Version 1 or Nike+PHP has been out for a while and earlier this month I released v1.2.1.

The code has been downloaded over 100 times and I'm extremely proud of that fact! I would love to see how people are using the code, so please add to the Examples page on the wiki.

I also changed the branding for the project a little bit, but need time to work on the site, something I might do in March. The site is a little bright, something I wanted it to be, but I'll be toning it down a bit in the next refresh.

The old logo was dark, plain and, well, just boring!



The new one is lighter, has a bit of depth and contains the Nike logo (hope I don't get into any trouble for that!).

It's possible to make text looked blurred using just CSS3. See the examples below, just hover over the first bit of text to see the possibility of using blurred text as a hover state.

Some blurred text

Some blurred text

Example:

HTML:

<h1 class="blurred">Blurred text</h1>

CSS:

h1.blurred {
	color: #FFF;
}
h1.blurred:hover {
	cursor: pointer;
	color: #666!important;
	text-shadow: 0 0 5px #444;
}

The colours need to be selected carefully, as the shadows are often a bit lighter than the foreground text colour. Shadow size also plays a role. 5px seems to be effective, but 10px can wash the colour out.

To apply the effect to a block element, you'll need to use the box-shadow property instead of the text-shadow property, but otherwise it's the the same.

For more effects, you could apply opacity to make the text a little see through and see how that works out!

If you find this useful, please check out my portfolio site.

So I am a lover of Nike+ and have had a Nike+ stat widget on the side of my blog for quite a while now. The project can be found at http://nikeplusphp.org.

It came to my attention that the method used wasn't the easiest and certainly wasn't up to date. Looks like something changed on Nike's end and that has broken the API I was using.

Looking around for an alternative, I was inspired to build my own class and am now firmly at version 0.7 with it. I've created a small website for the project where you can grab the code and there's some documentation to help you get started.

The project is called Nike+PHP and all you need is a Nike+ account, PHP5 and SimpleXML installed.

[ read more... ]

I had an issue where I couldn't delete cookies today. Turns out, adding the path works.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600);
?>

The above would set a cookie for one hour into the future.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()-3600);
?>

The above should set a cookie for one hour into the past, making it expire and effectively deleting it. Today, this wasn't the case, but adding a path did the trick.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600, '/');
?>

The above sets it for an hour and for the whole domain. Adding the '/' to both the setting and expiring did the trick!

I've been uploading some photos throughout the day here at FOWD. Take a look at the slideshow below, or check out my Flickr set.

As we speak only photos I could Bluetooth to my phone have been added, will upload some more from my More photos added from my minimo later!

Tomorrow is the Future Of Web Design conference and I really can't wait to go!

There are a few topics I'll be really interested in and I am looking forward to learning lots more about the industry and where things are headed.

I'm still debating, but I think I'll be taking my laptop. All I'll be doing is taking notes, but I'll have my iPod and hopefully there'll be wifi so I'll be able to check in on emails too!

During the winter of 2007, Google AdSense just worked so well for me. 12 months later and it was hard to replicate even a quarter of what the previous year had offered. To be fair, due to a lack of time and effort, other advertising avenues also dried up and I had to make changes.

I made some, but nothing I did ever helped to recover the revenue. A few months on and I decided to close Be Unequaled and Billionaire-Boys-Club.co.uk for good. I have plans for the former and ideas for the other, but nothing in the immediate feature.

receeve.it is ready for a BETA launch and you can either signup on the homepage for future news or readers of this post can register for real on the BETA site before we even launch!

I aim to continuously improve the site where time allows and one of the main aspects of that is revenue.

Google AdSense is currently in place and while I'm making just pennies a day, I'm hoping a web application will serve up a better click through rate than a forum/blog can. I have other ideas for revenue, so I'm not relying on Google to make receeve.it self sufficient, but it could play a key role IF it begins to pay at levels it was back in 2007.

Over the last few months we've been working hard to get the new combined Money & Property site up and running.

We're really happy with how it turned out because it looks great and we believe it's faster than the old site! We launched on Wednesday after a big effort by everyone involved. Take a look at the site and let me know what you think!

Today is the 1st of February and as promised, Be Unequaled is no more. Due to a lack of time on my part and the continued decline in activity, I feel it was the right thing to do. I am sad to see the site come to an end, but it really felt like the right thing to do.

As for receeve.it, things are coming on along nicely! I have a few small features left to polish off and the layout needs some work, but we're pretty much there.

Luckily, I have a holiday coming up over which time I believe I'll have no, or very little, internet access. I aim to take a bit of time off from development and get my head ready for an onslaught when I'm back! This will all be in the aid of getting a BETA version out by the end of February or beginning of March. In the even that I don't get away, I'll still try to do that.

If you want to keep up to date with receeve.it, please register on the mailing list and follow the blog that I set up.

One thing I've been meaning to do is to make sure that this site doesn't contain any 404 links. Easier said than done when a site has more than a handful of pages.

Using the Xenu Link Sleuth I was able to determine where things may not be as they should be and eliminate as many of the problems as possible.

I need to find a Mac alternative, but the Xenu software is perfect for finding 404's. I'm running another report as I type, but before I wrote this post, this blog had over 4,000 urls!