Elliot Jay Stocks Home

A few of my recent ramblings

URL ABC

November 27th 2009

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(A meme started by The Muscles From Brussels (no, the other one).)

Go to the address bar in your favorite browser and type one letter.

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Hard-code your navigation and get over it

September 23rd 2009

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There’s a question I get asked all of the time and it surprises me every time I hear it.

How do you create your navigation when you’re using WordPress? How do you control the order of the items when you have to use functions like wp_list_pages and wp_list_categories?

The answer is simple: hard-code your nav!

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English lesson #1: it’s / its

August 13th 2009

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Those of you who know me personally will also know that I’m something of a pedant when it comes to the written word. Such pedantry is not normally shared by most people so I usually keep it to myself, and attempt to tame the inner beast with readings from Eats shoots and leaves and consoling emails from fellow pedant Carolyn Wood, while crying myself to sleep at night every time I see a misplaced apostrophe.

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Starkers grows up

July 17th 2009

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I’m happy to unveil the new version of Starkers, my bare-bones theme for WordPress. An update has been due for quite some time, but this isn’t just a compatibility release; Starkers has well and truly grown up.

Most importantly, it now…

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Tutorial: Multiple single.php templates in WordPress

July 9th 2009

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Wordpress has loads of cool features built in for those of us who like to treat post categories differently, but sometimes a little extra hacking is required.

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Ghostly Discovery

October 30th 2009

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There’s a growing list of iPhone apps that I enjoy, but there’s one I downloaded this week that I absolutely love: the rather excellent (and free) Ghostly Discovery from Ghostly International.

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More reasons to get excited about Typekit

August 20th 2009

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The font-as-service, the article I wrote for I Love Typography a couple of weeks ago, seemed to go down relatively well (it got comments from such type legends as Jonathan Hoefler and Erik Spiekermann, no less!), but I think I accidentally gave the impression that I was anti-Typekit.

Not so.

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The Font-As-Service

August 7th 2009

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Johno just published my debut post on I love Typography: The Font-As-Service.

In the article, I talk about the web’s upcoming font delivery services like Typekit and Fontdeck and what they mean for the way in which we web designers will be buying and using type. I’ve tried to take a slightly different approach to the other sites writing about these technologies, in that I’m looking at the paradigm shift from the font-as-finite product to the font-as-service rather than focusing too much on the technical specifics.

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‘How to design a portfolio site’ screencast

July 13th 2009

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A few weeks ago Ryan asked me if I’d like to do a two-part screencast on designing online portfolios, and I thought it’d be a great idea, especially as — at the time — I was just putting the finishing touches to this new site. I also thought it’d be a good way of showing you some of the techniques I used rather than just writing about it on the blog.

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