Permanent Tourist

The personal website of Mark Howells-Mead

Posts about The internet

The internet plays a huge role in my life, from a place to share photos and videos, to a career, to a means of communication linking me to friends and family all over the world.

  • Why the software you love may not always be the right one for the project at hand, and how you can recognize and plan for it.

  • In 2016, 27% of all of the websites on the internet were powered by WordPress. That’s 8 times more than Joomla, 12 times more than Drupal, and 70 times more than TYPO3.

  • There are a few ways to apply CSS styling rules to an element. Each one is less or more specific than another. Applying a rule using a class selector when you’ve applied a different rule using an ID selector won’t work. Batificity isn’t the CSS specificity guide you deserve, but the one you need right now,…

  • A short post to help anyone who is looking to implement a responsive HTML imagemap, which also features an interactive highlighting function.

  • I have a 16Gb iPhone, with comparatively few apps installed. 70% of these 16Gb are filled with data for these apps, although only 6% are music stored for offline listening, and only 2% are photos. From the apps, the main offender is Facebook, which currently needs 571.6Mb to tell me what’s going on. One has to…

  • The new WordPress theme running this website has been improved by the use of WordPress’ get_template_part function.

  • Defining custom artboards in Sketch to better reflect modern screen resolutions.

  • A stripped-back, simple WordPress theme for my personal website, which I can begin extending as and when I have the time.

  • A summarized insight into maintaining individual features in your own WordPress plugins through the flexibility and organisation of modular development.

  • WordPress is much more than a simple tool for building websites. Here are a few prominent sites which use WordPress and its new REST API for much more than a simple blog.

  • I provide a free public Github repository containing example code for starting work on a WordPress theme which uses PHP namespaces and template parts.

  • I provide a free public Github repository containing example code for starting work on a WordPress plugin, which uses PHP namespaces.

  • An analysis of the visitor statistics during a recent web project showed that a large number of visitors were visiting the site using medium-small devices with 1024px x 768px screens. This corresponds to an iPad held in horizontal format. But further research into the statistics showed that a large proportion of the visitors with this screen…

  • Providing WordPress developers and designers in Switzerland with an online place to hang out and exchange tips and ideas.

  • I occasionally have a need to divert file requests on a website to a PHP script. By doing so, I can determine whether the visitor may access it, see whether an image should have a watermark automatically applied, or notify an administrator that a PDF has been viewed or downloaded. The easiest way to do…

  • The battle royal du jour in the web development community is the argument of whether websites should be built with a JavaScript-based technology like AngularJS, Node.js or React, or using the classic composition of HTML and CSS, then extending it with JavaScript for those browsers which support it. Without reading the detailed arguments from informed developers on both…

  • Using modern web technologies to replicate the ubiquitous red panel used by Swiss railway company SBB CFF FFS.

  • Publishing photos to WordPress directly via FTP using Adobe Lightroom.

  • I’m in the closing stages of development for a new WordPress site for a client. (A private one, so I can’t go into details.) As the development phase has progressed, the management of the required plugins in the Multisite installation has become ever more complex. Some sites are running an older Theme, which are dependent on a set…

  • There are many copy-and-paste examples of how to write your own functions and apply them through WordPress’ hooks and actions. But with a little simple knowledge of PHP’s namespace syntax, developers who regularly work on WordPress projects can make their lives a lot easier, whilst making their code much more robust, portable and secure. The first thing to…

  • I wrote and posted my first blog post in this version of my website ten years ago today. To celebrate, I’m reviving the “Photos” section of the site, which will contain my best and my favourite photos.