Thomas Craig Consulting

Stoke City F.C. Wallpapers Worth Checking Out

thomascraig — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:27:16 +0000

I will continue showcasing some fantastic English Premier teams over the coming weeks with a tribute to some fantastic digital art. This weeks feature is Stoke City Football Club. Stoke has had a fantastic start to the 2011 campaign taking a 8 out of a possible 12 points, and good enough for a top 4 position. Can they maintain this form or will will we expect them to drop as the season progresses?

Stoke City Football Club

Britannia stadium

Jermaine Pennant

Stoke Goal Celebration

Stoke City Football Club

Jonathan Walters

Stoke City Football Club

20 things that drive web developers crazy

thomascraig — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:37:17 +0000

So, visual designers, here’s a list of 20 things that drive developers crazy. If you’re not doing at least 15, then you’re not trying hard enough.

1. Add rounded corners to every single element on the page. While you’re at it, add shadows and gradients too.

2. Use the same PSD as a starting point for every project. Hide unused layers, but don’t delete them. Make sure your PSD is at least 100MB.

3. Use sIFR on every piece of text. Bonus points if you choose a font that’s very similar to Arial.

4. Never use the same dimensions on elements. Give each a different font size and colour (for black, use #000000, #111111, #121212 …).

5. Use a lot of breakout images with transparency. Web developers love graphics breaking out of boxes and columns. Bonus points if you add text wrapping around images.

6. Add a modal window. At least half the site should happen in a modal window.

7. Add a Facebook Connect button. It’s just a button. How hard can it be to implement?

8. Hide important PSD layers. Later, tell the developer that they missed a hidden element.

9. Create buttons with rollover, active and clicked states. Then don’t tell anyone you’ve done this. Create a separate file for them and send it on at the last minute. We love surprises.

10. Tell the developer about some fancy functionality you read about somewhere on a blog. Then tell them to build it, because, if you saw it somewhere, clearly it’s possible.

11. Add a carousel. Oh yeah, and make sure it’s a full-screen carousel.

12. Use Lorem Ipsum instead of real copy. And make sure the reserved space is not big enough for real copy.

13. Randomly merge PSD layers. Why not? (But don’t merge too many. It’ll take you further away from the magic 100MB target).

14. Name all your files ‘final’, plus a date and a random letter (final-2010-12-01a.psd, final- 2010-12-01r.psd, final-2010-12-02b.psd).

15. Don’t worry about making changes once everything is signed off. When we’re done with a page, send another, completely different version of it. And tell us that those changes are necessary and essential for user experience.

16. Don’t name or organise your PSD layers and folders.

17. If you’re designing a form, forget about error and success states. We’ll squeeze that stuff in somewhere. We love guessing your intentions.

18. When you’re designing a website, don’t invite any developers for brainstorming or design meetings. Make sure we’re the last ones to see the layout. Show it to the client first, so it will be too late to introduce even a modicum of sanity into your work.

19. We should hang out more, so during QA don’t use bug tracking software. Come sit with us for an entire day and point out changes you want made over our shoulders. Use the opportunity for some impromptu design updates as well.

20. And finally, this is the most important thing: don’t learn anything about HTML, CSS, JavaScript or browser issues. The less you know about it, the more important we seem.

This article originally appeared in issue 205 of .net magazine – the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

10 Helpful Twitter tools to find and manage your twitter followers

thomascraig — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:05:39 +0000

Managing people following you and ones that you are following is becoming more combustion and tedious but there are loads of tools which will help to give you a helping hand. These 30 twitter tools will definitely solve your problem.

Some of the features of these tools includes schedule future post, unfollow those who are not following you, search people within your niche, use more than one twitter account at the same time and many more.

If you want to keep yourself update with more twitter or web design related articles do not forget to follow use on twitter (@thomascraig).

Tweet adder

WeFollow

Tweetdeck

TwitterCounter

Tweepi

Friend or follow

Mr.Tweet

Just tweet it

Backtweets

Tweetstats

Coldfusion Query of Queries with looping

thomascraig — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:49:50 +0000

I will start posting some of these little snippets of code so hopefully they will be helpful to some new developers and to also get feedback and alternate solutions from more advanced developers, as this is an ever changing environment and I am always interested in various methods of performing tasks.

The follow snippet was a quick little test done at the office, when asked from a new team member about doing queries (this developer is from a .Net background and is still getting his feet wet in CF). The question/problem was that we were trying to solve was that of reducing the trips to the SQL server via processing and queries, immediately I thought of querying the original query, thus leading to the snippet below.

The is just calling a coldfusion component that has two functions: the first function performs that first trip to the SQL server and returns the resultset, which is show with the getData() function. The next task (scenario) was to pass in each letter of the alphabet to query each letter (an A-Z index), so instead of plaguing our code with statements or using a we wanted to compress the code as much as possible thus the loop.

In the second function call getSomeData() we are passing in our resultset from our first query along with the lowercase alpha value to perform a query of queries. The NumberOfRecords is just a variable returned from performing a count on the ID’s in the second function to output our recordcount. Again this was done quickly at the end of the day and I’ll likely update this post as the tasks become more complete.

Your component will consist of the following, we called it qry.cfc



  
    
    
       SELECT *
       FROM content
    
    
  

  
    
    

    
      SELECT COUNT(location) AS NumberOfRecords
      FROM arguments.qryObj
      WHERE location LIKE ('#arguments.qryParam#%')

The code below will be your index.cfm file.


  qryObj=createObject("component","qry");
  qry1=qryObj.getData();



  
  
  
  Queried leeter: #lcase(Chr( intLetter ))#
  Recordcount: #qryResult.NumberOfRecords#

GoDaddy Promo Code List – February 2011

thomascraig — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:39:47 +0000

Thomas Craig Consulting

Stoke City F.C. Wallpapers Worth Checking Out

Stoke City Football Club

Stoke City Football Club

Stoke City Football Club

Britannia stadium

Jermaine Pennant

Stoke Goal Celebration

Stoke City Football Club

Jonathan Walters

Stoke City Football Club

Stoke City Football Club

20 things that drive web developers crazy

10 Helpful Twitter tools to find and manage your twitter followers

Coldfusion Query of Queries with looping

GoDaddy Promo Code List – February 2011

Popular Codes:

Awesome Liverpool FC Wallpaper That Will Energize Any Desktop

Liverpool Football Club

Liverpool Football Club

Liverpool Football Club

Liverpool Football Club – Celebration

Liverpool Football Club

Liverpool Football Club

Liverpool Football Club – Celebration

Liverpool Football Club – Celebration

Liverpool Football Club – Steven Gerrard

Liverpool Football Club – Dani Agger

Liverpool Football Club – David Ngog

Liverpool Football Club – Dirk Kuyt

Liverpool Football Club – Maxi Rodriguez

Liverpool Football Club – Pepe Reina

Liverpool Football Club – Pepe Reina

Liverpool Football Club – Raul Meireles

Awesome Outdoors/Nature Wallpaper for Desktop

White night

China – li river Guangxi

Rain Forest Tropic

Brooks Range – Alaska

Eagle Creek and Emerald Bay at Sunrise Lake Tahoe California

Morning dew

Annapurna – Nepal

Powerful waterfall

Tiered Waterfall

Rainy Fall

African Land Scape

Forest Fire the Morning After

The Best Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources and Source Files

Complete Wireframing Toolkits

Web Browser Templates

Web Form Elements

Grid Templates

Optional Wireframe Extras

Printable Sketching Paper

Are You In Need of Online Tech Support ?

Tweeting Machine – Automating Your Twitter Experience