It’s this time of the year again – time is flying and the days are counting down to christmas and Drew McLellan is back with his advent calendar for geeks :)
→ 24ways.org

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after managing to lock myself out of the admin section for the second time – I thought I should write up a very quick tutorial on how to change the master password. So here is just a quick step-by-step on how to reset your password for the main admin user – using phpMyAdmin. For this you will need access to the control panel of your server and be able to access your WordPress database via phpMyAdmin.
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This has been an ongoing headache of mine – colour calibration – colour profiles – and how to avoid that annoying colour shift when you save your image for the web…

I was working on a design for Lawrence Griffiths (LookingForAWebsite) who is setting up a website for a primary school. As the school is set in trees – the design brief was to convey this feel, meaning lots of green tones and shades. All was going fine until I wanted to upload the mockups as optimised jpgs for preview and feedback. With my file setup as RGB, 8 Channel and the ‘convert to sRGB’ set in the ‘save for web’ window – I thought I was doing everything I needed to simply optimise my mockup.
But how wrong I was… again, I hit the odd colour shift problem – my carefully chosen green tones taking on a completely different shade as soon as I went into the ‘save for web’ window… :'( → continue reading…

Just a very quick post to tell you all about this fantastic little app from living-e – MAMP allows you to activate the apache server very easily on your mac…

Even though I have been working with WordPress for a while now (all work done live online using password protected folders) – I never had enough time to look into getting the server setup locally to work offline with on my themes and customisations. The local server setup was something I always really wanted to figure out – but being much more of a front end designer – I avoided the issue, being a coward really : ), running away from any complications which might slow me down or delay me – my workload not allowing much time to play.

For christmas I received a wonderful surprise in the form of a new mac book pro :) and so I was keen to get my dream machine setup with everything I wanted to use, including the local server. Doing some research online for tutorials and tips I found this amazing little app ;) and within minutes I was setup with my local server – importing all data from my DB, installing WP locally – now happily working on my WP sites offline ;)
In case you’d like to know – a quick run down: → continue reading…

you do know you should back up all your data on a regular basis, don’t you?

well….. yes, so do I – but becoming sloppy or forgetful is easily done – with disastrous consequences as I’ve had to find out the hard way… after a stressful time with getting the end of year exhibition for my students organised and setup – I was quite exhausted and no longer in my usual working routine.

Backing up the vital files regarding my students – I had neglected to save my own working files on my external drive – intending to take some time to properly archive my files and backup.
Never ever postpone at this stage !!! → continue reading…

Just doing a training session with Zak – a lot of useful little tips and tricks for InDesign :)

• always use a folder structure for any InDesign document and use appropriate folders for different type of content; this will ensure that on new edits – all content will remain in place, display fine and be editable.
• for backwards compatibility: top menu > file > export >> save as “InDesign Interchange”

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Being “a visual type” – as Eric Meyer puts it – and handcoding my webpages as much to the web standards as possible for my overloaded brain to cope with – I’ve come to love CSS as it’s a great techniques to work with. On a positive note – it allows us to fight the browsers and – with a few battles here and there, a few cups of coffee later – achieve a nicely grafted layout which reflects our design concept. Great.

Then, there comes the contact page, blog comments or generally any page using any type of form. And out goes the joy and visual continuity of CSS styling…. :”( → continue reading…

Firefox being the brilliant browser it is – more and more excellent and useful extensions are being developed ; ) One of these is FireFTP by Mime Čuvalo. This extension allows you to upload your files directly in Firefox via FTP. I’m not sure how well it performs with very large files but I tried it out for several uploads and find it very easy to use, stable and very responsive. I’d like to take you through its installation and setup in Firefox and a typical upload. → continue reading…

When you set out to start learning to handcode your sites in XHTML and CSS – and of course aiming to work towards the webstandards – there are a few things you should keep in mind. Below is my list of what to remember – it will become a little bit of a mixed bag of different bits but I hope it will give you something to think about – please feel free to share your thoughts…

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… in case your head is spinning with the new world of coding…
TacoHTMLedit – mac [http://tacosw.com]
CrimsonEditor – pc [http://www.crimsoneditor.com/]
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With such a vast amount of more or less useful Firefox extensions – I thought it would be a good idea to point out a few which are particularly useful for us webbies … → continue reading…

Personally, one of my favourite things….. I use it a lot and it’s proving to be the most useful way of keeping, organising and sharing links. Even though I know that it’s an easy and straight forward site and service to use – it can be a bit tricky if you are not that familiar with it – or trying it out for the very first time. So people do ask me a lot on how this exactly works and what the best way would be to start using this – so I thought I put together a little list – hoping to spread the word…

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