Nick Dunn's Blog

Aligning search design with user behaviour

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:53:00 +0000

How do you improve product search? Look at who your users are and what they are doing.

Read full post »

An alternative 'for' loop using XSLT and template callbacks

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:55:00 +0000

XSLT 1.0 has no native way of achieving a for loop, without iterating through XML. Until now.

Read full post »

Bekonscot.co.uk redesigned

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:37:00 +0000

Pixel pushing, CSS, and XSLT content management. All in a day's work. Can I sleep now?

Read full post »

Cross-browser drop shadows using pure CSS

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:32:00 +0000

Look ma, no images!

Read full post »

Show latest Last.fm plays on your Symphony site

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:46:00 +0000

Symphony has a hunger for XML. Thankfully Last.fm's API shares this appetite.

Read full post »

Hanging Out With Humans

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:34:00 +0000

Data.Select.Party are a party-math-indie quartet from London. And this is their album.

Read full post »

Developing with Symphony using the Firebug console

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:14:00 +0000

Symphony provides powerful debugging and performance profiling pages by appending various URL parameters to pages. No longer. Firebug is all you need.

Read full post »

New Symphony CMS website

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:12:00 +0000

The new website dropped this morning. Check it out.

Read full post »

Symphony as a data preservation utility

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:01:00 +0000

With the recent disappearance of Magnolia there has been renewed talk of archiving data from third party sites into a structured repository. Symphony might hold the answer.

Read full post »

Don't make me choose — I don't care

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:16:00 +0000

Smart defaults prevent a user from making unnecessary decisions.

Read full post »

Elastic usability

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:03:00 +0000

While frantically finishing my Christmas shopping; I had an odd turn. Amazon hadn't removed their search box, had they?

Read full post »

Archiving XML with Symphony

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:20:00 +0000

Symphony is an incredibly powerful CMS, but it's ability to cache dynamic XML feeds is lacking. In this article I explain a simple method of parsing a third-party XML feed and archiving its contents in native Symphony sections.

Read full post »

Focus on — Accessibility

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:17:00 +0000

WCAG 1.0 provides authors and developers with useful guidelines to follow to improve content accessibility; but following these rigidly can, on occasion, have the opposite effect.

Read full post »