badlyDrawnToy

Manchester City Council – How they waste your money

badlyDrawnToy — Wed, 05 May 2010 11:36:39 +0000

I currently live in Didsbury. Like many areas we have recycled waste collected on alternate weeks. This seems a good idea. However, it appears that such a system is way too complicated for the refuse collectors to understand. Not a month goes by without one collection being missed. I’ve spoken with the council several times, [...]

eBay Customer Service – FAIL

badlyDrawnToy — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:45:04 +0000

I’m not a regular eBay user. I sell items abut once a year, when I have a clearout. Last week I sold about 6 items, and decided to take advantage of the integrated option to purchase postage labels online. It’s all quite seamless. However, having paid for recorded delivery, I struggled to find any way [...]

kosearch – Zend Lucene Search module for Kohana framework

badlyDrawnToy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:27:03 +0000

I’ve finally got round to releasing kosearch – a Kohana search module. It’s an implementation of Zend (Lucene) Search, a file-based search/index solution. kosearch provides a simple way to index and search Models. It’s perfect for a web site that might contain news, products etc. kosearch also exposes the underlying Zend libraries so that other [...]

IE8 Rounded Corners using jQuery

badlyDrawnToy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:33:59 +0000

This site continues to receive a large amount of traffic from people searching for a solution to achieving rounded corners in IE8. Clearly, it’s a hot topic, and my previous post about using DD_Roundies has hopefully helped developers along their way. I recently had an issue with DD_Roundies where the border width was 1 pixel [...]

How to run custom PHP code in WordPress – the right way

badlyDrawnToy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:51:46 +0000

There are numerous Wordpress plugins that allow PHP code to be executed form within Wordpress. However, installing a plugin is only half the solution. To run the PHP code efficiently requires a few more steps.

Tethering the iPhone : My Experience plus o2′s secret little bmi.js file

badlyDrawnToy — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:22:12 +0000

I recently moved house, and in the process lost my broadband connection for longer than anticipated. Having looked into the various USB Dongle solutions, I decided to opt for a tethered connection form my iPhone. I learned a lot from my week or so working this way – about my productivity, and about how affective [...]

BT F*cks Up Again

badlyDrawnToy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:09:01 +0000

What a surprise. BT has f*cked up again. They really are the worst utility company I've ever had to deal with. I have no wish to deal with them, but I am forced to. When people go to work at BT, they must be lobotomised to have the words 'customer' and 'service' permanently removed from their brains.

grid960 – a grid overlay bookmarklet for 960.gs

badlyDrawnToy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:24:22 +0000

A couple of days ago I released a jQuery plugin that provides a grid overlay when working with the 960.gs css grid framework. The plugin seems to have been quite popular, and as a result I now have a host of new Twitter followers – Hello to everyone in Romania! I’m glad that others have [...]

960.gs grid overlay – a jQuery plugin

badlyDrawnToy — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:54:25 +0000

I’ve now released a bookmarklet to provide a simpler gird overlay. Please also see grid960 – a grid overlay bookmarklet for 960.gs I’ve been using 960.gs on a few sites recently. Without wanting to get into a discussion about the pros/cons of using css grid frameworks, I find them useful for some sites. The 960.gs [...]

IE8 Rounded Corners

badlyDrawnToy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:21:54 +0000

Also see updated post about suitable jQuery plugin Last night I finally got round to upgrading my Win XP VMWare image from IE8 beta to the production release. A bit slack on my behalf as the browser was released about 3 weeks ago. Still, I’d been testing websites in the beta release and all was [...]