Just a quick post to let you know that I have just published a short article I wrote on printing with CSS. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I had just put up a quick print stylesheet for this site and that I was planning on writing an article to cover the topics …so here it is!

So the article deals with styling for print, which is something I promote, and believe can have a big impact on the usability of a site. Hopefully the article explains how to go about styling a site for print, and some of the advantages that it provides, it also has a further information section with some additional reading links.

I’ve decided not to enable commenting on the article itself and so instead will link to this post as its official comments area, if there are any!

Read the article here

~Matt

Well throughout the last couple of weeks there have been a few small changes made to the site which you may or may not of noticed! Mostly this has been making tweeks to the wordpress theme in order that it may be a little more organised and better SE optimised.

You may also have noted the addition to the top right of every page, which is the as-yet nameless and sexless ninjapenguin mascot. The actual penguin I came across on istockphoto and last night a small ‘pimp-my-bird’ competion sparked off between Squib and Jess to see who could ‘ninja’ him up the most.

The nunchuks (seen here) were added by Jess while Squib went with a traditional style bandana and sword (it will make an appearance soon!). So I shall be tweaking the positioning of it slightly and also probably put a script up to randomly display one of the two at the top right.

In addition to the site mascot I have also updated the resume page with some more information, it’s not yet finished as I still want to do something more with the styling but the content side of it is getting there!

You may notice that if you now visit the site home page you will see my bookmarks feed is now appearing. This was a little script written in javascript which makes use of the Magnolia JSON object in order to display a few (currently 3) of my latest bookmarks, I’m actually looking at a way I can effectively load the JSON object asynchronously after the page is done loading as the request to Ma.gnolia can take some time, but in doing so have discovered a bug that means I cant get it working in IE! (would you believe :P)

So as well as those I have also now created a print style sheet for the site, this should make a dramatic difference in the rare case that anyone would like to print any of the information on the site out (you can see what the print will look like by looking at the print preview in your browser!). I am a big advocate of print style sheets and will probably post up a little article focusing on this subject a little later today.

Edit I have also just updated the wordpress install to the latest version (2.3.x i think), was very painless and straightforward, as I have come to expect from wordpress! With the update comes the ability to tag articles now and also the nifty(?) tag cloud to the right. I’m pretty sure it seems a bit faster as well, though that may just be me!
~Matt

Up until very recently any software diagrams I have put together have all been built through Microsoft Visio, however on the tip of a colleague I tried out OmniGraffle from the omni group, from this point on Visio can remain closed!

I love the user interface, as with most things mac it just feels lighter and stuff is generally where you would expect it to be, which makes for a nice and shallow learning curve and less of the head-banging, ‘microsoft-esc’ frustration!

Diagrams are constructed through the standard set of vector tools you would expect combined with a number of pre-set ‘stencils’. These stencils offer a wealth of useful items, however when combined with the power of the community site i stumbled across earlier (graffletopia) the power of stencils really hits home. The site provides a huge number of quality, user submitted stencil sets which can be downloaded and dropped into the program, ready for you to use and customise to your hearts content.

I have been mainly using the program for wireframes at the moment but am planning on creating a small article about product planning documentation and how this can be complimented through the use of OmniGraffle. Hopefully with that article I can include some links to the awesome stencils that i’ve been making use of.

For now I shall continue to familiarise myself with the nifty little program in preperation for my upcoming article.

~Matt

We are currently approaching the closing stages of a fairly large product at work. The application is a fully object oriented, php5 based web application which has made fairly extensive use of new constructs introduced in php5.

The project has been a fantastic learning experience and has really helped with my understanding of developing large scale applications in php, specifically enterprise scale solutions to issues such as portability, scalability, security and efficiency (code optimisation etc).

All the development we have undergone so far has revolved around the use of structuring our application strictly, to make use of a number of currently available frameworks and being able to integrate these seamlessly into our own framework which acts as the scaffolding for all the others.

The application works off of the Model View Controller (MVC) framework, which is pretty much the de-facto currently, but internally makes use of a number of Object Oriented constructs.Another fairly large aspect of what we are doing is the extensive documentation that is going on to support the application.

I have tried to introduce a lot of the skills we were taught in the masters in terms of project management and have really felt like they offer real value in the scope of what we are trying to achieve.

As ever with any project I imagine, there are things that next time I will try and improve upon, but I’m glad to say that so far everything seems to of developed really nicely.

~Matt

About a week ago Jess surprised me and told me she was flying into Manchester in 2 days time . .which I was obviously quite excited about as I hadn’t seen her in almost 2 months!

So the last couple of days we have been seeing some of the Lake District involving a trip to Keswick yesterday.

The park down there was looking very autumnal with a fine array of colours on display (complemented through Jess’ very pink hoodie :P)

If you have ever been to Keswick but not seen the park then you are definitely missing out, its kept incredibly nicely and offers a nice get away from the always crowded center of town, definitely worth a sneaky peak!

~Matt

Welcome to the new ninjapenguin site! As you can see I have decided to drop the old blog that I had built myself in favor of a shiny new Wordpress system. I made the choice for a number of reasons, but basically I could no longer see the point of using the system I had constructed (with its varying quirks) over that of a tried and tested system such as Wordpress . .so here I am!

I have been quite taken with how easy the whole experience has been, I have been trialling the wp install on my local dev sever for a little time, whilst developing the template and experimenting with various plugins and have been pleasantly surprised with the whole thing really.

The theme is a pre-constructed one I found here so all credit should go to the original designer. I have however made a number of modifications, including upgrading the sidebar so that it now supports the Wordpress 2.0 widget system, widening the design and upgrading some of the redundant CSS. There are future changes to come as well, but they are in the pipeline for now!

There are also a few plugins currently running, none of which should be to noticeable in the frontend but hopefully they should help to get a little more out of the system in terms of speed and flexibility. One that should however be quite noticeable is the flickr plugin (author here), its a really nice little plugin which loads images from my flickr stream asynchronously and enables previews using lightbox and links directly back to the original image as well, many thanks to the author for taking the time to put it together.

There is also a google code pretifier installed so if your running Javascript then hopefully any code should be a little more readable.

So for now that is all, hopefully the blog will be a little more active from now on, as I’ll attempt to integrate it with my flickr account and attempt to centralise everything a little more.