Iron Ion Blog
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Wrapping Text With CSS Shapes (Shape-Outside)
CSS Shapes is a relatively new technology being developed by the team at Adobe Platform that not a whole lot of websites use yet, but will undoubtedly become very popular when more browsers support it with consistency. It involves Wrapping text with CSS Shapes. This allow you to flow text and other forms of content […]
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Whales Are Weird Free Line Art or Icon Set
This is a free line art or icon set featuring whales. I had some time on my hands and decided to fill an exceptionally niche need where someone might need a bunch of whale icons or line art. You can find the download link at the bottom of this post, the set includes sixteen different […]
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Super Cool CodePens
Looking at the cool stuff other people have made on CodePen can eat up a lot of free time, especially when it comes to seeing how far web languages have gone over the years. Back when I was a kid, playing around with Javascript, it was already amazing if you could replace the default cursor […]
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Installing SASS on OSX Using Terminal
SASS is one of two CSS preprocessor languages (that I know of, if there are more, let me know) aimed at extending the power and functionality of CSS with the goal of improving development time and reducing repetition in code. As a preprocessor language, SASS requires that we have it installed before we can convert […]
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Swift: Arc4Random Type Casting
I’ve been struggling like usual with a relatively simple problem the last two days this time, it’s getting arc4random_uniform to give me a randomized value from an array. Sure, it’s an easy problem for someone more experienced, so prepare to laugh. It occurred to me to type cast arc4random the instant I saw the error. […]
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Why WordPress Themes Won’t Save You Money
While I prefer to do all my work in a 100% customized scenario, a lot of clients do request theme modifications. Many of these themes, they’ve purchased from ThemeForest or some other WordPress theme marketplace. And all that is fine and dandy, if you were just looking for something to build off of. The problem […]
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A Few Words About Logo Salads
Here I thought I was the first person to use Logo Salad. Evidently, others have been thinking the same thing: Logo Salad on Urban Dictionary Stop using logo salads on your websites. It’s cliche, and pretty meaningless. I mean, unless you designed those logos, in which case, you’d probably get better results from displaying them […]
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Anatomy of a CSS Rule
One of the basic skills in CSS is knowing the anatomy of a CSS Rule. A CSS Rule is a chunk of code (written in CSS) that styles certain components in HTML, typically its element, class or ID. There are other ways to style HTML components, but they’re a little beyond the scope of this […]
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Flappy Bird-Like Games & Swift Countdown
Seems to me like everyone and their cousin has a Flappy Bird knockoff on the app store. Call me slow on the uptick, but I only recently discovered that App Flipping existed. I don’t like the industry or the approach. But I can’t deny that if someone makes a buck flipping apps–then they’ve–made a buck […]
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Swift: A Designer Tries Learning Swift
I’ve been wrestling with Swift for a few months. Before that, it was Objective-C. Of course, I’m talking about Apple’s development languages for their mobile platforms. Truth is, I don’t know how far I really am because some things make sense and some other things that should make sense, don’t. What I’m going to start […]
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My Favorite Free Code Editors
There are so many code editors out there that when I was getting back into full-time web design, I couldn’t figure out which one to start with. So I decided to go for the most basic one and I’ve worked my way through a few to end up with the one I’m using now. This […]
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CSS Tutorial: Simplifying :nth-child
I’m going to take a moment to explain a class that tripped me up when I first heard about it and started using it: nth-child. This is a really basic and quick overview of the nth-child class so it won’t go into any specifics or lots of details. It does assume that you already understand basic CSS terminology (ex. you know what a pseudo class is, you understand how to write CSS). So without further ado…
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Iron Ion Site Design Updated
Welcome to the updated design for Iron Ion. I decided to go with a less cute design while still maintaining a level of personality with some of my favorite bright and fun colors. There are still some things I need to work out with the design. Most notably the wonky blog layout, but for those of you looking for the articles on this site, they should display good enough for now.
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WordPress Code Snippet for PHP Display Shortcodes
I’m always finding myself having to look through my notes for this little snippet for php display shortcodes. I use it often enough to have to look for it, but at the same time, not often enough to commit it to memory. So here, once and for all, is the PHP code to display a […]
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Coding a Button with CSS Only
When I found out how to create CSS buttons, it was like someone handed me a big, free piece of candy. Finally, no more time spent in Illustrator drawing buttons, variations for buttons and making sure all of them lined up and worked when someone moused over them! So here’s a beginner’s guide to creating […]
Where have I been?
Since late-2017, I have decided to go back to my roots as an artist rather than continue as a designer/developer. The articles featured in this blog are very old, many are out of date, but I did not want to archive all of these posts even though they are old. As the internet fills with more and more things, sometimes old information that may be crucial to solving a problem or helping someone understand a concept, becomes harder to find. So, I wanted to keep these posts up in the off-chance that it helps someone, someday.
If any of these posts have helped you, please consider checking out my current whereabouts on alumandink.com. Best of luck and be well! ❤️