Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Will the Daily Mail cheat your gypsy immigrants?

Do you want to make the Daily Mail more Daily Mail than it already is? This fantastic tool from the absurdly named qwghlm.co.uk site (motto: “Because all the other domain names were taken”) will answer all your needs. Assuming you have Firefox on your system (and you really should), just install the Greasemonkey browser add-on […]

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Typekit experiment: conclusion

It’s time to turn my Typekit code off. Typekit offers an online library of fonts you can use in your blog or web site without relying on it being installed on your visitor’s computer. Though it’s been exciting to see Freelance Unbound with a headline font that isn’t either Georgia or Verdana (the web’s two […]

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

My experiment with Typekit

Which, if you’re reading this on Freelance Unbound and not an RSS feed, you’ll see working in the headline above. That whole new typographic look is thanks to Typekit – a service that allows web users to access a font library online and so expand the typography available to web designers. Normally, the drawback with […]

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Create your own WordPress theme

Despite the wealth of tutorial information on the WordPress Codex, the idea of creating your own WordPress theme can be a bit daunting. So here’s a great tutorial on Web Designer magazine that strips the process down to its essentials and gives them to you in a logical order. Given that I’m planning to create a […]

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

How I hate my Samsung N140 netbook

As any visitor will have noticed, things are still quiet on Freelance Unbound this week. Partly this is to do with the fact that I am so busy I can barely read blogs, let alone write one. But also it’s because  haven’t yet had the time, or the nerve, to perform major invasive surgery on […]

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Political debate? There's an App for that

A while ago, I posted on the possibility that journalism might have to move towards software development. The Atlantic this month flags up an iPhone App that offers policy points for (US) conservatives to use when they’re arguing about Obama’s healthcare bill. The Conservative Talking Points app will set you back £1.12 from the iTunes store […]

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Plugin madness

Moving to my own hosting space and unleashing me on the world of WordPress has been a bit like letting a small, excitable dog loose in a butcher’s shop. For my world is suddenly chock full of plugins. Plugins to do virtually everything, it seems, bar the washing up. (And I understand someone somewhere is […]

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Why journalism may become software development

There’s an interesting comment from Soilman on my post on whether a donation model can fund web content. It’s worth a closer look. He argues that the three things users may pay for are: Data Services Software/apps  If you’re a business mag/website, you create a software programme that helps professionals in your industry do their […]

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Great beginner's guide to CSS

I’ve just come across this simple start-up tutorial to cascading style sheets (CSS), which is ideal for the absolute beginner. Much like style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS is at the heart of the look-and-feel of content management systems (CMS). But unlike style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS code looks like, well, code. […]

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Navigating the CMS minefield

Regular, geeky readers of Freelance Unbound will know that I am striving hard to become literate in the ways of CMS – that is in actually constructing a CMS-based site, not just using one. This stuff is pretty hard to get to grips with for a non-techie journalist, so I’ve been trawling the web for […]