Thursday, August 27, 2009

This is amazing!

A glimpse of the future? Apparently Microsoft have this sort of interface up and running in their labs. http://ohhello.tv/index.php/work/view/microsoft_sustainability/

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Newport City Truck Stop

Next project. Newport City Truck Stop. Have already done a holding page for this one http://www.newportcitytruckstop.co.uk but need to crack on with the site proper. One of the main considerations for this is that the site should be viewable on a mobile phone. Interesting. To me.

Going Live!

Sarah pleased with the work, so the site has gone live http://www.smart-temp.co.uk/. Sarah's feature should appear in the Western Mail today http://www.walesonline.co.uk/ so will be interesting to see if it impacts the number of visits the site gets.

Update @ 2:30pm : Feature not published today. Still, at least the site is ready.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Footer crisis

Got into a right mess with footers on the new smart-temp website. No matter what I did with the positioning the footer ended up either right at the top of the screen or halfway down it.

After a good hour of struggling with it I finally realised that the footer was set to appear below the last item on the page, but in the actual html was below a fixed size absolutely positioned item. So it was always in the same position on the page. Moved the absolutely positioned item elsewhere in the code so that the footer was at the end of the html after the main content. All working fine now.

Passed back to Sarah for checking. Waiting for response now.

Destroying a session completely in php

Interesting snippet of code. To completely destroy a session and all associated data including any cookies

session_start();

//Clear out all session data
$_SESSION = array();

//if a cookie is set set the cookie expiry date to yesterday
if (isset($_COOKIE[session_name()])) {
setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-86400, '/');
}

//destroy the session
session_destroy();

Monday, August 24, 2009

Smart Temp v2.0

Here we go with the redevelopment of the smart-temp site. Quite a bit of reworking required on the graphical side. New background fade and new buttons. Using a different technique with the buttons using css to apply the graphical highlight rather than a succession of javscript image hovers. Much neater and simpler. The test site can be seen here http://root.sjinfosystems.co.uk/smarttemp2

After liaising with Sarah it seems that I wasn't keeping close enough to the new brief. My imagination was running away with me. So back to basics. No background fade, so we're back to plain white. No gradient across any of the major graphical elements (the flowers and site title) so back to a plain dark purple there. Despite my reservations, it's quite striking. I think I like it!

There is a problem though. Lime green. Hmmmn.

Offline

A faulty internet connection chez Jones this weekend stopped most design work in its tracks. Smart-Temp updates must be done today really.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Crisis Averted!

Urgent phone call from the wife. Morgan Denton Jones is a limited liability partnership (LLP) not an LLB which is something completely different altogether. Fixed it now. All is well. Lawyers eh?

It's live!

New website went live today. Very pleased with it and have had some very positive feedback so far. Admittedly that was from my wife, but nevertheless very satisfying!

Next in the pipeline is a major update for Sarah Bowden @ http://www.smart-temp.co.uk ready for a feature on her that will appear in the Western Mail (http://www.walesonline.co.uk) this coming Wednesday. Guess that's my weekend sorted!

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Nearly there...

Just about ready to go live with a new design for the SJ Information Systems website, of which, this blog is part.

Farewell to the old minimalist design. It has served me not at all well. I don't think I ever got a single job from it!

Background


Trying to get this to appear as the page background. Hmmmn.