AmberCouch » News

Duck Race 2009!

Richard — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:42:45 +0000

Ducks freak-out on performance enhancing drugs

We’re heading up to church Stretton today as it’s the 2nd Carding Mill Valley Duck Races tomorow and Ambercouch are sponsoring a race! It’s organised by our friends Stretton Climate Care to raise climate change awareness and should be a fun day out but looking at the press releases god knows what we’ve let ourselves in for .

Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see. It all kicks off about 11am saturday 23rd May and at the very least it’s going to get me away from this computer screen.

Leaving multi-tasking to MU from now on

Richard — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:55:34 +0000

Spent Friday sorting out a few future posts for wordpress-design-cardiff.co.uk and upgrading our sites to wordpress MU. I had, what at first seemed like a great idea to combined the two by screen casting the upgrade process for a future post. In reality my time-saving brain wave turned a 2 hour job in to a mammoth task that spanned the whole weekend and had me coding and testing my site from my phone whilst in South Petherton in deepest darkest Somerset! So let me just say a big sorry to anyone who couldn’t access content over the weekend. Hopefully I will get a decent post out of the whole experience

Work-wise, we’ve just finish a great Shopify theme for a client. I can’t wait to get it on our home page but she’s not quite got all her products in the shop just yet so we’re just going to have to wait.

Currently were working on something completely different and really exciting. It’s for a Cardiff based musician and it’s going to look amazing, that’s all I’m prepared to say right now but stay tuned.

Spam! What spam?

Richard — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:07:58 +0000

It took precisely 7 days from allowing comments and feedback on our news posts, to receiving our first automated spam comment, Grrr! No worries though, I just installed Akismet in 30 seconds flat and the problem is solved.

It did take me a while to come to realise the benefits of Akismet mainly because we weren’t building sites that allowed comments but also the fact that the plugin requires an API key. The reality is, that getting an API key take only a few minutes, just sign up at wordpress.com and that’s it. You’ll receive your API key in the you welcome email and BAM! No more spam.

Currently we have a few sites that are blogs and so allow comments and feedback and they all use Akismet. It’s a shame there isn’t a version of fantastico that allows you to install Akismet automatically, now that would be nice.

Amber Journal

Richard — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:38:39 +0000

I’ve just finished a new news/journal/blogging section of ambercouch.co.uk so it’s official, the innovative single page layout is now an innovative multi-paged layout, Sorry OnePageLove for any confusion this might cause.

Anyhow, I thought I best write something as the news section of this site has never been the most active and I can’t see that changing just because you can now leave comments. I will be interested in seeing how these posts are indexed in search engines, all the code is nice and optimised so we’ll just have to wait and see. I’m also going to hook this up to my facebook so you never know we might have something decent to write about instead of all this self-referencing/self-deprecating drivel. Stay Tuned…

Best Website Design of 2008

Richard — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:11:35 +0000

Just wanted to say a big thank you to cssbuilt, whoever you are, for putting ambercouch in thier top site of 2008. It still makes me a little embarrassed to see our site listed next to amazing website designer such as Jeff Sarmiento and Jason Santa Maria.

A bit of coding

Richard — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:28:12 +0000

we’ve recently had a couple of small coding jobs which have been really interesting to do. Firstly there was a nice menu mod for a copyblogger, a lovely pearsonified wordpress theme. You can see the finished results at paulboakye.net. Secondly Will Tallis of The Waits had designed a really interesting website for his band but the html and css was letting it down and the site wasn’t working on certain browsers. We were able to rewrite the code to make it valid and work consistently across browsers.

Almost Famous

Richard — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:06:40 +0000

Hey, this website, ambercouch.co.uk has been featured on CSS-Design-Yorkshire.com

How apt, props from the motherland.

AmberCouch Website Launch

Richard — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:00:53 +0000

So this is the new design, it’s nice and bold and I do like the colour pallet but as always with all my design work for my own portfolio I hope I still like it six months down the line.