Future of Web Design London 2010: My thoughts two months on…

Have you ever tried to parse, process or preg_replace some HTML? Ever tried to do it when the HTML is UTF-8 encoded? Getting rid of white space can be tricky, here’s a few tricks I’ve learned.

Perusing my Google Analytics data shows up some interesting results. For starters the top search query which sends people to my blog is “symfony accessing object in a form”. This has been consistent for several months, but there is no article on my blog which answers that question. I imagine this must be very frustrating for people so it’s about time I added the answer here as a snippet.

Earlier this week I received an email requesting some help with a WordPress install that had been hacked. The site was almost 3 years old and was still running WordPress 2.2. It was quite funny getting to see and play with retro WordPress again, but it had to go.

Recently I worked on a Wordpress site where I wanted to be able to customise the dashboard for different user roles. Wordpress by default has administrators, editors, authors, contributors and subscribers. It’s not too much to assume you might not want to show your editors or authors all the details of your blog posts etc and this short snippet will allow you to do just that.

I’ve been experimenting with developing my Twitter account for the last year or so, and this week I published 5 simple steps for getting from beginner to a successful Twitterer: Getting Started with Twitter: 5 Simple Steps. The article is aimed largely at small companies and organisations who are looking to use Twitter to drive traffic to their sites and improve their Brand’s reputation.