One of the most popular features for online shops is to have a list of featured products on the homepage. I’ve set up quite a few eCommerce sites with Magento so far and always had to implement it myself since Magento doesn’t support it out of the box. Of course I could use a plugin, but the more independent solution is to do it myself. Fortunately it’s quite easy to implement.
My latest project was launched last week, the new website for Tasmania Police. It features various improvements over the previous site – it includes a beautiful cross-browser compatible design, a dedicated news section for media releases, an improved recruitment section and community alerts with automatic media outlet notification.
My work included all the frontend work and template integration. Additional features will be added soon, like a maps-enabled police station finder.
Over the last couple of weeks Ionata launched two new websites that were both built by me. The first one is the new site for St. Virgil’s College in Hobart. The second one is the relaunch of the Skills Institute website, an organisation specialised on workforce development and training.
Both sites feature nice designs by John from Hobart Design. The Skills Institute website is based on a customised CMS that allows comfortable management of courses and qualifications they offer. It is also the first site I wrote in HTML5 syntax.
I don’t use image preloading very often – in many cases it can be avoided by using sprites. Sometimes however it’s difficult to avoid it when injecting new image content that hasn’t been used before. To avoid loading delays it makes sense to preload it.
I was surprised to see how many websites are suggesting the use of long scripts and jQuery plugins to achieve what can be done with as little as one line of code.
Some time ago I posted the code for a simple Twitter widget for WordPress. The code was pretty rough and far from perfect, but simple and reliable, so the post became one of the most popular ones on this website.
I was asked to release it as a plugin and so I spent a few hours, put everything in a nice widget class in WP 2.8+ style, added several improvements and bug fixes as well as a set of configuration options to make it more flexible.