Multi Cell Design

Growing mushrooms in used coffee grounds

Karl Dawson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:50:48 +0000

The problem is the solution…

How two guys turned recycled coffee grounds into a gourmet mushroom empire.

Guerilla grafters – splicing fruit onto a city’s trees

Karl Dawson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:48:00 +0000

The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of San Franciscans who believe urban trees are a precious thing to waste on simple flowers. Their goal is to graft- albeit illegally- fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing fruit trees, in hopes that over time the cities ornamental trees can provide food for residents free of charge.

In this video, we follow Guerrilla Grafters Tara Hui and Booka Alon as they check up on their surreptitious grafts, perform a bit of pruning and search for their trees’ first fruit.

Speed up your WordPress site the right way

Karl Dawson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:42:15 +0000

Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites and htaccess rules.

Mac OSX Lion recreated in CSS3

Karl Dawson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:40:22 +0000

Very clever and detailed use of CSS3 (and some jQuery) to replicate the Mac OS X Lion experience by Alessio Atzeni.

Beekeeping training

Karl Dawson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:36:34 +0000

Our beekeeping training on the 21 January was informative and we followed up with some discussion over the bee garden design and all the equipment etc we’ll need. We’re going to start with three Nationals and place them in a plot of secure land that the local high school owns whilst the actual garden that I’m leading the design on will be on adjacent, community garden owned land. The school is leading on the bees themselves and thankfully doesn’t depend on our garden being ready – it’s a huge “wasteland” of recently-cleared brambles! I’ll update this post with a photo or two when the camera is to hand.

Exciting times!

How to harvest honey from natural comb

Karl Dawson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:20:23 +0000

As my own beekeeping training progresses ahead of our community hives arriving in the spring, you’ll see an increase in bee-related content here at Multi Cell Design – we’re diversifying at pace this year with my design for the bee garden (well, it will also benefit other insects of course…) being approved and a slot on Ipswich Community Radio‘s “Access to Nature” show to be arranged in the very near future.

My favourite Australian farm, Milkwood posted a great article on how to extract honey from Warré hives. What better way to get kids (of all ages) involved too than getting messy with hand-squeezing comb?

Hierarchy – a WordPress plugin that pulls the site structure to one view

Karl Dawson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:14:31 +0000

WordPress is being used more and more as a content management system rather than just as the blogging platform it originally started off as. Perhaps the one thing missing from the Core development is a central view of Pages and custom post types giving you an overall picture of your website’s site structure. Well, Jonathan Christopher has our backs, he’s just released Hierarchy a WordPress plugin that does just that.

Get the reasoning and full details straight from the horse’s mouth at Monday by Noon.

How to create a WordPress authors template

Karl Dawson — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:13:35 +0000

WPTuts+ continue to roll out quality how-to articles. In this post, author Kevin Muldoon looks at the oft neglected author template.

If you run a multi-author website, you may want to consider adding an author template to your website. Author templates help present more information about writers and make it easier for visitors to find other articles the author have written. In this post we will be breaking the author template down and showing you how you can improve it.

Read the full article at WPTuts+

Better tabs with rounded corners

Karl Dawson — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:09:31 +0000

Chris Coyier recently hosted a guest post from Menno van Slooten in which he uses borders, gradients, and shadows and while actually using the minimum amount of HTML elements, which I always like to see. What’s different here? Well apart from no images, Menno also introduces a bend on the outside of the bottom of the tabs – very neat!

Read the full article at CSS-Tricks.

HTML Formatting for Custom Menus

Karl Dawson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:59:08 +0000

I’ve employed this technique a few times where there’s been no requirement to show sub-navigation items. Some people are not bothered about code bloat, but for readability and mobile web users without an unlimited data plan I think we should still be mindful of it.

In this DiW article, we’ll see how to enjoy both: WordPress custom menus and clean, well-formatted HTML markup.

Learn more at Digging into WordPress.