The dreaded creeping scope

One of the most frustrating aspects of project management is dealing with “scope creep”, also known as “feature creep” or “requirement creep”. These ominous sounding terms refer to a project’s scope being changed after work is already underway. This phenomenon can impact on the project’s schedule, cost and complexity.

Because an individual change may only have a small impact on the overall project, scope creep can be hard to spot at first. It usually begins with a seemingly innocuous request from your client:

I know that development of our website is already underway, but we’ve decided that we need to have a mailing list signup form on the homepage. Hope that’s not a bother.

If you acquiesce to your client’s wishes without re-quoting the job, then you’ve allowed scope creep to set in. Before you know it the “small” changes are starting to mount up, and the project is turning into a much larger job than you anticipated.

Monokai theme for phpDesigner

Last year I created a port of the Monokai syntax highlighting theme for phpDesigner and posted it in the phpDesigner forums, but I think it deserves a proper home so I’m archiving it here on Pixel Acres.

PHP example:

Organise your CSS

Over the years I have streamlined the way I write and structure CSS to make my workflow more efficient. Here are a few tips I have picked up along the way.

Worldview: real-time Campaign Monitor metrics

For a number of years I have used Campaign Monitor to provide email marketing services to my clients, and I’ve always gotten a kick from seeing how subscribers interact with my client’s emails. When sending out a large campaign it is satisfying to watch the ‘views’ and ‘clicks’ metrics climb higher as subscribers open the email and click links within the newsletter.

I must not be the only person who enjoys these kind of real-time statistics, because Campaign Monitor have just launched a new reporting feature they call Worldview, which is designed to give instantaneous feedback about your subscribers.

Campaign Monitor Worldview

Adios Flash

When I first cut my teeth as a web designer in the late 1990s, the web industry was mired in the first round of the “browser wars”, with Netscape Navigator pitted against Internet Explorer for market dominance. Netscape and Microsoft tried to outdo each other by enhancing their web browser with proprietary features and HTML elements that were unavailable in their competitor’s product. For developers wanting to build complex DHTML websites that worked in both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer the only option was to fork their code, maintaining an entirely separate code base for each browser, and essentially doubling their workload.

It was in this context that Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash, and before that FutureSplash) first came to prominence. The Flash plugin worked identically in all web browsers, offering a way free from the browser wars and liberating developers from the tit-for-tat power struggle between Netscape and Microsoft. Build once, view anywhere. Bliss! Not only that, Flash (along with its sibling Shockwave) brought rich interactive animations to the web, a temptation that was too great for web designers to ignore.

Give Frank Chimero’s book a kickstart

Graphic designer Frank Chimero is raising funding for a book called The Shape of Design via crowdsourcing service Kickstarter.

In a little over 24 hours the project has raised almost $50,000 in pledges, well exceeding the $27,000 target. Wow.

Check out the video of Frank’s lecture of the same title, given at the Build conference.

In his presentation Frank discusses graphic design in the context of history, philosophy and anthropology, and draws interesting conclusions regarding the purpose and function of design. Apparently The Shape of Design book will expand on the themes of the lecture, so it should be a goodie.

Display recent Twitter tweets using PHP

IMPORTANT! This script has been superseded by TweetPHP.

If you’ve ever wanted to display your latest Twitter tweets on a website, here is method to do that using PHP. My approach has the following features:

Tweets are cached to avoid exceeding Twitter’s limit of 150 requests for a user’s RSS feed per hour
A fallback is provided in case the twitter feed fails to load
Replies (tweets beginning with @) can optionally be ignored
A configuration parameter allows you to specify how many tweets are displayed
Dates can optionally be displayed in “Twitter style”, e.g. “12 minutes ago”
You can edit the HTML that wraps your tweets, tweet status and meta information
The username which prepends each tweet in Twitter RSS feeds is automatically stripped

Sunset: A syntax highlighting theme for phpDesigner

My weapon of choice for code editing is the excellent program phpDesigner, but every so often I like to test drive a different editor to see what I might be missing out on. Recently I spent some time playing with Notepad++, and one feature that jumped out at me was the ability to choose from a large number of pre-installed syntax highlighting themes.

When I switched back to phpDesigner, the default blue-on-white color scheme seemed a tad boring, so I decided it was time to pimp my IDE! Unfortunately user created themes for phpDesigner are thin on the ground, which left me no option but to make my own.

PHP example:

Sunset theme for phpDesigner - PHP code

Subversion for web development: Part 3

In the “>second parts of this series you learned what version control is, and how to put a place a website under version control using Subversion. In this final article I will talk about configuring a local Apache webserver to integrate smoothly with your development working copy, and how to deploy a version controlled website to a live webserver.

Subversion for web development: Part 2

In Continue reading