The Code

Create a file called twitter-proxy.php and place it somewhere publicly accessible on your server.

Be sure to update the $config variable with the tokens, keys and secrets provided by Twitter when you create an app on their developer site (this is free).

Usage

Usage is pretty simple, instead of pointing your JavaScript XML request to Twitter just point it to the file you created instead. For example:

The post How to use Twitter OAuth v1.1 with JavaScript/jQuery appeared first on Full On Design.

• Socialize This – This is one of my oldest plugins, the update from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 is mostly just a clean up of unnecessary UI linkage. Hopefully I should have version 3 finish by the summer (It’ll mostly be a recode from top to bottom).
• WP HTML5 Category Selector – I removed a load of unnecessary code from the plugin & the clear button. It now makes use of the search input type.
• Gist Shortcode – I’ve been using this on my site for a while now, I decided it was finally worth sharing you everyone.

One of the main changes for all the above plugins is that I’m going to try & use their GitHub repos as the main issue tracker & develop them a bit more often.

The post Update all the things! appeared first on Full On Design.

Twitters bootstrap has really grown on me in the last few months, while I still code front end sites with a “keep it as small as possible” approach, the efficiency gained when using bootstrap is awesome.

PHP Frameworks

I finally started getting into using frameworks this year (Once I got my head around MVC they started clicking more & more). Yii has been one of the frameworks I thought was pretty cool (mostly because you can build a site based on the database set up).

I reckon this year I’m going to move more towards Zend & FuelPHP (maybe Laravel too).

SASS/LESS

I’ve really taken to using LESS in most my projects this year, though I’ve been using it with CodeKit on my Mac which feels messy. I’m looking at setting up my stack so it just complies on the server on the fly & caches on a CDN.

Node.JS

I’ve played a little with Node.js, it’s on my todo to use it more.

iTunes U

I love kicking back & watching videos on my iPad. I’m going to try and make use of some of the videos on iTunes U this year.

More Linux

I’m currently on OSX, which is nice but too many of the updates cause issues. I’m pretty tempted to make Linux Mint/Pear OS my default OS.

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The only solution I could find online to get decent signal was to change the super hub into Modem Mode than attach a decent router. I decided on the TP-Link TL-WR1043ND from Amazon (It’s was £43 or so) & now my signal is almost 95% at the other side of my house with very little noticeable speed loss. If your on Virgin Media & have a spare £40 you should give it a try. Below is a picture of my setup.

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You can download the most recent LivePage from the Chrome web store (free of course).

Backend rewrite

The previous engine was written over a rainy weekend, which meant the code became a little unmanageable over time. One of the main changes was rewriting the backend with a strong Object Oriented focus, as a result the code is much more manageable & has decent comments.

Priority polling

LivePage now polls the file which previously updated more frequently, so if your working on a single css file you should see what you save quicker.

Higher frequency polling

The new engine has more efficient code, as a resource on a pages resources can be polled at much higher rate (In a test, I managed to about 1500 polls per minute on the fastest (25ms) setting). As a result of this, I tweaked the default polling rate to 200ms from 750ms and changed the option list to a range field in the options page.

The post LivePage 1.4 – Backend rewrite, improved polling appeared first on Full On Design.

You can download LivePage from the Chrome web store (free of course). Some of it’s key new features have been described a bit more below.

Less

LESS is my favourite CSS preprocessing tool. So I want to introduce as many people to it as possible. So LivePage will now monitor LESS files on the page for changes & load their changes without a page refresh.

LivePage 1.3 currently ships with LESS version 1.3.0, as new versions are released I’ll updated LivePage and push out an update after testing. By default LivePage will monitor for LESS style sheets.

Entire domains can be live

One of the original feature I pulled until I could perfect the implementing was making entire domains “live”. So say your developing on the domain example.local, and you click to LivePage button, every page being served from example.local will be live.

This feature is off by default as I didn’t want to have a major UX change for current users of LivePage.

file://

Supporting the file:// protocol was a tad tricky, as a result LivePage needs an extra permission. But it’s worth it to be able to quickly drag and drop files into your browser and start editing them in real time.

To use this feature make sure on the extension page (chrome://chrome/extensions/), you have ticked “Allow access to file URLs ” for the LivePage extension.

The post LivePage 1.3 – LESS, entire domain & file:// support appeared first on Full On Design.

1. Improving battery life

One of the main let downs with Android is the crapware networks & manufactures put on the handset (in most cases you can’t even uninstall it). So I rooted my phone & put CyanogenMod on it. Removing the unused apps gave me about 25% more battery per day.

I also put my phone in Airplane mode when I wasn’t using it. I found having my phone in airplane mode used about 1/20 of the battery it would have if I didn’t have airplane mode on.

2. Improve security

I was fairly paranoid about losing my phone, or my data while I was away. Here are a three apps & one technique I used to keep myself a little safer.

Prey

Prey lets you keep track of your stolen device via a web interface & in some cases you can take pictures of the people who have taken it. It’s also free, so this seemed like a no brainer.

SugarSync

I didn’t want to lose my photos, so I set up SugarSync to backup the photos I took while I was away, so if I did lose my phone, my photos will still be ok. It also meant that when I was home, my Mac had the photos I had taken already on it ready for me to sort through.

Set DNS

I used a a few shared wireless hotspots, quite a few of these offered some pretty interesting DNS servers. So I used Set DNS for rooted android phones to change the DNS servers to the one offered by Google (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4).

VPN

I also used a private VPN while I was traveling mostly because I wanted to keep my data secure from anyone listening over wifi or mobile network connections. If you have a VPS, you can install OpenVPN pretty easily (though make sure your VPS provider is ok about it).

3. Finding my way around

Before I went away, I was given a couple of books to help find my way about. However, carrying a big book around a city during the day seemed a little silly. Here are a few apps I used to help find my way around.

Google maps

Google maps was pretty handy to find my way around town, I also found it was pretty handy to make “My Places” map in google maps  to save a few useful locations (Like my hostel & cool things to do during the day). That said, google maps didn’t cache the maps I made, so I had to keep downloading them every time I wanted to check it.

TripAdvisor & Lonely Planet

I found the TripAdvisor / Lonely Planet app guides really useful, they listed the top things to do & all the data it needed (about 32mb per city) was downloaded on wifi so it didn’t eat to much data.

FourSquare

FourSquare was really handy for finding awesome places around the cities, though reading the reviews & checking in ate lots of data.

4. Dealing with data

Even with lower data roaming prices within Europe, the price of sending the odd tweet or checking google maps was silly. So I picked up a prepaid data sim (it’s pretty easy to walk into a phone shop and ask for one, they should only cost a few euros for 1GB data) and used a Micro Sim Adaptor to make it work with my phone.

In most cities the signal was pretty awesome, I could download at about 100kb/s. That said, you may want to look into a picking up a unlocked MiFi to get more out of your SIM.

5. Making calls on the cheap

Calling & texting while traveling looked friggin expensive! However with the data sim I had & jumping onto free wifi, I used Viber (It’s like Skype, but not a bloated OTT POS) to make calls & message people.

The post 5 tips for traveling with Android smartphones appeared first on Full On Design.

I’ve made a quick google map so you can see where I should be  on a given date You can follow my travels, by searching #Holi2012 / @MikeRogers0 on Twitter.

The post I’m going to be a Spain.js this summer (+ other things) appeared first on Full On Design.

What is version control?

Version control allows you to keep changes to files organised.

What makes Git so great?

• Git is really fast, mostly because it keeps a database on your local machine.
• Git is great for collaborative changes to files, so it’s great for teams.
• Distributed. Git uses remotes, so I can push to a main repo or I can push to my mates a repo.
• Adds a .git folder in the root of the git folder as a database, so unlike SVN it will not add a .git folder to each folder in your tree.
• You can commit parts of a file to staging you have worked on for better peer review.
• Git doesn’t delete anything, so it’s almost impossible to lose stuff you’ve worked on.

Setting up Git (& SSH Keys)

GitHub have written a really good tutorial on setting up Git on your OS. For the most part, just you need to run through the installer using the default options.

Cloning a Repo

Cloning a repo will copy it’s files & history to your machine. Most git repos will provide you with a URL like ‘git@github.com:MikeRogers0/siteng.in—SiteEngines-Site.git’. The ‘foldername’ is the directory you wish to clone to.

git clone URL foldername

Reviewing & Staging Changes

Once you have some some edits, you can stage them (Add them into version control with a brief message about what you have done).

# Add all the new files in the repo into the next commit.
git add .

git commit -m ‘Message Here’

or

git commit -a -m ‘Message here’

Branches

Branches are really powerful, they allow you to work on features independent from other peoples work. So for example, you could have someone adding a new feature to a site while the CSS is being edited in another branch & you will not overwrite each others work. When your happy that the feature is done you can than merge is back into your master brach & deploy it.

Review the branches available
git branch

Change branch
git checkout branchname

Make a new branch
git checkout -b branchname

Merging

Git is really good at looking at changes in different versions of a file & merging them together as to not cause errors.

git checkout master; git merge branchname;

Pushing Changes

Pushing a branch updates a remote repo.

git push

Pulling changes

Pulling changes will fetch what others have pushed to a repo & merge them into your local git repo.

git pull

or

git fetch; git merge origin/branchname

Useful videos

• Introduction to Git with Scott Chacon of GitHub
• Quick start videos from Git-scm
• Deploying Your Git Repo To Arvixe Web Hosting

The post Getting started with Git appeared first on Full On Design.