Lessons from creating WordPress plugins

Ever since I created Auction Nudge in 2008, customer support has been a top priority. People would email me their questions, problems and feature requests and I would go out of my way to help or accommodate them. It was important to me to keep my users happy and it made business sense to surpass expectations, even though the tool is completely free to use. While creating Auction Affiliate earlier this year, part of my strategy was to create a WordPress plugin which gave users a friendly interface for setting up the content they wanted Auction Affiliate to display on their site. I was happy with

Web Development And Me

I have been thinking of a little while that I should write a post about work - specifically what I actually 'do' and how that has changed over the last few years. This may not be of interest to everyone, but it is something I have given a lot of thought to over the last year and I figured that as well as explaining how I make a living, it might also have the added advantage of helping me collect my thoughts. Since graduating from Cardiff University in 2008 with a degree in Computer Science I have been working as a web developer - initially for a company and then self-employed with my own clients.

Introducing Hot Officing

If you have been following my recent posts you will know that as well as travelling I am continuing to work via the internet as I go. For a while now I have been working on a project which is about just that – working while on the move. Specifically it is about finding places to work remotely from anywhere in the world. I call it Hot Officing. As a web developer I can only work if I have a reliable internet connection. There are some food and drink chains that guarantee wi-fi to their customers, but I have always liked to search out nicer, more interesting places like cafes to hunker down

How To Create A YouTube Style Button Using HTML/CSS3

A video tutorial showing how to quickly create a button similar to the "Create Account" button displayed on the YouTube homepage using HTML and CSS3. Using the Coda text editor we can edit our HTML/CSS, preview in browser and also compare this to the YouTube button all in one window! View the demo: https://www.morehawes.ca/uk/tutorials/create-account-button/index.html View the source: https://www.morehawes.ca/uk/tutorials/create-account-button/index.html.txt CSS3 gradient generator used in tutorial: http://gradients.glrzad.com/ More advanced CSS3 gradient generator: http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com Joe

Add eBay Listings To Your Website In Seconds

If you sell things on eBay then getting your listings seen by as many people as possible can be the difference between selling your item for 99p or £99. Whether you use eBay as an additional outlet for your existing online business or as a way of clearing out your garage - listing your items on your website can be an excellent way of directing visitors of your site to your eBay listings. Keeping your listings up to date can be a real headache which is why having a listing tool such as Auction Nudge that automatically updates and displays your current eBay listings on your website can be a real

Stop Spotlight From Indexing External Drives

Spotlight in OS X annoyingly indexes external devices like USB pen drives and cameras when mounted. You can block spotlight by using the ‘privacy’ setting in preferences, however once unmonted this seems to get forgotten. To make sure spotlight never indexes a drive you can add a hidden file to the root folder of that device to prevent it getting indexed forever. Create a file called .metadata_never_index For example to block my camera all I did was :
touch /Volumes/CAMERA/.metadata_never_index
Now if only there was a setting to block all external drives…