Magento is an amazing piece of software, and Canada is a wonderful place to live, but if you don't know what your doing, setting up the taxes will be an arduous task. With the GST, and various provincial and harmonized sales taxes, and well as regulations about displaying the taxes on website checkout processes, it is highly complex. Save yourself the headache, and follow this great guide: http://innoveight.ca/magento-taxes-setup/...
I prefer to use straight HTML and CSS whenever possible, rather than using Javascript. This is mainly due to the fact that I am strong in HTML and CSS, and don't have nearly as much experience in Javascript, but also because I follow the Keep It Simple Stupid philosophy. Having said that, sometimes I just want to make something really big a link. Lets say you wanted to make half of a webpage a link to another page. Sure you could wrap it all in an tag, but there is going to be cross browser issues. I've adopted this little of javascript for such situations. Its really just as simple as an HTML tag, and you can add it to any element: <div onclick="window.location = 'http://localhost:8888/everetdalecom/';"> </div> ...
For anyone learning Magento, I could not recommend this videos series enough. Available for free on Youtube, Scott Tolinksi at Level Up Tuts has created an extensive series on configuring Magento, and creating a custom theme. I have him to thank for my knowledge of Magento, and I look forward to watching more of his videos, which cover many other topics, including HTML5, Drupal, and others. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSxq-eJ0VvY...
I've been exploring Git recently, and though its incredible power is evident right away, it is quite an endeavor learning it. After immersing myself in it for a couple weeks, I am getting the hang of it. These are the steps I'm using: 1)create beanstalk repo 2)clone beanstalk repo to local (https) 3)move local project into local clone 4)Add 5)Commit 6)push This allows me to work locally in WAMP, create snapshots in time of my projects, and quickly deploy to live servers. It's a bit on the complicated side, but well worth the learning curve....
In my opinion, web fonts were a big step forward in web design. We can now have all the great creative freedom that was once exclusive to print designers. Web fonts do experience rendering problems however, and you may have noticed the edges of text can be jagged and non-aliased, depending on the browser, and the font being used. There are many options to improve the rendering of web fonts, which can be tweaked depending on the needs of the situation. The first solution I found was this one: http://www.adtrak.co.uk/blog/font-face-chrome-rendering/#fix This fix makes web fonts look great in Chrome, and text reverts to fallback fonts, such as arial, in other browsers besides Chrome, when this is applied. Because the amount of traffic using Firefox and Internet Explorer combined is greater than that which is using Chrome, on the sites I manage, I stopped using this. It does look great in Chrome though. Currently, I am using the following CSS: html { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke: 0.2px; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.007); } This applies these properties to all html on the website, but I then specify different settings for certain elements on the site, as some text will look better at different settings (white text on a coloured background typically benefits from different settings, for example). If you would like to improve the look of web fonts, I would recommend playing with those properties and see what you can come up with. ...
I love it when things work. Especially when it's over 100 lines of javascript and php that I found on Google and pasted into my project. And thats exactly what happened when I found this little ditty put together by Jay Are. If you are using OsCommerce, you really ought to be tracking your Ecommerce Analytics, and you can do so using the code found here: http://blog.jayare.eu/e-commerce-tracking-in-oscommerce-with-new-google-analytics-tracking-code.html...
Web design involves alot of making little changes to code, and then refreshing your browser window to see the changes. This repetitive and tedious task can be a thing of the past thanks to this great Google Chrome plugin which automates this for you. It can tell when the source code is altered, so everytime you save your file in your code editor your browser will refresh for you. Cool! http://livereload.com/...
2012 was a great year for me. I fulfilled a lifelong dream of performing with an original rock band by forming Aphellion with Kyle Murphy and Ffynnan Bowen and playing the Lethbridge pub circuit: I met Janice! and I got my BFA in New Media from U of L: I hope 2013 turns out to be as good, if not ever better. Here's hoping for more inspiration, good health, more interesting projects, and more chedder!...
This is a great presentation on workflow by Chris Coyier. I first came across Chris as an instructor on lynda.com. I particularly got into his creating custom Wordpress themes tutorial. In this video he presents alot of great solutions to issues I constantly run into while making websites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTrAfJFLXI...
A popular trend these days is to display examples of interactive design work on Mac moniters. Here is a great .psd file that you can use to put your own designs into. It even has a nice shiny light reflection layer. Get it here...