Uuummmm, this is a tasty ispum!
Are you bored with the same old latin lorum ipsum for placeholder text? Samuel L. Ipsum is one bad ...placeholder text generator. It generates classic Samuel L Jackson movie quotes and also has a safe for work mode, just don't get them mixed up!
How To Make a Image Greyscale in CSS
One common technique used on websites to add interactivity to a page involves rendering an image, or a set of images, in greyscale and switching back in a colour version when the mouse is rolled over.
This is typically achieved by using Javascript to replace the image inside a correctly positioned div. However, with the filter CSS3 tag having recently landed in webkit this is now an effect that it's possible to produce entirely using CSS.
Obviously having this functionality in webkit wouldn't usually be sufficient to role this method out on the wider web, but fortunately both Gecko and Trident have broadly equivalent functionality to achieve the same effect.
Magento: Removing links in the navigation block by name or by label
Sometimes in Magento you may want to remove links from the customer navigation block. What you'll notice is it's actually quite hard to do so because there is no 'remove' method.
In this tutorial I will show you had to extend Mage_Customer_Block_Account_Navigation to include an extra two methods, one to remove links by name and the other by label.
Wordpress Shortcoder plugin: Create a Twitter widget Shortcode
In this blog post i will show you how to create a Twitter widget Shortcode using the Wordpress Shortcoder plugin. This excellent plugin for Wordpress enables developers to create custom Shortcodes quickly and easily.International Day Against DRM
May the 4th isn't only (as Dave so subtly alluded to), Star Wars day, but also the FSF's International Day Against DRM.
DRM can be a huge problem for genuine, paying consumers across a range of media: computer software, music, video and even books. One of my personal bugbears is how difficult HBO make it to access their content online: their close links with the large US cable networks make it absolutely impossible to pay for HBO shows without signing up for a much larger package (in the UK, with Sky). DRM has been extended to such a point that it actively prevents some people for paying to access content.
How to set up Ctags for Sublime Text Editor 2
"Use the Source, Luke"
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Ctags is an excellent plugin for Sublime Text Editor 2 for giving you Jedi like powers. It enables you to jump through function calls to their definitions in the source code saving you a whole load of parsecs in file navigation.
Setting Ctags up is easy, here's how to in linux...
Some handy tools for optimisation
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"
Donald Knuth
There are a raft of tools now available to help a developer to optimise a modern web application: either providing pointers for improvements and modifications of the code or changes that can be made directly to the server (such as enabling mod-spdy). Here are a few that I've found helpful:
Webkit's brilliant inspector
Webkit's inspector is a tool that every developer will likely have to hand, but that many won't know how to use to its full potential. The audit, network and resources panel can be a real help in optimising sites. Majd Taby has recently Read more... [Post Comment]
Sublime Text Editor 2
Sublime Text Editor 2 is a favourite here at Gravitywell for developing Web Applications and here's why...Wordpress: Version 3.3.2 and Beta 3.4
The PHP CMS Wordpress has a new revision available. Revisions include security updates to 3 external libraries...
the PHP CMS Wordpress has a new revision available. Revisions include security updates to 3 external libraries:
Extending the Magento API

As UK Magento Developers we often find the need to extend the Magento API. This is actually quite easy to do.
In this article I will show you how to take the sales order API and extend it to automatically capture any payment when an invoice is created through the API.