Stefan Mischook, the founder of Killer PHP has become something of an Idol to me, his tutorials have once again given me hope in the future of the programming and web development community, which has forever been a place for power hungry geeks who choose to write condescending tutorials on pretentious blog sites in the vein hope of raising their profile.

I was always warned about working with developers and programmers alike, when I began taking an interest in web design. I was told how programmers were difficult, unsociable, and rude. However Stefan Mischook, has proven thats just not the case. His video tutorials, which range from the basics of PHP to highly involved OOP have shown that programming can be a powerful tool, useable by ordinary folk like you and me. Its people like Stefan that really make a difference in the web dev community, he tells you what you want to know and cuts out all the bullshit, no blurred lines, just the facts. If you are interested in learning more about web programming languages you can access his site at www.killerphp.com.

This man has achieved what no other has attempted, taking hard concepts, breaking them down, then distributed them to the masses, so fuck your Apress ‘PHP beginner to professional’ book of bullshit, written in some undecipherable jargon and give Stefan a try, you will not be disappointed i promise!

I am an Avid fan of the Nike +, however I decided to go for a jog yesterday, only to find that the sensor for my Nike Plus kit was dead. After researching this for a while I found I am not the only victim of this flat sensor battery epidemic.

Normally I have nothing but good words for Apple, but the fact that they designed something which could render the whole system to utterly useless leaves me to assume that someone somewhere didn’t think this through. More googling told me that the sensor battery has a life span of 1000 miles, now i have actually evidence thanks to my Nike+ account to show i have only run about 83miles. So why is the battery flat? well a lot of people have been asking that question. Apple have reported faulty batteries which have not been holding their energy, as one possible reason.

Frustratingly you cannot purchase just the replacement sensor on its own. The only alternative is to buy the whole system again including the adapter, for the full RRP. To add insult to injury Apple responded to another support blog saying they offer a replacement sensor if you have had the system less than a year. No good to those outside of the 12 month deadline.

The moral of this story is be aware that although the Nike + system is revolutionary, it ccan be costly over longer durations. So if you do buy one know that your probably gonna have to buy more in the future.

Just recently i have been looking for inspiration in web design, having been bogged down in backend development it is easy to overlook the beauty of many websites, the elegance of their design.

I was recently having a discussion worth a co-worker about the merits of flash websites over XHTML version. Being experienced in both fields i feel that Flash is far more of a designers playground, the action scripting required is a lot more focused around basic commands, although this can be made more complex. In Truth Flash is a much more conceptual space in which to develop, but flash is a dreamer if you will, the reality is that nearly 50% of the worlds population is still on dial-up, the very idea of them spending 20 mins waiting for your flash based webapp or site to load is ludacris. With this comes the sad truth that flash websites are notoriously hard to spider on search engines, having no HTML text for google spiders to read and relying completely on meta tages will only get a flash site so far.

Having said all this Flash does have one overriding success that in that no matter what browser or OS you run the site will look and feel the same.

I believe the best approach we deciding is to contemplate the strengths of both models, and impliment a compromise, that is why many of my sites use what i like to call flash “components” which gives the user the best of both worlds, the razzle dazzle of moving parts, combined with the practicality and adaptability of a web based SEO compliant site. As i like to think of it the best of both worlds.

M-bellish is now beginning to take on some real functionality, i have found designing the site in a modular fashion has enabled me to develop some really transferable code which can be applied to all future developments. I have been working on the page control panel and thinking practically about the users role in content managing the system. By forming a list of tasks simply defined by buttons the m-bellish control panel can now access a range of functions.

These new features include a direct link to wordpress news manager(requires additional login) and also a link to google analytics to give information about m-bellish stats i.e. site views etc. Although these are minor issues they will prove invaluable in centralizing a hub to control all aspects of the site, even though these different functions are located in physical locations.