Lately I’ve needed to find out how the person is viewing my pages. Now, in WordPress there’s a cool plugin called WPTouch that does all this for me. But when I’m not using WordPress then what do I do? Enter the script below. It detects about 90+% of the mobile devices out there and then sets a variable. I use that variable throughout my layout to include extra css, js, images, whatever. Hope someone finds it useful.

Device detection script

$is_mobile = 0; // init variable

// detect what device/browser is being used
$mobile_pattern = "/Mobile|iP(hone|od|ad)|Android|BlackBerry|IEMobile|Kindle|NetFront|Silk-Accelerated|(hpw|web)OS|Fennec|Minimo|OperaM(obi|ini)|Blazer|Dolfin|Dolphin|Skyfire|Zune/";

if(preg_match($mobile_pattern, env('HTTP_USER_AGENT'))) {
   // set mobile variable
   $is_mobile = 1;
}

As you can see it’s pretty simple. You could actually take the $pattern value and use it in any regex.

Once I know if the user is on a mobile device I can set various things inside the code such as:

<!--?php if($is_mobile): ?-->
<meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width'>
<!--?php endif; ?-->

Which will fit the viewport to match what mobile device the user is on.

Feel free to use the code above and ask any questions you may have or give comments in the space below.

Yesterday I spent the day talking and learning with the WordPress community at WordCamp San Diego 2012. In short, it was pretty awesome. A day packed full of what I like to call “The fast track to WordPress knowledge.” See, you can go out an buy a book on WordPress…but it’ll likely be too general or basic. Let’s face it, books have to be in order to appeal to a mass audience. I’m not saying books are bad, just that they’re more generalized. Or, you can do a Google search on WordPress and get about 585,000,000 results.

WordCamp brings people who already know about WordPress…who know what you need to know because they’ve been doing the same thing you’re trying to do…right to you. They’ll pass on awesomeness to you, answer your questions, and show you stuff you’d probably never stumble upon on your own.

I’m still going through my notes from yesterday’s WordCamp, but I did run across a tweet that someone had linked to all the presentations from the day.

Looking for a list of slidedecks/code from WordCamp San Diego 2012 presos? Here you go: bit.ly/GP0I7a #wcsd

— DeborahEdwards-Onoro (@redcrew) March 25, 2012

So feel free to check that out. I’ll also write/comment on what I learned, tips I picked up, and awesome people I either met or heard about.

I was recently involved in a project consisting of a group of websites. There is one big player who’s in charge of several franchises of the same business. Each one of the businesses has its own manager in charge of it. The job was to create a site for each individual business that would display the products each of them had in their inventory, as well as one site for the ‘group’ that would show the combined inventory of all the sites.

Turns out though that the big boss wants all the products to show up on all the sites, regardless of which store they’re actually in. Now we have conflict right? The individual managers have to play along, but they want their products shown on top of all the others.

Starting to get the picture? A user can find the same product on 9 different websites but only one of the stores actually has that product. There’s another little wrinkle. The products on each of the individual sites have several sorting options: price (low to high), brand, etc. However, since each individual business owner wants their products shown first (regardless of the sorting), a user can be browsing the products by price, but the price will suddenly jump around as the user goes past that specific stores products.

Why all the complication? In a word, ego. The big boss wants max exposure for all his products. The little bosses don’t want to be selling products for their sister stores. Despite telling them that it’s a confusing concept, they all came up with this “solution”. And yeah, it meets the criteria set…but at what cost? The development team had to figure out how to sort and display all the products to the given specification–which took more time and cost the client more money. But the cost of losing business because your visitors are leaving your site…either by confusion or frustration…I’m not sure can be measured.

Bottom line is that usability is a big deal. When you hire a web developer it’s not just because he can put some code together to make some images and text show up. It’s the experience of trial and error building hundreds of sites. The expertise of figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. That’s why you hire a seasoned web developer and not the 13 year old kid that will build your site dirt cheap.

Today I came across a post about passwords. It had many tips for using a ‘system’ that helps you remember your various passwords while still keeping them secure. It also shows you some handy tools for keeping track of your passwords. It reminded me that it’s time that I look over my many passwords and make sure they’re good and clean.

In my line of work I deal with passwords a lot and over the years I’ve learned to ‘remember’ the odd combinations I come up with. My clients often tell me that the passwords I give them for the tools I make aren’t easy enough to remember. “That’s kind of the point” is my first reaction, but they don’t have to be difficult. The theories in the article linked above aren’t anything new…I’ve heard them before, but it’s a good resource to point clients to and show them that just because you make a ‘secure’ password doesn’t mean it has to be impossible to remember.

SDRadio.net is one of the most popular sites about radio on the web. SDRadio.net reports on radio (and tv) in the San Diego area and a bit beyond.

“Todd understood my web site problem: A great blog in content that lacked appeal. He handcrafted a back engine and SDRadio is one of the premiere radio sites in the country. Plus he delivered before the due date. I still use him today and highly recommend.” ~ Chris from SDRadio.net

Reaching deep into the archives, I came across a flash game I made for 91X. Back in the late 90′s, the Brand X morning show had a game on the air called “You Can’t Win”. Since the game was so popular, they asked me to make an online version. Here was the first “episode” of that game.

Click on the image below to play the game.

(This is an SWF so may not be mobile compatible)

KKFN often wanted to use short flash teasers on their home page as a way to promote to their site visitors the biggest thing happening on the station at the time. These were not flash intro’s. They appeared on the main page of the site like where you’d see a “slider” or feature box. Below are two of them from when the Colorado Avalanche (KKFN carried the games) were in the playoffs.

Click each thumbnail to view the movie (SWF so sorry, may not be mobile compatable)

Over the years I’ve designed many logos for clients. Sometimes a client had a very specific idea in their head (and even a drawing) of exactly how they wanted it to look…sometimes the client just said “make me a logo”. Of course that’s how it is with anything. There are times you know exactly what you want and times you don’t know what you want until you see it.

Here are a few logos I’ve created over the years. I will continue to add to this post as I dig through my hard drive(s) and find more.

Most people don’t think of San Diego as a great sports town, but it does have a rich sports history. The sports fans in this town are passionate about their team. The media has never taken it seriously though and thus, because the media puts sports in the back seat…people often think that’s where it should be.

Except for Craig Elsten, Chris Ello and Cookie “Chainsaw” Randolph that is. They wanted to give San Diego sports fans a place to go for local coverage, news and commentary. Not just professional sports either. 619Sports.net covers college sports and high school sports as well.

They came to me to build their site and I’ve been coding and designing for them since 2009.

Details: While 619Sports is mainly a WordPress site so that they can manage all the content, there was a lot of custom work done. PHP, JavaScript and database wise.