Mobile First means Content First: thank $%#@ god!

I am a believer in, and am trying to be a follower of, the ‘Mobile First’ philosophy which has emerged in the last couple of years. I first heard mention of this concept by Dale Mugford of BraveNewCode who gave a talk at my local WP meetup group, and was immediately hooked. More recently I have been reading Luke Wroblewski’s ‘Mobile First book, which outlines a very compelling argument for embracing this idea.

For those who don’t know, Mobile First is a design and development philosophy that proposes websites and applications should be built primarily for mobile platforms, before considering desktop platforms. The reasoning behind the philosophy is also straightforward: mobile platforms are overtaking desktops as the primary means that users interact with the internet. The statistics are not trivial; smart phone and tablet use is growing exponentially, and 2012 is set to be the year that their use as the most common web access device exceeds that of traditional desktops.

And yet the development industry lags.
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Adding a Little MVC Structure to WordPress

(Okay before anyone objects too loudly, I know WordPress does not have an MVC architecture, and I know this example isn’t really what MVC is all about. But please bear with me.)

One of the tenants of the Model-Controller-View software architecture is that logic is separated from the views. This is not unlike separating style from content in html. In MVC, views are the files that the user interacts with.
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Speeding up workflow with a batch file

This is a quickie for Windows users.

Pretty much every single day — or at least days that I’m working on web dev projects (pretty much every single day!), if my computer has been shut down I have to re-launch the same bundle of applications that I use to work. I finally realised that computers are quite good at dealing with repetitive tasks and really should be handling this, not me. The answer is to create a batch file that launches each program.
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