Matthew Byrne: the blog

Has Flash lost its sparkle?

I’ve always had a something of a love hate relationship with Flash, so sitting here at Flash Camp ‘09 listening to Adobe laying it on thick about the virtues of the latest release I’m compelled to weigh up the arguments for myself, consider the bigger picture, and try to figure out the real story. I first [...]

Open Street Map 2008: A year of edits

This fantastic animation was presented at Minibar last Friday. Looks like OSM are really starting to give Ordinance Survey a run for their money. Ordinance Survey holds much more accurate geo-data, so this crowd sourced data set wont destroy their entire business. However, they do need to act fast if they want to stay in [...]

Friends Reunited – Gratis

After eight years of charging users for messaging one another Friends Reunited has decided to go free – pretty major news I’d say. I’m wondering what fantastic business model they have up their sleeve as overnight revenues will be down by 40%. Given that Friends is not Facebook, Bebo, MySpace or LinkedIn I think their success [...]

Wonderfl – An Actionscript goldmine

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading Colin Moock’s latest 900 page epic – Essential ActionScript 3.0 so it was great to stumble upon Wonderfl. The concept behind the site of sharing and developing code online is genius. Compared with 99% of tutorial sites (this included) the Wonderfl approach is the way forward and it’s [...]

Wordpress – Redirecting to old domain

After migrating a Wordpress site to a new domain (renaming the root folder) I found that my new site kept forwarding to the development domain. As I was unable get into the admin screen of Wordpress to change the base URL of the site I had to alter it directly in the database. The path to [...]

Form breaks Wordpress

Just spent the last hour trying to figure out why a simple php form was breaking Wordpress. The answer was a variable name clash. I used a variable called ‘name’ in my form which seems to be linked the WP tag tags (!). To get things working I renamed ‘name’ to ’signUpName’. Whilst scrabbling around for answers [...]

Accessibility

Web accessibility is an attempt to make content available in equal measures to every user of the internet, regardless of any physical or mental disability. Accessibility is not just our moral obligation as reasonable human beings, but also a legal obligation too. Fortunately designing with accessibility in mind from the beginning, means that implementation is nothing [...]

Gnome-vertising

Any of you lucky enough to have never experienced the World of Warcraft might not be aware of the vast underground industry that exists to supply impatient players with gold and high level characters. As the story goes, somewhere out there, armies of geeks sweat away in basements turning Warcraft gold into top dollar, or [...]

Ad-o-matic: The ad generator

Why waste time thinking? Let the Ad-o-matic take the strain. Coming up with award winning ads day after day is hard work. But thanks to the Ad-o-matic, with a few clicks you can create great ads in an instant. Leaving you free to get on with the important jobs – like deciding [...]

Postcode Widget – Part 3

You can see a prototype version of the widget by clicking here. Template engine I attempted this built as single piece of php but it quickly became obvious that this was not the right approach. Instead I adapted a simple template engine from my faithful O’Reilly book. This allowed me to separate the logic from the markup function [...]