MediaElement.js features of the next weeks/months.

HTML 5 logo mashup

06 - 07 - 11 by Phil

In case you didn’t know… there’s a new kid in town called HTML 5. This update to the language adds lots of new features, but rather surprisingly the W3C also released a logo for it:

Hopefully this logo, and the buzz and press that of the new features in HTML 5, are getting will speed it’s support amongst all browsers.

One sparse lunchtime I decided to knock one up myself that brought together the HTML 5 logo with the Rawkes rocket. The colours were a good match, and the concepts of the speed, frontiers & possibilities held in the rocket complimented those conveyed by the HTML 5 logo.

Git GUIs

06 - 07 - 11 by Phil

The market is finally taking off. While GUIs for Git have been around for a long time, they have never really offered all the features and ease of use of a “proper” GUI – they always felt like a stop-gap – and it was easier to stick to the command line. But times are changing.…

Above and below the fold: fact and fiction.

06 - 07 - 11 by Phil

Why some clients dislike scrolling.

The terms “above the fold” and “below the fold” refer to a practice that started with Newspapers. Because of the size of a broadsheet they are commonly folded in half, leaving only the top portion visible to people browsing news stands. This means that a publisher only has the top half of the paper to catch a buyers eye and thus sell the paper, so they would always ensure that are most important and arresting stories appeared above the fold.
This philosophy was transferred into the digital world, where above the fold refers to the area of the page visible before a user has to scroll down. This idea that this was important was re-enforced by the early AOL browser (once the market leader in case you’re too young to remember it!), as it did not allow whole screen scrolling, making the only content area available above the fold. Anything that over-ran simply could not be accessed making the page broken from the perspective of the user. This led to the idea that the functionality of the site must appear above the fold.