KeithMcLaughlin.ie has a new design!

I am delighted to announce that my personal web design portfolio website at keithmclaughlin.ie has a new design!

I have wanted to get this new design live for months but have been too busy with client work to give it the proper attention.

The unfortunate events of COVID-19 resulted in less client work, which in turn gave me the time to work on the new web design.

Moving away from WordPress

The old website was powered by WordPress with a theme built using Bootstrap CSS.

The new site is powered by Gridsome using Tailwind CSS for the styling and layout.

I would love to hear your feedback on the new design :)

Local by Flywheel Upgrade Filesize = Wow!

A while back I came across a post about using Local by Flywheel for local WordPress development, so I decided to try it out.

That was a while ago and I didn’t have the time to fully check it out. So today I decided to go back to it to see if it was any good.

Upon launching the app I was greeted with a window saying an upgrade was available. To my amazement it was 639 MB in size!

Local by Flywheel

I can’t remember the last time an app was even close to that file size. I think it’s been a few years!

P.S. I case you’re wondering if I kept using it or liked it, the answer is no.

WordPress + TwinHelix ‘IEPNGFIX’

If you are having trouble getting the IE PNG FIX from TwinHelix to work in your WordPress theme, make sure that you set the correct path to the .htc file in your themes stylesheet.

/* To fix IE 6 or less PNG issues */
img, div, span { behavior: url(wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/iepngfix.htc) }

If the relative path doesn’t work for you, try an absolute path instead.

/* To fix IE 6 or less PNG issues */
img, div, span { behavior: url(http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/iepngfix.htc) }

You also need to set the correct path to the image file in the .htc file.

if (typeof blankImg == 'undefined') var blankImg = 'wp-content/themes/your_theme_name/images/blank.gif';

Again, if the relative path doesn’t work, try the absolute path.

Once you have both paths set correctly everything should work fine. If you’re still having problems, chances are that the paths are still incorrect. Double check them and try again.

It took me a while to figure this out, so I hope this post saves you the bother.

Standard Web Fonts Revisited

A good while back I asked about Standard Web Fonts. According to my stats app, it turns out that a lot of other people are also interested in finding out the answer. I was going to put together a detailed post on the subject but after a quick search on Google I found an article that covers everything my post would have.

Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents

Don’t bother with web standards!

Quite the statement huh? No, I’m not saying it, but Microsoft essentially are.

According to The Register’s article ‘Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise‘, Microsoft intend on displaying a broken page icon next to all web pages that are standards compliant.

What does this say to your average Joe Blogg user? Standards = wrong. At least that’s the way I see it. And of course some lots of those users will probably want to design their own web sites. Do you think they will design to standards now? I think not!