Cognitive Resonance » Programming

Flickr Colour-Search Tool

Sunil — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:26:04 +0000

Thanks to John Nack for blogging about this one: Idee’s Multicolour Search tool searches Flickr to find CC-licensed images which match specific colours.

Coding PHP with Eclipse

Sunil — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:04:31 +0000

A couple of introductory videos on getting started using Eclipse as a PHP IDE.

They assume you’re already comfortable with PHP, and just want a quick-start guide to using the Eclipse development platform.

However it seems that the URL provided by the publisher (phpdeveloperblog.com) no longer exists – a shame, as although these were low resolution videos, the content was very good.

More Colour Tools

Sunil — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:26:08 +0000

I’ve found a few more colour tools which are useful when creating web pages:

slayeroffice.com’s Color Palette
wellstyled.com’s ColorScheme2
meyerweb.com’s Color Blender
Color Schemer Online v2

Each works in its own way, but they’re all rather fun and useful.

Web Design and Typography Articles

Sunil — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:11:44 +0000

A couple of rather good articles by Jason Beaird at sitepoint.com which I’ve only just come across. The first is titled “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design“, the second “The Principles of Beautiful Typography“.

Regular Expressions

Sunil — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:36:45 +0000

Regular expressions are very, very useful – but they can be pretty confusing at times, especially when they start to get complicated.

RegExr is a fantastic live previewing tool for checking that your regular expressions work as intended.

Thanks to Twitter user iotashan (via jakemarsh) for finding this gem of a web application.

Yet More Colours

Sunil — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:37:12 +0000

A friend pointed me in the direction of another colour generator a while back, and I only just found the link again. ColorToy 2.0 is a rather nifty Flash-based generator which takes an RGB or Hex input, and generates 8 complementary colours. Each swatch is also clickable, which is a nice touch.

More Colours

Sunil — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:03:29 +0000

Adobe’s kuler is quite a nice online and offline tool for managing and sharing colour palettes which can then be used in Adobe applications. It requires an Adobe ID to use.

Colours

Sunil — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:10:30 +0000

When I am making websites I find the “graphic design” part harder than the “coding” part. I can tell what looks good and what doesn’t, but coming up with colour schemes from scratch is something I’m not an expert at. DeGraeve.com has some pretty nice tools to help out with generating colour schemes: Color Palette Generator returns hex values based on a photograph, and Color Picker returns related shades for other hues.

PHP OOP

Sunil — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:06:40 +0000

Been a while since I’ve posted on here. Need to do it more often! Ought to look into getting some proper hosting and transferring the blog to a custom WordPress install, too.

I’ve not done much Object Orientated Programming before. I took a year’s worth of Computer Science at University in which we did some OOP Java, but I never took it beyond that in a practical sense, and so I’ve not been familiar with it.

Most programming I’ve done since then has been PHP, and I’ve not used the OOP side of it. My host doesn’t have PHP5 anyhow, and that version changed the way that OOP worked anyhow, so I’ve put off using it. Most of my PHP projects have been database related, and I’d also had difficulty relating the relatively simple OOP stuff I’d done in Java to a practical application in a MySQL database. Sure, I might be looking up information about a person, who could have properties like “name” which I could access with methods like “setName”… but more practical MySQL-access OOP matters eluded me.

I came across this page tonight, which has a nicely worked out example, starting simple and building up, using a custom class for database access. I need to actually play with some examples and familiarise myself with it, but it seems fantastic

CSS example sites

Sunil — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:59:40 +0000

Whilst looking at examples of styling forms today, I came across this website by Stu Nicholls. A lot of very useful examples of CSS on there, not just forms…

CSS From the Ground Up has got some pointers from a usability perspective, whilst Jeff Howden has also posted some nice examples on his site.

I’ve also just come across Peter-Paul Koch’s excellent site QuirksMode, which looks very detailed and seems to provide a very good reference to many of the more puzzling CSS (and Javascript, and other) issues.