Grumpy Monkey: Web Design and Development

Opera's icon

james — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:46:14 +0000

Jon Hicks writes about the new Mac-friendly interfaces for Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3. In the article he mentions how the Opera icon desperately needs an update and how he'd love to do it.

Web design trends 2008

james — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:12:45 +0000

Some fabulous designs gathered together by WebDesignerWall.

Webmonkey interviews Dries Buytaert

james — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:43:14 +0000

Brief but interesting interview with Dries Buytaert, about Drupal's history, plans for its future and Acquia's role.

Faux Absolute Positioning

james — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:28:28 +0000

Great article on A List Apart about handling complex layouts with dynamic content: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxabsolutepositioning
There don't seem to have been any exciting discoveries in CSS for a while, and I seem to have been distracted by PHP recently, so I'll enjoy messing around with this.

Looking forward to the next BarCamp

james — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:39:23 +0000

BarCamp Manchester was fantastic and I can't wait for the next one.

Quick reminder: Drupal NWUK User Group

james — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:13:23 +0000

Quick reminder: Drupal NWUK user group is meeting on Wednesday at the MDDA. Whether you know Drupal inside-out or would just like to know what it's all about, come along (if you're going to Leeds GeekUp you'll just have to be in two places at once: we'll try to avoid clashes in future).

Drupal 6 Released

james — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:47:17 +0000

It's on the shelves! http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0
Chris and I will run through the new features at the Drupal user group next week.

Drupal Training Course Details

james — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:35:03 +0000

Chris and I have sorted the time and place for our Drupal training course in Manchester: Wednesday 9th April at the MDDA.

Pop to the menusandblocks website for more info, or give one of us a call if you've got any questions!

Path checking in Drupal 6

james — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:33:25 +0000

The menu system in Drupal 6 has been completely rewritten, but most of the changes are under the hood.

Drupal 6 RC3 released

james — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 07:53:36 +0000

Download it. Find bugs. Let them know.
As the release notes point out, Views 2 is still a couple of weeks off at least, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun trying out all the other goodies in 6.

Drupal NW February Meeting

james — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:52:54 +0000

Details here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/419074/
Groups page here: http://groups.drupal.org/north-west-uk

I'm planning to do a talk on Drupal 6 theming, to have a look at what's new, what's cool and why themes can be made of CSS and CSS alone. I wasn't planning on being quite so busy, but I should be able to put something together before then... (he hopes!)

See you there!

menusandblocks: Drupal training in the North West

james — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:11:07 +0000

Chris and I are putting together a Drupal training course and we're really excited about it.

Quick fix for for feed.png in IE6

james — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:42:37 +0000

Internet Explorer 6 is still out there and we still have to deal with it. Yucky, I know, but wouldn't life be dull if it was all too easy?

If your theme is using a non-white background, here's a quick fix to display the syndication icon in all its rounded-corner loveliness:

a.feed-icon img { filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0); } a.feed-icon {


read more



BarCamp Manchester
james — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:19:00 +0000
It's BarCamp Manchester right at the beginning of March (which doesn't actually seem all that far away) and I'll be going. This will be my first BarCamp but as I'm sure most of the GeekUp crowd will be there, there'll be a lot of familiar faces.
read more


Converting a static HTML page to a Drupal 5 theme
james — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:37:00 +0000
I've posted the notes from my Drupal 5 theming talk on drupal.org.uk: http://www.drupal.org.uk/node/474 (at the Drupal NW UK User Group meeting in December 2007).
I'm hoping to put together a talk on Drupal 6 theming for the February meetup. See you there!