Alex Watson

Well, I’ve not posted on here for over a year. It’s time I started writing more posts.

I am full time freelancing again, so expect to see more about my work and what I’ve been learning.

Happy New Year!

Today I was looking for a plugin to allow an image to be associated with a post. Turns out that it is a built in feature in WordPress 2.9 and newer (thanks to Mark on WordPress).

By simply adding these 2 lines to the themes function.php file, an image can become a ‘Featured Image’ on a post or page:

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails', array( 'post' ) );

set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50 ); // 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall, box resize mode;


Then the following code can be used to show the image:
$thumb = get_the_post_thumbnail( $page->ID );

I was scratching my head today trying to work out how to stop a rollover dissapearing when the mouse went over a nested element.

The answer was simple: use mouseenter and mouseleave instead of hover, mouseover/mouseout.
$('#someDiv').mouseenter(function(){
//do whatever
}
$('#someDiv').mouseleave(function(){
//do whatever
}


I started to have a play with Augmented Reality today, using Flash. I tried out one of the examples from this ActiveTuts tutorial. There’s so much potential with this type of user interaction, I already have tons of ideas I want to try out. The user just needs a webcam and a print out of a ‘marker’.

This video is a cool example of what can be done:

.fla 2 / 14 Desktop Rainbow from Saqoosha on Vimeo.

I hope to make my own AR Flash app soon, as this topic really interests me.

I have decided to start learning how to write my own wordpress plugins. I have found a great book – WordPress Plugin Development, Beginner’s Guide, and I am going to follow the tutorials by trying them out on this very blog.

Most of the projects I work on at work are WordPress site, often requiring a high level of customisation using plugins. I want to become better at wrting my own plugins when needed, so using my own blog as a test envitonment is perfect, plus I can blog about what I am learning as I go.

Just found this handy 25 point usabilty checklist. It’s nice to have a list like this to make sure nothing has been missed to make a site useable. I’m very keen on this topic, I’m always thinking about how usable a site/page is as I’m building it.

Just trying out posting from my iPhone. This seems to be a nice little app for making quick posts. Expect to hear more from me on the move!

Yup, I’ve finally started using my Twitter account properly. You can find me here:

twitter.com/alexkwatson

Raiding Research Online
A fellow World of Warcraft player asked me to set her up a blog and forum for her research into the MMO raiding culture for her PhD at Durham University. This was actually a really easy task, but I also learned more about WordPress and adding widgets and editing the settings so the blog was exaclty as she wanted it.

The forum I used was PHPBB, as it is very popular and suited her needs perfectly. With no prior experience setting up a forum, it was quite a challenge to get all the user/registration permissions correct to avoid any spammers registering.

As with all the sites i built/set-up, I used Google Analytics tracking. It produces lovely charts and graphs which the site owner can also have access to. In this case my client was particularly impressed with the data output, and said it would be very useful to her PhD.

www.raidingresearch.co.uk

Blog banner

Polls widget

Mark P Jones Lighting Design
Mark asked me to build him a website based on his business card. His work needs to be seen, rather than written about, so I made sure photos of his lighting designs were easy to find, and displayed in an effective manner. He didn’t want fullscreen images, to prevent people “borrowing” them for other uses, so we decided on a 200x150px thumbnail for each image, that couldn’t be viewed any larger. This resulted in a page of colourful images that are large enough to see.

www.markpjones.co.uk

Homepage screenshot

Projects page screenshot

Gallery page screenshot