Technology conferences are fun, an enormous amount of extremely geeky fun. Most folks can’t wait to get home and blog about all the wonderful things they’ve seen, heard and learnt over the duration of the conference. Those reviews are great insights into what works and what doesn’t, but are they an accurate reflection of the long-term benefits web industry professionals can gain from attending conferences?

Two months on and I’m still reeling from my single day experience of the Future of Web Design Conference. I shared a ticket with colleague and so attended the party & second day of the conference, having the chance to meet some awesome people and learn a great deal. I highly recommend attending the FOWD conference and these are my reasons why.

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.

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.

These functions and hooks let you customise the output of the_excerpt() template tag. Just copy and paste into the functions.php file in your theme. This works for both posts and pages.

Welcome to Part 2 of my YUI Carousel series. If you haven’t read it, Part 1 is here. Part 2 uses class names to setup multiple carousel instances, and also drops the YUI CSS in favour of writing your own custom css. The final Part 3 will show you how to write your own completely custom navigation for the carousel.

If you haven’t already read the first part of this tutorial, I suggest that you do. If you want to follow along, then please setup your workspace with a basic HTML file and somewhere to put Javascript, CSS & images now, the demonstration page is here . I’ll be using the same images as last time, same rules apply!