Feeds are in no particular order, I just plucked them from my Google Reader.

Beyond Coding

I have only discovered this blog a while ago. Under the category “what’s in a name”, this blog is about: coding. D’uh. Some geeky stuff is being discussed here. Looks promising!

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Webdesigner Depot

This website is pretty new, but already has a ton of great articles. Some non-conventional things (like “Why mood boards matter“) are being covered here.

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Web Design Ledger

A great site with a lot of inspirational posts, freebies and even some give-away contests! Don’t miss out!

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Max Voltar

Blog and portfolio of fellow Belgian Tim Van Damme. This is a great site with a great design. He also often posts links to other very useful articles. This one is a must!

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Michael Wales

Blog and portfolio of Michael Wales. He might not be as known as others, but his recently updated blog has a few very useful articles on CodeIgniter. Especially his CodeIgniter Advent series was really interesting. If you’re into CI, you really should follow this one.

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WPCandy

Founded by an old contact of mine, Michael Castilla, this website has grown to one of the biggest and best WordPress-dedicated websites. There are tons of useful articles, a little gallery and lots more. If you’re using WordPress as a blogging platform, you cannot not follow this blog.

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Usability Post

If you’re designing your own interfaces, this is one blog you cannot go without. Dmitry Fadeyev has a huge amount of knowledge and loves nothing more than sharing and discussing it with the world. “Tips and insights into good design practices” as Dmitry puts it, I couldn’t have said it any better.

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Smashing Magazine

This was probably the first feed I ever subscribed to. Smashing Magazine is maintained by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. They’ve been doing a great job since two years, frequently publishing high quality articles (often guest-written), varying from “simple” inspirational posts to coding tips and ajax tutorials.

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Six Revisions

An excellent for the developper: lots of links to handy tools, video tutorials. But also loads of freebies for the designers among us.

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PSDTuts

PSDTuts is my one-stop-spot for anything Photoshop related. They have awesome tutorials that learn you some pretty nifty Photoshop tricks. They also have a handy freebies section with brushes and textures!

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Pattern Tap

Built on the excellent CodeIgniter framework, Pattern Tap is the place to be when you’re looking for inspiration. Everything is divided into handy categories and what’s even better: sign up and subscribe to your personal RSS feed that notifies you whenever one of your favorite contributors adds something!

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Noupe

Don’t ask me where the name comes from, what I do know is that Noupe is an extremely handy resource for webdeveloppers alike. They have tutorials, resources, freebies, inspirational posts… Everything you need when you’ve hit a design block.

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Nettuts

The seconcd Envato-network website covered in my list. Even the veteran coder is likely to learn something new here. They cover so much, it’s uncanny. Looking for some PHP tips? No problem. Would you rather like to learn a new framework? Don’t worry, they have it covered!

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Just Creative Design

Home of Jacob Cass, a 21 year old Australian designer. He has a great portfolio you should check out. Other than that, he also writes about logo design, the business side of being a designer and much much more.

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Elliot Haughin

Another CodeIgniter enthousiast, Elliot is probably not someone you allready knew, but if you’re looking for some fresh insights into the world of webdevelopping, you really should read his blog.

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Devlounge

Devlounge is a site for people working and enjoying the web. We want to be the online magazine for web designers, web publishers, and web workers overall. They write about lots of things and you’re likely to find something here that suits your taste.

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Design Reviver

Talking about “quality, not quantity”. The people behind Design Reviver don’t post that often, but when they do: boy! They have awesome tutorials on anything from designing to xhtml and css, jquery or even WordPress plugin development.

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David Airey

Home and portfolio of David Airey. He talks about branding your company, logo design and the business of it all. His articles are guaranteed high quality.

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CSSplay

Stu Nicholls’ CSS Play offers tons of CSS menus and demos. If you’re looking for some kind of CSS trick or a nifty little gadget for your CSS menu, you’re bound to find it here.

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CSS Newbie

CSS Newbie is another handy CSS related website. There’s tons of tutorials and demos, even some jQuery love. Their stuff is really worth checking out!

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Abduzeedo

This blog has it all if you’re a designer. There’s inspiration (how about their lengthy “daily inspiration” series?), tutorials on how to achieve some effect in different software programs. They also have some articles that’ll help you get started with your very own Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, you should be ashamed!

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24 ways

For the last three years, 24 ways has been posting ways to impress your friends from december first untill december 24th. This feed might be a bit useless, as we’ll to wait another 11 months before they start again, but you really should check out their previous articles. You’re bound to learn something new!

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Matt

This is the blog of Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, our beloved blogging platform. His posts aren’t that long most of the time, but it’s rather fun reading up on what he’s up to. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily jealous, Matt travels more than anyone I know. Probably richer than anyone I know too…

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Explosm

All work an no play make Jack a dull boy. These last two feeds are pure entertainment. Explosm posts daily comics that are just too funny in their series “Cyanide and Happiness”. Don’t subscribe if you’re easily offended.

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Robotpony

Geek humor. Oh yeah. Robotpony doesn’t update frequently, but you really should have a look at all their previous charts.

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A few days ago, I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. My biggest mistake probably was not checking properly (or even not checking at all) if my homepage was displaying properly. I saw no errors in the back-end so I presumed all was okay.

Today I checked my Google Analytics account and saw that I’ve had 0 visitors for the last two days and only 14 three days ago. Now normally I hover around 40 - 50 visitor / day, so I was a little surprised. I decided to go check my homepage and what do I see? A blank page. Nothingness.

I googled the problem and quickly found a blog post describing the same problems. It only mentioned the Super Cache or wp-cache plugins, but I remembered the PHP Speedy WP plugin also caches everything. Turning this plugin off immediately fixed everything.

I’d like to apologize to anyone who might have come across my white blog the last three days. I promise I’ll check my upgrades better next time.

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This website is hosted on a shared server. When I started it was just what I needed: cheap, nothing to worry about etc etc. Though as time progresses and my skills grow, I feel the need for better control. A while back, I had a discussion over at the CodeIgniter forums about hosting etc and a lot of people mentioned VPS hosting. I didn’t know what it was about, but got curious and googled it. What did I learn? I wants.

I started looking for some cheap VPS hosting but my search came up empty, as a student making some money off the side with my webdeveloping, I simply can’t afford 50$ / month.

A while back however I discovered Webbynode. They’re a new company planning to launch an astonishing VPS service in a few weeks. And what’s the good thing? They need BETA testers. A free VPS to beta test it, chances of winning lifetime memberships, iPod’s or 50% off on further deals. I say: don’t hesitate, go sign up! It’s easy, just enter your e-mail address.

For those of you who really don’t have a clue about VPS, some extra info: with a VPS, you basically get a server with a Linux distro for yourself. You can do with it what you want, everything’s possible. This means however that you have to configure everything yourself too. I won’t go into it too much, because there’s simply too much about it, but I know you can “learn” to manage your VPS by playing with a Linux distro in a virtual machine on your computer. Your distro then acts as your VPS. You won’t be able to put your sites live etc, but you’re able to test the whole thing and learn. I’ve only started gathering information myself, but I’m planning to write a few articles about my experiments, so check back later for more info on that!

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This post was written for the $11,000 Prize Giveaway at Just Creative Design

A while back I decided to set a standard signature in GMail. I got as far as “Bram Van der Sype” and I knew I wanted my URL in it too. But then I was stuck. Do I put webdesigner or webdeveloper below my name? I consider myself a webdesigner. I have designed all my websites myself (unless clients provided a design that only needed coding). I’ve never outsourced my designing. I like the feeling I get when I finally hit that design I like. I love to browse through dozens of blog posts, looking for inspiration and I love experimenting with photoshop.

On the other hand, I don’t like designing as much coding. I love to puzzle images together with HTML and CSS. I love the intricacies of PHP and I certainly love the possibilities the CodeIgniter framework offers me. I like thinking about security measures, passwords salts, complicated foreach loops and database abstraction. The real geeky stuff.

So what to put down there? Designer or developer. The answer is actually a simple one. It includes a slash. I decided to go with webdesigner/developer. I want to promote myself as much as possible, attracting as much clients as possible. So far all the clients I designed for new little to nothing about making websites and whatnot. Those people don’t go looking for developers, they probably don’t even know what that means. And that’s why I promote myself as Webdesigner, to address those clients. But I’d also like to attract bigger projects, bigger clients that need an extensive backend, people who know what they’re looking for. And I’d like to be found by them too.

So what did I end up with?

Bram Van der Sype
Webdesigner/developer
http://www.bramme.net

The e-mail signature is offcourse a small part of a bigger problem. How do you promote yourself? How do you come out to the world? Do you promote yourself with idea of getting as much clients as possible or with the idea of getting clients that need work you love doing? This entire situation relates to one of my previous posts too, about getting a new portfolio. I got some good advice there and made a few decisions since then. I have decided that I’m gonna make a new website: with a very specific portfolio, no blog whatsoever. And I’m getting a new name too. Even though a lot of people have told me that Bramme is a good name, I believe I can attract more clients with another, a better, name.

If you have ever had to ponder these issues, I’d love to know how you handled them!

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Don’t worry, I haven’t really. But as you’ll probably notice, there is now some ad-space under the search box. I’m not going to clutter the entire site with ads, do not worry, I’m merely trying to see if I can get any response on this. If I can, I might make a little buck out of selling ads and pay back my hosting costs that way.

To make up for this blight, I will try to write more posts and deliver better content.

If this doesn’t hit off, the ad space will, offcourse, disappear.

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However, today I am in that business (at least a bit) and I feel that bramme.net is a little too unprofessional to profile and advertise myself. My clients so far have almost always been Belgian or Dutch and most of them know nothing about the web except that they want a site of their own. However, when they contact me and ask for a portfolio or more information, I have to direct them here, because I have nothing else to show. And that feels kind off awkward. This site isn’t a portfolio, it’s a blog with a portfolio category that stands out a little more. And then some more random stuff.

So I’m thinking of starting up a new portfolio, maybe with a Dutch name and Dutch content to profile myself more around here. And that’s where the thoughts start to go crazy. What about the name? Should I just pick my full name or something fancier? What about the design? I can hardly design, though if I’d like to profile myself as a designer, I’d need one of my own…

Say I do find a suitable domain name and manage to create a good looking template, what about bramme.net? Do I depart from it, giving up the name it’s allready built up and start with something as blog.mydomain.com? Or do I keep it, linking the portfolio to the new site…

As you can see, a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts and no direct answers. That’s why I’m looking for some input from other people. Maybe they have had similar issues in the past, how did they handle it etc.

So if you have anything to say, any comment at all (preferably something useful though), please: do comment!

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Matt says :

I am just concerned though about the link for “hide” if JS is disabled it does not function? Maybe if you created the link with jQuery as well, and added it in, then it would be more accessible.

Now even though there’s not a lot of people out there who don’t have javascript enabled, I think they should be considered. Though Matt’s idea of adding the link through JS is good, there’s an easier way.

What we’ll do is simply hide the link with CSS and then show it with Javascript. If people have got javascript turned off, they’ll never see it! And something tells me people with javascript turned off, won’t go snooping through your source code and wonder why they’re not seeing that link.

So how do we do it?

<br /> #top { display: none}<br />

In my example, I’m not only hiding the link, I’m also hiding the container. You could, offcourse, only hide the link.

And how does our new slider.js code look like?

<br /> $(document).ready(function() {</p> <p> // the div that will be hidden/shown<br /> var panel = $("#box");<br /> //the button that will toggle the panel<br /> var button = $("#top a");<br /> var button_container = $("#top");<br /> // do you want the panel to start off collapsed or expanded?<br /> var initialState = "expanded"; // "expanded" OR "collapsed"<br /> // the class added when the panel is hidden<br /> var activeClass = "hidden";<br /> // the text of the button when the panel's expanded<br /> var visibleText = "hide";<br /> // the text of the button when the panel's collapsed<br /> var hiddenText = "show";</p> <p> //---------------------------<br /> // don't edit below this line,<br /> // unless you really know what you're doing<br /> //---------------------------</p> <p> button_container.show();</p> <p> if($.cookie("panelState") == undefined) {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", initialState);<br /> } </p> <p> var state = $.cookie("panelState");</p> <p> if(state == "collapsed") {<br /> panel.hide();<br /> button.text(hiddenText);<br /> button.addClass(activeClass);<br /> }</p> <p> button.click(function(){<br /> if($.cookie("panelState") == "expanded") {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", "collapsed");<br /> button.text(hiddenText);<br /> button.addClass(activeClass);<br /> } else {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", "expanded");<br /> button.text(visibleText);<br /> button.removeClass(activeClass);<br /> }</p> <p> panel.slideToggle("slow");</p> <p> return false;<br /> });<br /> });<br />

That’s all there is to it!

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Mick designed the site and did the bigger part of the xHTML and CSS and I coded what was left: a part xHTML and CSS, but a lot of PHP.

You can view the site online at MickM.com

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However, the script started off from a hidden div that you want to show, instead of hiding a box that’s there. I started fiddling with it and before I knew it, I broke it. Nice going, Bram. Smooth.

The script was completely unobtrusive, which means there’s no javascript in your actual html. That part I really liked, but the script had some major downsides too: if you knew nothing about jQuery, you had to use the accompanying HTML else it wouldn’t work either. So I decided to rewrite the whole thing and make my own script! Still, credit to ifoh designs for coming up with the idea!

So what do you need to get it working in the first place?

• offcourse the latest jQuery version
• the jQuery cookie plugin by Klaus Hartl

Let’s start off with some basic HTML. What we need is a box to hide and a link to hide it! I’m just pasting something here, but you can offcourse whip up something yourself!

(I’m not gonna post the html in here, just visit the links and view the source)

When you click the hide link now, you can see nothing happens. You’re simply taken to the same page with a # behind it. We’re gonna fix that now! Let’s add some jQuery love, like you would before you read this.

As you can see, our script now works! Yes! When you click the link, the #box div closes. Click it again, and there it is again! Merely toggling away.

How does it work, you might ask?

As simple as that. But you knew that offcourse.

However, there are some downsides to the current version.

• Close it and then hit refresh. It’s open again.
• Once you click it, you end up with # at the end of your url. Not the pretiest thing.
• Close it. See how our link stays exactly the same?
• Imagine we want to start off with our box hidden. Changing the CSS to display:none is easy now, but imagine you gotta start digging through 100 of lines of CSS.

But, no worries because all those things are covered with this script!

All our previous downsides are now fixed. Our box stays closed, there’s no # at the of the url, no matter how many times you click the link. The text of the link even changes and a class is added if you want to add different styling. Even the fourth downside is covered in the script!

So how does it look?

<br /> $(document).ready(function() {</p> <p> // the div that will be hidden/shown<br /> var panel = $("#box");<br /> //the button that will toggle the panel<br /> var button = $("#top a");<br /> // do you want the panel to start off collapsed or expanded?<br /> var initialState = "expanded"; // "expanded" OR "collapsed"<br /> // the class added when the panel is hidden<br /> var activeClass = "hidden";<br /> // the text of the button when the panel's expanded<br /> var visibleText = "hide";<br /> // the text of the button when the panel's collapsed<br /> var hiddenText = "show";</p> <p> //---------------------------<br /> // don't edit below this line,<br /> // unless you really know what you're doing<br /> //---------------------------</p> <p> if($.cookie("panelState") == undefined) {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", initialState);<br /> } </p> <p> var state = $.cookie("panelState");</p> <p> if(state == "collapsed") {<br /> panel.hide();<br /> button.text(hiddenText);<br /> button.addClass(activeClass);<br /> }</p> <p> button.click(function(){<br /> if($.cookie("panelState") == "expanded") {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", "collapsed");<br /> button.text(hiddenText);<br /> button.addClass(activeClass);<br /> } else {<br /> $.cookie("panelState", "expanded");<br /> button.text(visibleText);<br /> button.removeClass(activeClass);<br /> }</p> <p> panel.slideToggle("slow");</p> <p> return false;<br /> });<br /> });<br />

Paste that lot in your <script> tags (you could offcourse put it in a separate .js file), change the configuration at the top to your needs and you’re good to go!

Move on to the next page if you want to know how the whole thing works.

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Please let me know what you think!

However, I do know there are some bugs to be ironed out. Here’s a short list

• Find an image to display categories
• Put the text in the post meta in the middle of the icons
• Fix the sidebar in IE
• Style the comment form to something a tad prettier

If you can help me with any of these, please leave a message!

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