KamikazeMusic https://kamikazemusic.com Web design and development in Kendal Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:10:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.4 ChatGPT might be a game changer for coding https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/chatgpt-might-be-a-game-changer-for-coding/ https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/chatgpt-might-be-a-game-changer-for-coding/#respond Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:04:51 +0000 https://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1238 So I’ve had on my to do list for a while a bit of coding to take an input text and add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to any links that don’t already have it set. In theory it’s a straightforward thing to do, either use a regex or something like DOMDocument to parse the text. But it’s a bit of a faff and I haven’t gotten round to it yet.

I have though having a play around with ChatGPT and chatting to a friend he said “have you used it for coding yet”. So I thought this one might be a good place to start checking it out and wow is it good.

ChatGPT coding

As you can see from the screenshot above in a matter of a minute or so I have my function. But looking at that I thought “I wonder if it’d be better with regex”. So why not ask?

It’s a simple as typing “rewrite the function using regex instead of DOMDocument” and here’s the new output.

function add_nofollow_to_links_regex($text) {

// Define the regex pattern to match tags and their attributes
$pattern = '/]*?\s+)?href=(["\'])(.*?)\1(?:[^>]*?\s+)?(.*?)?>/i';

// Replace all tags with modified versions that include rel="nofollow"
$modified_text = preg_replace_callback($pattern, function($match) {
$href = $match[2];
$attributes = $match[3];
$nofollow = 'rel="nofollow"';
// If the link already has a rel attribute, add nofollow to it
if (preg_match('/\brel=([\'"])/i', $attributes, $rel_match)) {
$rel_value = $rel_match[1] . $nofollow . ' ' . $rel_match[1];
$attributes = preg_replace('/\brel=([\'"]).*?\1/i', $rel_value, $attributes);
}
// If the link doesn't have a rel attribute, add it
else {
$attributes .= ' ' . $nofollow;
}
// Return the modified
tag
return '
';
}, $text);

return $modified_text;
}

// Example usage:
$input_text = "This is a
link to a website.";
$output_text = add_nofollow_to_links_regex($input_text);
echo $output_text;

I really think ChatGPT does have the power to be game changing here, there are a few caveats though, one being I think you need to have some idea of what you’re expecting back and I’d probably make sure to test what you’re getting quite thoroughly as well. But if you learn how to ask and refine your requests you can get some great stuff back.

There’s a great podcast from Drowned in Sound that whilst it approaches it from a musician perspective gives some great info about how to use these new AI tools

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dis005-how-music-can-embrace-the-power-of-ai/id1037405920?i=1000601175249

Check out David Boyle’s book prompt as well (he’s the one interviewed in the podcast)

https://prompt.mba/

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How to deploy a WordPress staging site with Duplicator https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/how-to-deploy-a-wordpress-staging-site-with-duplicator/ https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/how-to-deploy-a-wordpress-staging-site-with-duplicator/#respond Wed, 26 May 2021 09:25:44 +0000 https://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1205 So you’ve got your nice shiny new site all ready on the staging site and you need to make it live! This is a step that is fraught with peril and danger!!!! Only kidding, if you do things properly it’s pretty straight forward.

My preferred tool for deploying a WordPress site is a plugin called Duplicator which you can find here https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ or by typing in “Duplicator” to your add plugin screen in the WordPress admin. So below is a quick guide where I’ll look at deploying over an existing site and also deploying to a new domain, for the purpose of the example deploying staging.thesite.com to thesite.com. The example below is also targeted at two mainly static sites, if you have a more dynamic site, housing lots of comments etc then you’ll need to consider additional steps for data migration and when to put up holding pages on the live site etc. However most of the steps here can still be applied just with a little more caution and forward planning.

Preparing the Staging site

First things first then, get the staging site ready to move. Make sure everyone working on it knows that the site is now being moved so they stop making changes as any changes now stand a good chance of getting lost in the move.

Is it up to date?

So time to make sure the site is up to date. No point moving it and then applying a load of WordPress and plugin updates, best get them all done now and make sure everything is ok. Also make sure you have all your appropriate plugins installed for going live, Yoast, WordFence, Caching plugin, image optimisation.

Analytics

It might be a good point here to make a note of anything like analytics code so you can easily add them to the new site without having to go and dig out your account details.

Duplicating the site

Now we run the duplicator plugin, obviously if it’s not already there on the staging site then install it, head to the Duplicator menu item on the main WordPress admin menu. You should see a button labeled “Create New” so click on that.

The Duplicator main page with the “create new” button top right.

Now head through the step by step process until you get a package at the end, download both the zip file and the installer.php file and keep them safe for later on.

The Duplicator build completed, click on “One-Click Download” and look out for a pop up about multiple files downloads in browsers like Chrome

My site is too big!

One issue you can run into here, especially with media heavy sites, is the site being too big for WordPress Duplicator. There are ways to increase the allowable limits, notably with Duplicator Pro. However my personal choice is the let duplicator handle the database and manually move the site files. In this case when you first click “Create new” for the package, open up the Archive tab and select “archive the database only”. You’ll still get a package out at the end but you’ll need to back up everything in the staging sites’s route directory ready to move. So head in via FTP or a hosting file manager and backup all those files ready to upload to the new site later.

Preparing the new site

So the staging site is all ready to go, we now need to get ready for uploading to the destination. There will be a couple of different permutations here mainly

  • Uploading over a new site
  • Uploading to an entirely new domain (maybe with something like a holding page in place)
  • Moving to a new server

So we’ll look at the first two first as they’re roughly similar and then discuss doing the last one further down the line.

Backup Backup Backup

First things first, backup what’s already there, even if it’s just a holding page. If it’s a WordPress site you can use duplicator like above to do so. Then keep those backups handy, if anything goes wrong (it shouldn’t!) you’ll want to be able to roll back easily if it does.

Setup the FTP and database

So you’ve got everything backed up, good job. You now need to upload your duplicator package and get ready to install it. So get your FTP and database details ready. If you’ve got an existing site setup then you can use the existing details, if it’s WordPress you can grab the database details from the wp-config.php file. Bear in mind using the existing details will overwrite your current live site data – hence the backup we’ve just done. If you haven’t got an existing setup you need to go into your hosting and create a database, a database user and assign a password and also create an FTP user.

Upload the Package

Next step is to upload the package / files. If your site was small enough then you just have installer.php and a zip file to upload, so go ahead and pop those into the main site folder on your server. If you’ve had to backup your files separately then I recommend clearing out the site’s main folder, uploading all your files backed up from your staging site and then adding the installer.php and zip file from Duplicator. You’ll get a few errors on the front end as stuff uploads but we’re nearly there.

Unpack it all and go live!

Now you visit the installer.php to go live! Navigate to thesite.com/installer.php and you’ll get a step through guide to deploy the site. Have your database credentials handy as you’ll need to pop these in during the process as well.

If you’re overwriting an existing site then Duplicator will install the files over the top of the current site. If you’ve copied the files separately then Duplicator will simply set up the database and work with the files you’ve uploaded. Once it’s all done though you’ll be pointed to the login page, use the same credentials as you did on the dev site to login and Duplicator will do a cleanup and remove all the install files from your domain.

It’s alive

So that’s it you’re live, at this point you still have a few tasks to do. Have a look around for a start and check everything is working, test contact forms etc. Make sure you have all the relevant plugins such as caching, firewall etc now turned on and of course make sure you’ve unticked the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option in Settings > Reading. Also add back in the analytics code and similar if you need to.

I’d recommend taking another backup of the site now as your day 0 backup. But well done you’ve deployed a new WordPress site.

Moving to a new server

So I mentioned three options above for deploying to a live site, the third one being moving the site to a new server in the process. I have a preferred method for doing this which requires a little more technical involvement. Specifically this scenario is referring to a move from a thissite.com from server A to server B as part of going live.

On the new server B you do all the steps as above, setting up the domain on the server as you would normally and uploading all the files, however when you visit thesite.com/installer.php you aren’t going to get very far as the DNS will still point you to server A. This is where you need to delve into your local machine settings for a bit of help. Your computer contains a “hosts” file which tells it where to look for a certain site. In this case you need to edit your hosts file to tell it to find thesite.com at the IP address of server A instead of server B. I won’t put a detailed description of changing your hosts file in here as there are plenty of articles about that (check out this one https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/how-do-i-change-my-hosts-file). But the process is to adjust your hosts file and when you are now pointing at the new server B you can run through the steps as above with no problem. Once you’re done and happy, reset your hosts file back and then update the domain DNS to point the site address at the new server B (either adjusting an A record or changing the nameservers entirely) As the DNS changes propagate the site should gradually change to pointing at the new server for users over the next 48 hours

Managing live site data during a move

One other thing mentioned at the start is dealing with a site that collects data such as comments on an ongoing basis. Again I won’t go into an exhaustive process here but my preferred method is roughly

  • Get the dev site ready
  • Put the live site into maintenance mode and back it up
  • Migrate all the new data such as comments, posts etc to the dev
  • Check the dev site is all correct and working and then follow the steps as above to deploy the site to a live setup

I’ll say it again “Backup, backup, backup”

Once you’ve done a few sites this process becomes quite familiar, they’ll all throw up little tweaks, license clashes for plugins and things like that. But one thing to remember is every step of way to take backups. As long as you have a quickly deployable backup of any stage of the process you can rescue any issues.

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Theme my login and WordPress updates in general https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/theme-my-login-and-wordpress-updates-in-general/ https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/theme-my-login-and-wordpress-updates-in-general/#respond Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:17:35 +0000 https://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1199 One thing I often do is end up overseeing WordPress site updates, both to the WordPress core and to plugins. In theory this is an easy task, and a very important one especially security wise, but often people are reluctant do it. There’s one main reason and that is breaking things. Generally it doesn’t happen and the benefits of breaking a small section of a site are usually massively outweighed by not leaving a vulnerability in the site and getting hacked.

Of course a WordPress core update, especially to a new version needs a bit of planning, but a plugin update is usually trivial. However the issues that can occur were highlighted recently when I discovered a change in the Theme My Login plugin. This plugin allows WordPress site owners to setup login and registration forms that are powered by the site templates, thus keeping everything more focussed and on brand. In a recent version the developers have now removed automatic redirecting after login and have instead added this functionality as a paid for plugin. I’ll be honest I don’t think that’s a great idea and will annoy a lot of the user base for the plugin but I’m sure the developers have weighed up their thinking behind the decision. That said removing this core functionality essentially breaks the login process. You login and land on the same page with an empty login form, which would take an eagle eyed user to spot. So what to do? If you don’t wish to pay for the plugin then I would point you in the direction of this tutorial on Envato (https://code.tutsplus.com/series/build-a-custom-wordpress-user-flow–cms-816) It needs a little developer know how but there is a downloadable version you can grab from github on the article to get you going.

If you’ve been sensible and backed up you can always roll back and use an old version and continue on with that.

It is worth having a think through the options. But mainly I just wanted to point out the Envato tutorial for anyone who’s looking for a solution to this problem at the moment.

It’s a problem you should look to fix though, as mentioned at the start of the article, building up security issues is not worth it to save solving a few functionality issues.

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Little Wing Dev – A rebrand and a few changes https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/little-wing-dev-a-rebrand-and-a-few-changes/ https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/little-wing-dev-a-rebrand-and-a-few-changes/#respond Thu, 19 Nov 2020 21:51:07 +0000 https://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1193 So like everyone 2020 has been some year so far. One big thing for me is moving from full time to part time flying, a little earlier than planned and a little more part time than I had planned to. The upshot of which is I’m doing much more web development work and enjoying it!

Ahead of this I started a little bit of a rebrand, but managed to pick up work quite quickly and as with all good “internal” projects it gets pushed back. However I have finally launched my new site and essentially rebranded my dev side of work to https://littlewingdev.uk As you’ll see when you visit the site I’m not really keeping a full portfolio, mainly because of the fact I’m doing a lot of “white label” type work and joining clients as part of their in house teams to help clear backlogs and plug gaps in experience.

I’ll be keeping the site here as my blog slightly separate and hopefully start to post a few more web posts (I already have a few drafts started!)

Moving Hosts

I’ve also moved my hosting. I’ve hosted with Media Temple for over a decade but having found clients I work with often want a U.K. based service recommended I decided to switch over myself so I’m now with TSO Hosts and all is going well so far.

So why not check out the site at https://littlewingdev.uk and let me know what you think.

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Statamic plugins https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/statamic-plugins/ https://kamikazemusic.com/web-development/statamic-plugins/#respond Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:16:41 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1170 I’ve recently been playing around with the Statamic CMS for a project and generally I’m impressed. It is a nicely put together CMS that comes without the need for a database.

One thing I have noticed though is that as a developer you can tell this is a relatively new CMS and doesn’t have the maturity and features of something such as WordPress. That said I don’t think it’s planning to emulate the likes of WordPress and wants to be a much simpler system. There is great support via twitter etc and it seems to be growing a community. Which is the key and strength of platforms such as WordPress. So in the spirit of this I’ve shared a couple of plugins I’ve created myself to solve a few little niggles I’ve come across so far.

The first two are related, when using an excerpt there is a truncate feature but the application of it for using a word count leaves an issue of open tags in HTML content and can cause some problems. I’ve put together a basic close tags add on which you can find on github here – Statamic-Close-Tags. However that doesn’t quite work within the truncate function as it is applied.

{{ truncate:words limit="20" }} {{ content|close_tags }} {{ /truncate:words }}

Using close tags there applies the modifier before the truncation. So I’ve created a new words truncate modifier which also closes tags, that one is at statamic-word-truncate and you can apply it quite easily onto the content tag.

{{ content|word_truncate:100 }}

The second issue I’ve had is using the Redactor WYSIWYG editor as it sometimes has issues with smart quotes and Unicode characters (see my post here). So I’ve stuck together a plugin to convert some common trouble makers to unicode characters so they display properly and you’ll find that one here Statamic-kill-quotes.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the upcoming new version of Statamic is capable of but in the meantime I’ll happily use and recommend the current version and hopefully these little plugins can help some other people out.

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Taking out the trash – unset and wp_cache_flush to free up memory https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/taking-out-the-trash-unset-and-wp_cache_flush-to-free-up-memory/ https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/taking-out-the-trash-unset-and-wp_cache_flush-to-free-up-memory/#respond Fri, 02 Aug 2013 12:05:59 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1155 I’ve been working on a third party API plugin for WordPress that requires a script that auto updates from the API. It consists of pulling a big list of items from the API and checking them against the local site entries, often adding new items or updating existing entries.
The problem was with a number of memory allocation errors with PHP as the script went on, often about half way through the execution. Memory exhausted and Fatal Allowed memory issues popping up. A memory limit change would fix the problem to a point, it would still leave issues though – to work through the full list of items would need a very high PHP memory limit and also what happens if the list gets bigger in future? When 64Mb stops being enough do we simply up it to 128Mb what about when that isn’t enough do we carry on upping it? That still leaves a period where errors are being thrown and updates are missed until it is picked up and the memory limit is upped.

I made sure I called wordpress without themes to reduce a little bit of load and a quick check through to make sure unset() was being used as it should be – I’ll admit my code discipline has been lax in the past with regards to this but as ever we are always learning and making sure that we can improve our techniques. Unsetting things properly to free up the memory is one of those things I now make sure I’m doing rather than just overwriting old variables.
So the script was unsetting as it should and with diligent debugging with php memory usage outputs it became apparent that it was around WordPress functions that the memory usage was going up and not being unset, gradually leading to the errors. Plenty of looking around and eventually I stumbled upon wp_cache_flush and it worked a treat – every time I went around a processing loop or finished a process I called the cache flush and it removed all the stuff WordPress had been storing. I’m sure this wouldn’t be the best fix all for every situation but it’s certainly something to be well aware of.

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Adobe Fireworks – do not resuscitate https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/adobe-fireworks-do-not-resuscitate/ https://kamikazemusic.com/general-stuff/adobe-fireworks-do-not-resuscitate/#respond Tue, 07 May 2013 09:47:29 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1149 If you haven’t seen it already Adobe made an announcement yesterday about the future of their Fireworks software. Sadly for those fans of Fireworks it confirms the ever looming spectre that Fireworks is being put to bed and no longer developed.
It does surprise me a little that so many people seem to find this news unexpected, maybe they’ve been ignoring the inevitable? In the last iteration of updates most Adobe products got an updated darker interface, notably Fireworks didn’t, it’s not been looked at favourably for a while – it’s been on life support with Adobe and they’ve pretty much said it’s now do not resuscitate.

Still it isn’t total doom and gloom, Fireworks isn’t quite going away yet, it will continue to be ported onto new versions of Mac and Windows and will have bug and security fixes (although for how long?), so Adobe are still supporting it in a way. It is just that CS6 will be the last version, which doesn’t bother me personally as I’m still on CS5 anyway!

Overlooked, Undervalued

I’m a fan of Fireworks and always have been, it’s baffled me why so many people plug away using Photoshop for web design when you have a tool like Fireworks on hand. The absurdity of using Photoshop for web / interface design is surely highlighted by the fact that editable rounded corners on rectangle elements have only just been added!
Fireworks is a much more capable and suitable tool and has always for me seemed a more logical tool. It also has a more straight forward and more intuitive interface providing a lower barrier to entry of usage and very easy to dip into and out of for small straight forward graphic tasks.

Had it’s day

But as much as this news is disappointing I had a think about how much I actually use Fireworks now. I struggle to think of the last time I actually opened it and I’ve still been doing design work. I do everything in the browser, Fireworks has opened up for the odd picture crop or resize and little tasks like that – not much at all and there’s probably just as good applications for that now but I’ve never needed to look beyond Fireworks.
It is a great web design tool if you want to produce static comps, you can make use of great tools like master pages for templates. But that isn’t how I design anymore and I’d bet that’s not how a lot of other people do and it does make me think maybe Fireworks has had it’s day for large scale use and it may well be that it isn’t worth Adobe continuing to develop it.

I’ll stick with CS5 it still does everything I need, and maybe one day I’ll upgrade to CS6, but as much as I feel Fireworks has had a raw deal from the web design community at large and from Adobe I can’t help but think, especially in terms of the web, it’s best time may be behind it.

You can read a quick chat I had about Fireworks from a while ago if you’re interested.

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A useful analogy of web design and browser compatibility https://kamikazemusic.com/random-thoughts-and-musings/a-useful-analogy-of-web-design-and-browser-compatibility/ https://kamikazemusic.com/random-thoughts-and-musings/a-useful-analogy-of-web-design-and-browser-compatibility/#respond Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:29:00 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1144 My standard contract (based on Andy Clarke‘s contract killer) includes a clause about creating designs for the latest version of current modern browsers and any older versions will get a workable version of the content. I do of course do some more specific catering for a certain browser if needed but generally building something sensibly and providing the correct fallbacks works well enough for clients.

But sometimes they question why I work this way? I find the best way to explain is with the good old movie making analogy – one I touched upon in an old Smashing Magazine article about using CSS3. It works well as it’s something people are more familiar with, even if they don’t watch a lot of films they will know the terminology and ideas you’re explaining.
So how does the moving making analogy go? A little like this.

Let’s pretend we’re making a film instead of a website. The website design is of course our film and the browsers are our forms of playback, in this case we’ll use forms of home playback. Let’s say we have a 3D TV setup, a BluRay setup, a DVD setup and a VHS setup. (I’m not here to argue about the merits of 3D films, we’ll just take it as a given it’s best and at top end) We’re making a film for the best possible medium we can, we want a film that looks good on a 3D TV that takes advantage of all that has to offer, at the same time though we want a film that can be watched by someone who just has an old VHS setup.
So we make a film that is in 3D and we make it as good as possible and then we make adjustments to put this film on standard BluRay, standard DVD and even make a VHS version. Gradually as we get to older forms of playback we start to have bits missing, we won’t have the 3D on older media, we won’t have the same picture and sound quality once we get to DVD, we’ll start to miss DVD extras and even more functionality when we get back to VHS.
But essentially we still have the same film but presented within the capability of the users setup, we still have the same story with similar visuals just sensibly tweaked where needed for older media. In the analogy of course the browsers on the 3D scale are the likes of Chrome and the VHS is around IE6, although maybe IE6 is even older? A black and white TV maybe?
Obviously you have to put each of these on a different medium, BluRay, DVD, VHS tape, you can take those steps as the tweaks you make at stages of your web design – modernizr and that type of stuff. How much effort you put in depends on how much you want in the DVD / VHS version.

So it makes sense that we work for 3D? Why not it’s the best quality we can get – why would we make a film for VHS? Why would we therefore design for IE6? We can’t predict what a user will have at home but we’re making something that will work no matter what. If for some unbeknown reason all your clients users have IE6 then you have to put a lot more work into the VHS version, but you are forever limited by the technology, in the same way there’s only so much you can do a website for IE6.

What also comes out of this is that if the movie has a rubbish script and story it’s not likely to be very good on any media, and it may look great on 3D but when you strip out all the fancy visuals it falls down on VHS. We want to make a film that works at every level and that means a solid script, or in our web design case a good content base for the site. So you work up from the story to a basic idea of the visuals, that’s everything that’ll go in the VHS, we then start to layer ideas on top of that until we get to the 3D version – of course you can work with your eye on those big flashy 3D visuals throughout the whole process but you still need to make everything work on the way up.

Hopefully that makes sense, personally I find it a good way to explain problems around browsers and why the web doesn’t look the same on every browser.

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RSS is criminally under used but it won’t die with Google Reader or social media https://kamikazemusic.com/random-thoughts-and-musings/rss-is-criminally-under-used-but-it-wont-die-with-google-reader-or-social-media/ https://kamikazemusic.com/random-thoughts-and-musings/rss-is-criminally-under-used-but-it-wont-die-with-google-reader-or-social-media/#respond Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:07:21 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1140 I’ve been a long time Google Reader user and I’ve realised that I’ve never really looked much further. I started using it many moons ago and it’s always worked and done what I want so I’ve never looked at anything else.
But Reader is being killed off by Google in July and many people are predicting a decline in RSS usage because of it, I can’t really see that happening. It most certainly won’t be replaced by social media.

I think the reason a number of people think of RSS dying off is that many other services leveraged Reader’s API to manage various RSS related things – any of these services serious about their continued running will find alternatives either of their own or another third party. Underneath the reader API all of the information from the RSS feeds is still there so they haven’t whilst they’ve lost a fundamental tool they haven’t lost the foundations on which that tool was built.

Having utilised RSS feeds for many years to keep up to date with sites – I often lose track of those sites that don’t provide an RSS feed – I’m amazed that more people don’t utilise an RSS reader. I watch my wife who keeps up with her favourite web sites by visiting them and seeing if there’s anything new on there, I imagine that’s a way many people keep up to date with their favourite sites. They’d probably be amazed that they could have updates delivered to them without having to check all the time. They just don’t realise RSS is there, and Reader was a bit of a help here being something from a company everyone is familiar with.

Apparently many people use social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a replacement, and I just can’t get my head around this. I understand the argument that following websites on these services you get all their updates but the practicalities just make it difficult – how do you easily know what you’ve already read? How do you keep track of older posts and tweets? It just isn’t as easy as using a decent RSS reader. And if you don’t follow sites and just rely on your friends then you’re missing out hugely, I still read a newspaper and a massive part of the value in it is finding news and stories that I would otherwise never come across. Yes you’re RSS list may be curated by you but my lists are full of things I’d miss in my twitter and facebook streams.

I know some despair at the possibility of unread guilt, that big number of articles you’ve left unread. Whilst I offload plenty of stuff to pocket nowadays for offline reading I maintain a list of blogs who’s news is of passing interest so after a bit of time away I can simply remove them from the unread count with a couple of clicks.

I think so many sites and especially blogging platforms still use RSS for many different reasons that I can’t see it dying off anytime soon and I’d be hugely disappointed if it did. But Reader is going so I’ve started to give Feedly a go, and so far it’s looking pretty good.

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Where to keep up with the web and continue learning https://kamikazemusic.com/quick-tips/where-to-keep-up-with-the-web-and-continue-learning/ https://kamikazemusic.com/quick-tips/where-to-keep-up-with-the-web-and-continue-learning/#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:02:10 +0000 http://kamikazemusic.com/?p=1039 In my last proper post I introduced a couple of resources I recommend to those getting started on the web.
But where do you go from there to keep up to date and continue learning? Apart from browsing these hallowed pages of course.

Here are a few of the resources I regularly use to keep track and reference, I have plenty more in my RSS reader (Google reader! I’ll be looking for an update) but these are the ones I regularly end up visiting and reading from. They offer a variety of levels of interest and difficulties.

For designers

Smashing magazine – possibly one of the biggest resources on the web, not just for designers but they cover all things web with their blog and some very useful ebook collections.

A List Apart – a great site with very forward thinking articles on all aspects of design and development.

Spoon Graphics / Line 25 – Spoon graphics is the site of Chris Spooner who presents plenty of useful design tutorials.

Net tuts – Net tuts is part of a huge network of different sites offering articles and tutorials on a large number of web design and development areas.

For front end coders

Some of the already mentioned sites have plenty of front end coding stuff, Smashing mag, Net tuts and Spoon Graphics. In addition CSS tricks is run by Chris Coyier and is a great resource for cutting edge CSS techniques and information.

For back end coders

For back end coding the afore mentioned Net tuts is a great place to get information on all sorts of stuff. On top of that David Walsh offers great articles on back end stuff such as PHP as well as jQuery, HTML and CSS.

For documentation

There is some great documentation online Php.net and JQuery have great online documentation.

For those designing, developing and running websites on a daily basis

Boag world – The website of Paul Boag of Headscape – there is plenty of food for thought on there and it is about the only web podcast I listen to all the time. It’s also a great place to ask a question.

For troubleshooting

Stack Overflow – another great place to ask a question but also a great place to look to see if someone has already asked – and had an answer – before you.

Google – do I need to provide a link to Google? Really? You have a problem, google it, you’ll probably find you aren’t the first person to have the issue.

For general interest

There are plenty of great designers and developers out there who love to write about what they do – here are just 3 who are well worth keeping track of and will also often post links to stuff they find interetsing on their blogs and twitter.

Trent Walton – a Texas based website designer who builds some great work.
Elliot Jay Stocks – Bristol based designer who posts plenty of interesting stuff.
Stuff and Nonsense – Web studio of designer Andy Clarke who also posts some great links. He is also half of another good web podcast about freelancing Unfinished Business

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