This blog has been powered by Wordpress since we setup way back in 2006 but since then Wordpress has become much more powerful and is a real CMS in its own right. We’ve built fully featured Wordpress sites for clients and it has worked out extremely well:

• www.projectblogger.ie
• www.ul.ie/envirocom
• www.3bv.org to name a few.

Clients have always been delighted at how easy it is to add/edit/remove content from the site. This is really important when your working for a client who isn’t at all tech savvy and would probably end up with a dormant, dead site if implemented in static HTML or even a CMS which was too complicated for them to use.

Our current site www.tricycle.ie is pretty much static with a few different php scripts to display dynamic content but by and large it is static. This means going into dreamweaver or whatever to edit the html and upload. This shouldn’t be a huge barrier for a web development company but it is! Inevitable, we concentrate on our clients and neglect our own site. Our staff has also grown since those early days and alot of them are eager to contribute. Sooooooooo… we’ve decided to take our customers advice and move to Wordpress.

At the moment the site is 50% redesigned and we are exploring options of having this design converted to a highly functional wordpress theme. We’re busy with client work until late 2010 so we are considering using a markup company for the conversion. In the past we’ve used www.psd2html.com and have had varying success with them. Sometimes the markup is excellent, but sometimes not! You get assigned a random project manager but you never learn their name and its just not a personal service.

So for this job we’re looking for a new Marker upper solution. Wordpress themes should be a specialty of the chosen company not just an additional service. I did alot of googling and there’s a tonne of choices in this area. I cut it down to two though:  ShopHTML  and ConvertPSDtoWordpress. I chose these two for very different reasons…

ShopHTML has a terrific live chat feature and I talked to a very friendly REAL person. We went through the rough requirements and I was sure they could deliver, as they really seemed interested in the job.

On the otherhand ConvertPSDtoWordpress are making this specific type of markup job their speciality. They provide a number of additional features over any other provider I found. For example a custom admin panel for controlling certain theme specific settings. Also integrating certain functions into the theme rather than installing lots of plugins. They are also running a competition at the moment to win a free markup so hopefully I might win that and cover some of the psd to wordpress costs!

If anyone has anything to add or could suggest a really good alternative I am all ears but until then it is between these two.

We will be launching our new site mid-March 2010… so I’m gonna be busy!

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I recently installed the shiny new Skype 4.0 and it is a big leap forward as a software program.

One unexpected side-effect however of installing the Skype Firefox Add-On is that it blocks all JavaScript pop-ups on every website in firefox. Given that the majority of e-commerce and utility websites need javascript pop-ups to work properly, its a massive bug that Skype have given birth to.

The fix is simple:

In Firefox, click on “Tools > Options”

Then click on “Add-Ons”

Find the “Skype Extension for Firefox” add-on

Click “Uninstall” and then restart the browser.

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Minority Report was a breakthrough in fictional design of interactive technology back in 2002. The vision for Human Computer Interaction in the film has since guided the tech community’s attempts to match the capabilities shown by Tom Cruise’s magic gloves.

Oblong.com is making headway in achieving the level of interaction and pure “wow” that could easily pass for magic in many parts of the world.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

The only drawback with the obvious brilliance of this interface is that the complexity of the tasks being demonstrated is specific to the gesture/interaction performed. The skills and knowledge to acquire a productive level of use would probably take years to learn. The guys in Oblong and hopefully here in Tricycle too will do a lot of the “hard yards” now to design the “conventions” and “protocols” that will guide the universal language of Gesture Driven Input.

Keep up the good work guys, its going to take a while though!

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Cushy CMS 

Cushy CMS is a lovely simple web app created by Australian company Stateless Systems. Tricycle are using it now to help their clients make basic changes to text content and images.

Apture

This web app is a powerful system for adding media to your site. Quickly  insert video clips, photos and wikipedia links on your web page and see instant results.

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This is a very specific issue I experienced when integrating PayPal (website standard) with a form for simple online payments. I was using formspring.com to generate my form, but that doesn’t really matter. A form can pre-populate the fields in PayPal such as Price, Quantity, Name, Address and a host of other values.

I was having trouble getting the “Country” field to pass on from my form to PayPal when I found quite a simple solution. Basically the “Country” field can be very important because of currency and taxes, not to mention having the correct delivery address of the customer of course.

The problem with the “Country” field I experienced was caused by the fact that my form was sending the wrong value to PayPal.

I will explain: my form used Country Names = Country Values.

Therefore if a customer selected “Jamaica” as their “Country”, then the value sent to PayPal would also be “Jamaica”. Should be fine you might think…not so

PayPal only recognise the official ISO 2-letter country codes.  In this case “Jamaica” = “JM”

I have made this list available in CSV format for your convenience, it is taken directly from the ISO page but I took out one value because it was only a reference and would upset the form.

Here is the link to the CSV list >>

Another small point I would like to add is that if you want to apply taxes in PayPal, simply click on Profile > Selling Options > Selling Taxes and add the tax rates you want for each jurisdiction. These rates will be applied to everything that you sell through that merchant account.

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Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

I read this book about one year ago, but it deserves a place in our blog. I have read many other business start-up/self-help books in the meantime and there are none to compare with Michael Gerber’s short and snappy softback.

I haven’t time to write a full review, there are probably lots of them out there. Here are a few positives:

• Although it says there are 268 pages, it felt more like 100
• The font is big and the pages are small!
• It gives practical steps to take that anybody could understand in very basic terms
• One core idea is presented here and it is fundamentally correct
• This book applies to every small business or start-up across the board
• The central idea is presented through story-telling and simple examples

So if you are in business or thinking about starting one, forget about all the other stuff. You need to read this little book first before you do anything else.

Here’s a link to buy it on amazon

Have fun!

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Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7) has a niggly habit of rendering vertical spacing due to an empty div element e.g. <div id=”testdiv”></div> renders as vertical whitespace in IE but not in Firefox or Opera. It would be easy to prevent this happening by using CSS to hide the div using “display:none” however what if on certain pages content will appear in that div for example when loaded via dynamic code such as PHP? We want IE to hide the div when its empty but show all the content correctly when so loaded. The solution is blank HTML comments. Simply by popping in <!– –> at the beginning of your div code will cause IE to hide the div if there is no further content e.g. <div id=”testdiv”><!– –> dynamic content follows</div>. Negative margins begone!

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Some handy apps for my fellow codemonkeys out there:

ComponentSoftware Diff (CSDiff) is a free advanced file difference analysis tool for Windows. Use it to analyze what changes have been made between two revisions of the same file, folder or archived folder. CSDiff is commonly used to analyze program source files, HTML documents and MS-Word documents. I use this a lot for comparing folders of PHP code to track any changes I may have forgotten to document. http://www.componentsoftware.com/

PowerGREP is a powerful Windows grep tool. Quickly search through large numbers of files on your PC or network, including text and binary files, compressed archives, MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, etc. Find the information you want with powerful text patterns (regular expressions) specifying the form of what you want, instead of literal text. Search and replace with one or many regular expressions to comprehensively maintain web sites, source code, reports, etc. Extract statistics and knowledge from logs files and large data sets. This really is a great tool. I use a lot of third party component for Joomla! and isolating a particular code section can be time consuming. A simple search of the code folder with PowerGREP can unearth that code very quickly. http://www.powergrep.com/

Firebug is a plugin for Mozilla Firefox that puts a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is a genius little tool and saves you having to repetitively upload code changes to your CSS/HTML/Javascript when you can live edit them in the Firebug toolbar to see what effect that has. Very good for finding the right sizes for your div elements. Also check out the YSlow plugin for Firebug which analyzes your web pages and recommends mechanisms for speeding up the load times of each page. http://www.getfirebug.com/ http://www.yahooapis.com/yslow/

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If you are interested in web design then you will be familiar with CSS I hope!

Positioning an element in “absolute” terms is very useful, but the element will position itself according to the window size of your browser rather than the containing “div” unless you do the following:

The PARENT “container” div must be positioned relative if the CHILD “insider” div is to position itself absolute according to the edges of the PARENT rather than say 20px from the left/top edges of your screen. Subtle difference but very important if you’re working with moving/fluid layouts.

div#container{
position: relative;}

div#insider{
position: absolute;
top: 20px;
left:20px;}

This article at Barely Fitz Designs must take the credit for what I have learned.

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The latest version of Word, Powerpoint, Excel and all those fidgety Microsoft applications that the whole planet depends on have been revolutionised in there new format. An adjustment period might be painful for some users but there is such an improvement in 2007 that it is like going from Black and White to Colour TV.

As a usability expert I admire some of the brave changes that have been introduced on the interface by the Microsoft team. Powerpoint 2007 is a masterpiece in productivity and graphic production. Excel is much improved, while Word’d pernickity formatting options have been greatly simplified.
By the way, one little tiny problem I did experience in Word 2007 was inserting Page X of Y in the “Footer” section of the documents. This clever person has the solution on techrepublic.com 

Anyway, while “Google Docs” and “Open Office” pretend to the throne of office automation, Microsoft are back in front by a long, long way again. It’s expensive but it’s the best money you will spend on software this year.

Now why don’t the people who made this wonderful product please start replacing Windows Vista please with something more humane!

Slán agus buíochas

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