Author Archives: Peter Wilson
About Peter Wilson
Peter Wilson is a Web Developer based in Melbourne, Australia. He co-founded Web Production firm Soupgiant with Josh Kinal in October 2009.
Behind the Websites: Delay loading of print CSS
July 28, 2010
Recently I stumbled across an article detailing browser performance with the CSS print media type. In most recent browsers the print stylesheet held up rendering.
The article suggested a solution, which I decided to automate for WordPress.
Tags: coding, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress
Behind the Websites: Thesis V WordPress, Pearson V Mullenweg
July 15, 2010
Mullenweg believes that, because WordPress is released under the GPLv2 license, all themes and plugins developed for WordPress must also be released under the same license. Pearson disagrees. I believe that Mullenweg is wrong. WordPress themes can operate on other blogging platforms with minimal changes.
Tags: blogging, Chris Pearson, GPL, Matt Mullenweg, Movable Type, themes, Thesis, WordPress
Behind the Websites: Getting the bloginfo correctly
July 13, 2010
One of the standout problems when using plugins with WordPress MS is when they define a constant for the plugin’s url as the script starts executing.
Tags: bloginfo, coding, domains, plugin, theme, WordPress, WordPress MS
Behind the Websites: ‘Skip to Content’ Links
July 8, 2010
Josh and I were discussing the positioning of Skip to Content links on a website. In the past I’ve placed these in the first menu on the page, usually positioned under the header.
Tags: accessibility, Best Practice, coding, content, JAWS, screen readers, WordPress
Content Strategy: Blog Post: This Tweet Looks Unloved
June 29, 2010
We had Twitterfeed set up at this blog’s old location and took the opportunity to compare click-throughs from manual tweets versus automated tweets. Manual tweets had a substantially higher click-through rate than the automated tweets.
Tags: blogging, blogs, CoTweet, Statistics, Twitter, Twitterfeed
Business: Surprise. It’s all about honesty
June 22, 2010
We were unable to help a potential client with the task they had in mind. We may have been able to fudge it but we don’t think ‘fudging it’ is the way to keep clients happy.
Design: Web 1.5
June 16, 2010
The brief for Big Red Tin and its redesigned sister site, Soupgiant, included the note “We haven’t got an exact style in mind, but something relaxed and modern without going over the top – Web 1.5 if you like“
Tags: Content Strategy, Design, Web 2.0
Behind the Websites: Valid Isn’t Best Practice
June 9, 2010
Not long ago, on the @soupgiant account, I tweeted “Vaild html / css doesn’t indicate your code is best practice; it may even indicate the opposite. #css3″. Neither the xHTML nor the CSS on this site validates, we consider it to observe best practices.
Tags: accessibility, browsers, html5, input types, standards, xhtml
Behind the Websites: JavaScript the WordPress Way / Part 2
June 4, 2010
In Part 1 we introduced the wp_register_script and wp_enqueue_script functions developed to avoid JavaScript conflicts.
In this section we’ll deal with a more complicated example. We’ll also take what we’ve learnt about including JavaScript and apply it to our CSS.
Tags: coding, CSS, JavaScript, plugin, theme, WordPress, wp_enqueue_script, wp_enqueue_style, wp_register_script, wp_register_style
Behind the Websites: JavaScript the WordPress Way / Part 1
June 3, 2010
Problems arise when your theme or plugin both use the same JavaScript library or if Prototype and jQuery are both used on the same site.
Two of the most important WordPress functions are often ignored by WordPress theme and plugin developers. Introducing: wp_register_script and wp_enqueue_script.
Tags: coding, JavaScript, plugin, theme, WordPress, wp_enqueue_script, wp_register_script