bcg webdesign ltd
Responsive Table Demo First Name Last Name Job Title James Matman Chief Sandwich Eater The Tick Crimefighter Sorta NON-Responsive Table Demo First Name Last Name Job Title James Matman Chief Sandwich Eater The Tick Crimefighter...
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For the last year or so I’ve been working on a big corporate site using Hugo. The advantage of using a static site generator over something like WordPress is that you end up with a bunch of pages that you put on any server you want – minimal security risks through login pages etc – and a speedier site. That’s the theory anyway – there are several workarounds required in various place, but it does just about everything you could want a site to do....
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A client of mine over at www.teachchildrenmeditation.com was having issues with an uploaded mp3 on a blog post. The issue is quite a technical post for me so it’s for any fellow WP users out there rather than the average client! The problem was that the mp3 worked fine on all desktop browsers that I could test and even on my android phone but it had a couple of quirks on iOS. The duration of the mp3 was shown as NaN:NaN on the embedded player The mp3 would loop back to the start after approx 2mins 30seconds. Turns out that the way iOS handles things is slightly different to other browsers and it means it can’t work out how long the mp3 lasts. Now this can be down to 1 of (or probably both of ) 2 reasons Access-Range – best explained in this post https://forums.cpanel.net/threads/how-can-we-enable-byte-range-requests.289232/ File redirection – htaccess being used to serve the file up from location X while the browser thinks it’s in location Y Turns out that because I use a WordPress multisite install it was the latter that was causing the issue. Simply uploading the mp3 to somewhere else via ftp and then taking a note of it’s URL and using that in the blog post fixed the...
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I’ve been working on some new graphs for Teach Children Meditation and have come up with some nifty solutions for some issues. Instead of just boring old input boxes for setting some values the user gets to slide sliders (ed – what else would you do with a slider?). The values are stored and a pretty Polar Area Graph is generated to be printed out or saved so the user can see how they improve their scores between the start and end of the online...
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More for the developer this one than most clients… When doing some maintenance on an existing site I noticed lots of updates were pending on plugins. Some of the plugins I had customised for particular purposes (which is not the right way to do it but sometimes time is of the essence!) so I didn’t want an update to overwrite all of my hard work. So I found the cleanest way to do it was to add a few lines of code to the button of functions.php in the theme directory. function filter_plugin_updates( $value ) { unset( $value->response['drop-shadow-boxes/dropshadowboxes.php'] ); unset( $value->response['jquery-vertical-scroller/sg-jqvs-widget-plugin.php'] ); return $value; } add_filter( 'site_transient_update_plugins', 'filter_plugin_updates'...
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Complementary therapist Anne needed an upgrade to her existing site and (very) outdated content management system. Already used to updating her site the WordPress revamp now allows her to make immediate changes. I included a couple of hours of tuition to get her up to speed on the basics for editing the text and other content on the site.
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Following on from me blogging about using Trello, another tool I try to use as often as possible is Todoist. I’m a terrible one for needing lists of things to do or reminders written down – otherwise they just don’t happen! I suppose there is a bit of a crossover between Trello and Todoist but I tend to use Trello for the detail and todoist for the semi-big-picture stuff like ‘do the update for X’. Trello does actually have scheduling within it but I like the more general nature of Todoist for seeing things at a glance. Like Trello I use Todoist for lots of things outside work too and one of its coolest features is the ‘gamification‘ scoring. eg give yourself a task to do at a date and time and you get points, do it ahead of schedule and get more points, postpone it and lose points! Naturally there are apps for all devices so why not give the free version a...
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I always think it’s a good sign that a tool is pretty useful if I use it for both work purposes and for non-work purposes. Such a tool is Trello https://trello.com/ which lets me organise projects at work with cards which you can shuffle about between lists, add comments too, add checklists or attachments too and then finally archive once they are completed. Project Management or clients can add/comment on cards to keep everything in one place (nothing worse than massive email threads which are no longer about their original subject!) For home it’s great to organise things like planning a house move. I can share cards/boards with other people so they can do their bit where required. It’s free to use unless you want some of the extras and available on all mobile devices so do yourself a favour and give it a...
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A new development for bcgwebdesign recently was being involved in an e-book for client Lorraine Murray at www.teachchildrenmeditation.com. You can see the book ‘Connected Kids‘ on Kindle (other formats are available). This involved cleaning up the book from it’s Microsoft Word formatting and creating clean .epub and .mobi files ready for publishing. The work involved in cleaning up the code is something bcgwebdesign is used to as it involves HTML – the language/markup behind webpages....
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What’s the difference? A lot of the time bcgwebdesign finds itself doing a bit of both. Clients come with (many) different ideas, some well thought out and structured and others that need more of a helping hand to get to where they want to be. So if you have a great and firm idea about what you would like your site to look like and what structure it needs I end up developing your site rather than designing it. If on the other hand you just know you need a website but don’t know where to start then I help you get the design together and then develop based on that. The design takes that wee bit more time of course as there is more to do! I sometimes work closely with a company that do all the design and project management side of things and then I come in and just do the development bits. When I say ‘just’ it has taken years of learning lots of different programming languages and techniques to get to that stage! So hopefully the difference between web design and web development is a bit...
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Rest assured that your website hosted with me is safe. But it’s always interesting to see where attempted failed logins come from. bcgwebdesign’s server sends out an email everytime a failure happens and today has been a particularly widely travelled set of failures! 01:46 Italy 06:18 USA 11:50 Italy 12:28 Iraq 12:41 Vietnam 13:05 Jordan 13:13 Mongolia 13:18 Lebanon 13:21 Thailand 13:32 Lebanon 13:33 Iran 14:10 India 14:10 Turkey 14:41 Kazakhstan 15:03 Philippines 15:20 USA No matter where they come from we keep everything updated to keep them...
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Wow, it’s been ages since I’ve posted on here – continuing to neglect the poor old blog in favour of Twitter and Facebook… Always best to have a multi-pronged social media attack and updating content on the website helps keep it fresh and shiny in Google’s eyes! Verdict – must do better!
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