I recently read a post entitled The Daily Routines of Famous Writers. I enjoyed Henry Miller’s quote the most:

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

It was refreshing to read about someone who understood their workflow so well; that they had it as optimized and as efficient as it could be. Henry Miller knew exactly what to do when he got in a “mood” and how to get out of it. He also knew what inspired him the most and what activities he could do to get inspiration.

It got me thinking about my own routine as a Web Designer. I do not have my routine written down but reading about these famous writer’s has inspired me to write my own. I’ll be drafting my routine and writing a post expounding on it. In the meantime, do you have your own optimized routine?

The post Thinking About My Web Design Routine appeared first on Andrew Lee.

I had previously built sites for clients under my own name, but decided to make it official (and legit) by getting our business license. I also felt like having an official company name would make our business more appealing to other businesses and clients instead of just my name. So, Railtie Studio was born. We’re a custom web design studio that loves to build sites on the WordPress platform.

The Railtie site is a totally scratch-built theme that has an adaptive and responsive layout. And of course, it’s built on WordPress.

Railtie has been taking up all our spare time but it’s been really fun to have a project to work on together. My wife has been a huge help with design advice and talking through our business practices. Check out the site and let me know what you think!

The post Railtie Studio appeared first on Andrew Lee.

The post [Link] Web Performance Tools appeared first on Andrew Lee.

Run Pace is my newly finished, super simple pace calculator site. Enter the data from your run (miles ran and the time you ran it in) and it will compute your average speed. I needed a site like this because I enter my average speed into the My Fitness Pal app which determines the calories I burned. However, I wanted a site that was visually minimalistic (in the same vein as my other side project, Minimal Tasks) and was really easy to use. There are a lot of pace calculator sites out there but I wanted one that was a lot more simple. Hopefully other people will find it useful as well!

The post Run Pace appeared first on Andrew Lee.

1. Shoptalk Show

The Shoptalk Show consists of Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert and usually they’ll have a guest on as well. Their focus is on Front-End development, nerdy jokes, “hot drama”, and sometimes Back-End development. Three episodes that are favorites of mine are:

1. Tab Atkins (On the CSS WG)
2. Paul Irish (On the Chrome Dev team, creator of HTML5 Boilerplate, etc.)
3. Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder)

Sometimes the audio quality is lacking but it’s not a deal-breaker by any means.

2. Draft

A design-specific podcast that focuses on designers telling stories of how they have tackled challenges and how to find inspiration. Besides design, they also talk about interacting with clients as well.

3. This Developer’s Life

This is a podcast that I just recently started listening to and has a much different feel/tone than the others. Created by Rob Conery, this podcast is more about developer’s telling stories about specific issues in their own careers and on projects they’ve worked on. It’s a show of how developers have overcome their own obstacles and risen above. The podcast is done in a very different format and is a welcome change. Also, the audio quality is absolutely excellent.

Leave a note in the comments if you have any to add to the list.

The post Podcasts for Front-End Developers and Designers appeared first on Andrew Lee.

The post [Link] Anatomy of a WordPress Theme appeared first on Andrew Lee.

Photo by Skuds

I’ve started to follow Matt Mullenweg’s blog (yes, the WordPress founder) and he does a great job of blogging things he cares about in his personal life as well as his professional life. The tone of the blog is very positive, interesting, and entertaining even for people that aren’t WordPress fans like myself. You get a great sense of the man  behind the site that I think some blogs are missing. I saw a link that he posted that went into depth about the idea of “owning our digital homes”. To go along with the idea of a “digital home”, I’m realigning my own blog. I want this blog to be useful to people and interesting, but also to serve as an archive and a record of my own data . This blog holds my data and it will retain my data for as long as I keep it running. I won’t be posting personal things that should be on something like Facebook, but I will be posting more links I find interesting like Martin Wolf does on his blog and that other people do as well.

As always, I enjoy interacting with other people, so please leave a comment if you would like to talk or you can email me via the contact form.

The post A Realignment appeared first on Andrew Lee.

Coding the form in HTML is relatively simple. Below is the code used on the client’s live site at nuanced.com/domains.

<div id="form">
  <form id="offer" action="process.php" method="post">
    <div id="inner-form">
      
      <div class="single-field">
        <label for="fullname">Full Name</label>
        <input type="text" name="fullname" />
      </div>

      <div class="single-field">
        <label for="email">Email</label>
        <input type="text" name="email" />
      </div>

      <div class="single-field">
        <label for="domain">Domain</label>
        <input type="text" name="domain" />
      </div>

      <div id="comments" class="single-field">
        <label for="comments">Comments (Optional)</label>
        <textarea name="comments"></textarea>
      </div>
    </div><!-- end #inner-form -->

    <div id="submit-form">
      <input class="button" type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" />
    </div>
  </form>
</div><!-- end #form -->

And here’s basically what the above code looks like without CSS being applied:

So far, it’s all pretty simple and straightforward HTML. However, to get the data being entered on the form from the website to the client, we’ll need PHP. The PHP file gets called in the line:

<form id="offer" action="process.php" method="post">

. The “process.php” file is a separate file that lives in the root directory on the web server that contains our PHP code. Here’s the file below:

<?php 
$errors = '';
$myemail = '#';//<-----Input your email address here.
if(empty($_POST['fullname'])  || 
   empty($_POST['email']) || 
   empty($_POST['domain']))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: Fullname, email, and domain fields are required"; //<-----Error message is displayed if inputs are missing
}

$fullname = $_POST['fullname']; 
$email = $_POST['email']; 
$domain = $_POST['domain']; 
$comments = $_POST['comments']; 

if (!preg_match(
"/^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$/i", 
$email))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: Invalid email address";//<-----Verifies email address syntax
}

if( empty($errors))
{
	$to = $myemail; 
	$email_subject = "Contact form submission: $name";
	$email_body = "You have received a new message. ".
	" Here are the details:\n Fullname: $fullname \n Email: $email \n Domain: \n $domain Comments: \n $comments"; 
	
	$headers = "From: $myemail\n"; 
	$headers .= "Reply-To: $email";
	
	mail($to,$email_subject,$email_body,$headers);//<-----parses and sends data via email
	//redirects user back to main page or to a "thank you" page
	header('Location: index.html');
} 
?>

As you can see, the form accepts the data being entered after it validates that the inputs are filled out and then parses that data into an email. I added a few comments in the code to explain what some of the lines are doing.

If you’d like to use the above code in your project, just switch out the field names (like fullname, email, etc… ) with your own.

I hope this tutorial helps and if you have a better/more semantic way to do it, let everyone know in the comments.

*Syntax highlighting in this post is done by the excellent SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin.

The post Complete HTML and PHP Form Walk-Through appeared first on Andrew Lee.

Really, really excited about this news: GitHub for Windows is finally here. I’m anxious to get started learning Git and the GitHub way. I’ll be posting soon on how it’s going.

The post GitHub appeared first on Andrew Lee.

I found the perfect solution for my theme-ing issues. No more using someone else’s code when I can write it myself and use my own, simpler design. I’m now using the Toolbox theme which is semantic, HTML5 code and then a very minimal amount of CSS leaving plenty of room for styling but still giving you a baseline to get started. Perfection.

Now, on to making more content.

The post Done With Themes appeared first on Andrew Lee.