Oxygen Kiosk

Blog

An assortment of various postings relating to web design, development, and the internet as a whole.

Handy CSS Test Cases

Over at oksushi.com I’ve linked to a number of handy little CSS test cases that I’ve been creating in my IRC time on #css.

I hope they help someone, somewhere, with a CSS problem.

Posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 by Cal Wilson.

Wordpress Post Image Resources

We’re doing some advanced Wordpress templating and hacking for the new version of the awesome The Motor Report blog, and trying to do some cool things with images from posts. Rather than requiring authors to manually define “feature” images, we’d like wordpress to automatically generate various thumbnails for search results, feature post scrollers etc.

So hence, some interesting/useful resources on the subject:

Get Images Attached to a Post: Requires functions.php hacking, gets attachments from the database, rather than through brute force search of the post content.

Get the first image from the wordpress post and display it: Requires some functions.php hacking, searches the actual post text, and has the advantage of getting the first actual image in the post, rather than the first image uploaded and associated with the post.

Simple Image Grabber Wordpress Plugin:

Also interesting: Related Posts with Thumbs plugin.

Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 by Jaymis.

Magento Ecommerce

Hi everyone - I have written a post outlining the various costs we were faced with developing a large site with Magento Ecommerce over at my site.

Hopefully, some of you will learn from my mistakes!

Posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 by Cal Wilson.

Wordpress Developer-Friendly Plugins List

We spend quite a bit of time with the awesome open source Content Management System Wordpress. A huge amount of Wordpress’ power comes from the vast range of plugins available. On the flip side: As a developer trying to create a website with fast, clean, valid code, plugins can cause problems by injecting styles into their HTML output or into the head of the template. We’ve also had issues with plugins loading their own versions of common JavaScript libraries, ending up with redundant and possibly conflicting JS loads.

It’s understandable that this can happen. Plugins are generally designed to allow functionality without any template editing, and automatically including CSS and JS means that your plugin can look “right” to most users. However, we believe that plugins which include this kind of code should have “Developer Friendly” options, which allow you to turn off these includes and keep full control over how your site is styled.

A specific example: The PXS Mail Form plugin is a simple, light WP plugin which looks for code and replaces it with, yes, an email form. It’s getting rather old (last update was 2005), and there are mail form plugins with greater functionality, but PXS wins over the newer, flashier ones because of this simple feature:

It allows you to turn this extra CSS off.

Of course, a developer who’s smart enough to know they don’t want multiple lightbox.js versions embedded in their template or style declarations in their content is probably smart enough to also know how to hack it out of the plugin responsible, and we’ve done so on many occasions. This causes problems for upgrading though, we have to document these changes and remember to re-apply them whenever the plugin is upgraded, which makes more work for us, and more expense for our clients.

So, whenever we can, we try to use plugins which either don’t do these “unfriendly” things, or give us the option to disable them. So this is a list of plugins we’ve discovered which are Developer Friendly:

PXS Mail

Posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 by Jaymis.

Cal’s Queensland Government design launches

Last year I worked full time for the Queensland Government, as part of the Smart Service Queensland team, where I was contracted to redevelop the main Queensland Government website qld.gov.au. Initially contracted for a short three month stint, this quickly blew out to a six month, then a nine month contract, as the site was a mess.

Read more

Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 by Cal Wilson.

New Oxygen Kiosk layout

This year is a year of big changes for me. At the end of 2007, many different threads of my life seemed to come to an end, leaving me at the beginning of this year with a lot less baggage. Because of this, I have relocated to Sydney to open another branch of the Oxygen Kiosk.

This means that from my sunny desk in the eastern suburbs I will be working hard to expand the business down here. It also means that I will have a lot more time to spend with our existing clients, developing new solutions for them.

And, to celebrate the new year, we have a brand new website design for you. Same colours, different ideas. Please, send the link to your friends!

So, an exciting year for everyone. Bring on 2008!

Posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 by Cal Wilson.

O2KPTYLTDFTW

We’ve registered as a company today. Along with my aquisition (finally) of oxygenkiosk.com, we are now officially Oxygen Kiosk PTY LTD. Yes, we’ve dropped the the. We hope that that won’t confuse you.

Unhappily, after the painless process of registering the company, we’ve been let down by the ATO’s ABN application process:

The service standard as outlined in the Taxpayer Charter for the issue of an ABN is 28 days.

10 minutes to get the ACN and business registration, then a month to get an ABN? A month in which we can’t get a bank account?

Good work ATO, loving your service standard and Taxpayer Charter.

Posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 by Jaymis.

New Projects added

Coming out of a busy start to the year, we’ve added two new projects to our portfolio.

Posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 by Cal Wilson.

CreateDigitalMotion Announcements

There has been some recent blog PR for CDMotion at Applelinks, Sonicstate and MacMerc. The site is progressing steadily, and theOxygenKiosk is along for the next phase of development, an online store aligned with CreateDigitalMusic.

Posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 by Jaymis.

Create Digital Motion Launch

Sister site to CreateDigitalMusic - CreateDigitalMotion has been pre-released today.

We will have a couple of days public testing before the release announcement next Monday. CDMusic has enjoyed plenty of praise since its’ OxygenKiosk powered redesign, attracting new readers, new advertisers and plenty of good will around the net. We’re sure CDMotion will be similarly successful.

Posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 by Jaymis.