Clock Blog
Our responsive toolkit
Here at Clock, the vast majority of our web projects are now responsive. Whether we implement a fully fluid design or a set of fixed breakpoints, we now approach projects with an extended armoury – making sure we deliver a top experience across devices. Here's a run down of some of the tools and libraries that help us along the way…
Just remember...
Google Reader reminded us today that when using cloud services you need to remember....
Clock goes to Front-End London
Last night the team attended Front-End London – a free event & meet up hosted by Made by Many – dedicating itself to all things front end.
Conference Highlights: Digital Media Strategies 2013, Day 2
A whistle stop tour through Day 2 of #DMS13
Conference Highlights: Digital Media Strategies 2013, Day 1
A rough walkthrough the highlights of Day 1 at #DMS13
Preventing 'http: Raise hangup error on destroyed socket write' from crashing your node.js server
This is our approach to preventing your node.js web server from crashing because of the hang up now thrown in nodejs 0.8.20
Clock Week in Pictures 08/02/2013
Say goodbye to the WIP, as this is the last one! Don't fear though – it's not as bad as it sounds, we're just changing format slightly. After this week, we'll be aiming for a fortnightly frequency, but the slightly less restrictive moniker of 'Clock in Pictures' will allow us to proceed at whatever…
Clock Week in Pictures 01/02/2013
A pinch and a punch for the first of the month, and welcome to February's first week in pictures! We've been busy putting in the groundwork for some big and exciting projects that will soon be on the production line, but we've still got a few extra-curricular pics to show. The boardroom has seen…
An Introduction to Backbone.js
Last week I gave a presentation on Backbone.js to the rest of the developers here at Clock. The amount of exposure we've had to client side heavy-lifting varies, so the idea was to get everyone on the same page. The other guys found it pretty handy, so I thought I'd write it up here where there's a…
Clock Week in Pictures 25/01/2013
It's been fairly quiet this week. Nonetheless we see some new wheels, some hardware hacking, the end of an era, and some dizzy heights! Paul (our CTO by day, mountain-goat by night) takes a Luke and Francisco for a trip to the climbing wall to show them the ropes… And Francisco…
The Black Art of Background Processing
A discussion on the different techniques we can use to process large tasks in a web environment.
Clock Week in Pictures 18/01/2013
This week's WIP is (as much of the UK is) primarily concerned with the weather. If you've forgotten what that transparent rectangle on your wall is for, then this week you're in for a treat. To kick things off, five of us Clockers hit the slopes in Les Deux Alpes. Here we are snapped on Adam's…
Why Scrum simply works
After a few projects using Scrum, it becomes fairly easy to understand why Scrum works so well. Scrum is not the secret ingredient for success but it does certainly help us to achieve better results on our projects.
Clock Week in Pictures 04/01/2013
Hello and welcome to the first WIP of 2013. We hope Santa brought you everything you asked for, and that you didn't spend all of New Year's Day in bed recovering from the Auld Lang Syne antics the night before – yes, I'm sorry to say that you were embarrassingly out of tune. Don't worry though, in…
Clock Week in Pictures 14/12/2012
The Week in Pictures is back for a final, increasingly festive rendition before the Christmas break. This week (or the last few weeks, should I say!) sees Sophie get a face full of water, the musical members of the team get together for a jam, and some Christmas-y preparations for tonight's Winter…
Passing the Zend 5.3 PHP Certification
My experience of revising and passing the Zend 5.3 PHP Certification
ALL NEW! Two Weeks in Pictures 23/11/12
Fresh off the shelf is this week's TWIP! Due to absence last week we have compiled a bumper selection of the WIP in a special two week edition. Don't be shy, come on in...
Team Building. Meet; the Mycrowave, Ironman, Crapology and the Spidge!
Objective: invent, design and shoot a commercial for a new home appliance
Clock Week in Pictures 09 / 11 / 2012
This week get the full insight of Clock life with our special 'team building' instalment. All of the normal fun with and added bonus! Go Team!
Clock Week in Pictures 25 / 10 / 2012
This week is fat with fun. Clock bring you another instalment of our Week in Pictures. Chow down!
Clock Week in Pictures 19 / 10 / 2012
A kick ass week for Clock in house and in San Francisco at Nodestack Conference!
All new Week in Pictures from Clock
Welcome to our new Week in Pictures blog happening every Friday from Clock Towers
Top Picks of the LXJS Talks
Seven of us Clockers made the trip to Lisbon for LXJS last week. The overall quality of the talks was excellent. There was a great balance of abstract and technical content, and luckily for you (if you didn't make it to the conference, or just want to relive the experience) the organisers have done a great job getting the video live-streamed and already uploaded to YouTube...
Optimise your pngs from the terminal in OSX
A simple guide to optimising all of your png using a single command.
Git Bisect: Simple Examples and Automation
A brief introduction into Git bisect and an example of it's automation
Use jQuery Events on Plain JavaScript Objects
Did you know that you can use jQuery events on non-DOM-related objects? Just wrap up the object in the jQuery function, and you can use on, off and trigger.
Automated Cross Browser Testing: The Holy Grail
Update: One of the authors of Buster.js helpfully responded to this article on Twitter, pointing out that a new version had been released since I'd tried it. This new version addresses IE support, which was one of my major qualms as mentioned later in the post. When writing module.js, I wanted to…
My top picks from D&AD New Blood
Some really interesting work to see last night at the D&AD New Blood exhibition. Here are some of my highlights.
Sprint Planning & Success
Here is a better way to measure your Sprint success using Sprint Goals instead of points in Agile and Scrum framework.
iOS & JavaScript event response time optimisation
When developing HTML5 applications with JavaScript, iOS click and touch response times are infamously slow. Here's some advice from down in the trenches here at Clock on how to improve the responsiveness of your applications.
A Simple Website in Node.js with Express, Jade and Stylus
This post will use the popular Express framework to show you how you can build simple websites in Node.
10 Years of University Interns
For the last 10 years Clock has been hiring university students as Interns to allow them to fulfill their degree. During this time we have employed over 20 students. The intern scheme at Clock is a pipeline for hiring staff and it helps the business grow.
Clock Embracing Next-Generation Internet
We are official participants of World IPv6 Launch, a coordinated adoption of the next-generation Internet protocol.
Doctrine ORM Associations
Doctrine ORM Associations define the relationships between entities and are responsible for setting up the foreign keys and enforcing referential integrity.
Scaling Node.js and MongoDB on Joyent Cloud
Here at Clock, we recently deployed a large Node.js and MongoDB application for a client to Joyent's cloud platform, designed for horizontal scalability. This document gives a brief overview of the configuration, and observations in the setup. We are not explaining how to design a scalable…
PHP Conference 2012
Today is Clock's 5th annual trip to the PHP Conference and generally speaking, it gets better each year. The keynote this year is by Rasmus Lerdorf entitled "A look at PHP in 2012", and as the PHP conf site tells us, Rasmus is: Best known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995. He…
versionator - Static content versioning in node.js using express
versionator was built to solve the problem of static assets getting stuck in browser and proxy caches when new versions of the assets are deployed. Without versionator this is what can happen: You set your static content to be cached and expire in 30 days time. express.static(__dirname +…
Upstart and Node.js
One issue that we have had with Node.js projects is how to allow our developers to assume the role of devops for the various different sites a machine may be running - i.e. to restart node sites without incurring a large overhead in server configuration. To date we have been running our node sites…
Zsh: [Ctrl + left arrow] outputting '5D'?
If you've recently started using Zsh as your shell of choice and have noticed that some key bindings are not working or are now outputting unusual characters, you need to update your .zshrc. I noticed the issue on a virtual machine running Ubuntu Server, however, other systems vary and output…
and now... Will the fat lady sing?
As discussed, I am trialling new browsers - to enrich and broaden my horizons. I ended up using Chrome for longer than I intended and with good reason, I found it to be the best browser I had used. Previously I was an adherent Firefox fan. So, how does Opera fare? With more than 220 million users…
Secret Santa app
The ‘Secret Santa’s Tombola’, is a new free iPhone web app from digital agency Clock Limited to help you find that perfect Secret Santa gift. The Secret Santa app, developed in-house at Clock, guides you through various choices about the recipient before helping you find them the perfect…
The Rise and Rise of Game Mechanics
We all like games. They are fun, social and as it turns out tremendously useful in real life. (See my previous post on that subject here. Read it? Good, then welcome back!) How did it start? So lately, the world of gaming has started to spill out from the realm of hardcore gamers to, well... the…
Facebook - are we asking the wrong questions?
Where is my money? The above is a question. Not a dramatic question just yet. It doesn't have any context, no real point, no drama. But we can work on that. Yesterday I was watching the BBC documentary "Inside Facebook", featured in it was a short interview with the ever elusive Mark Zuckerberg.…
Compiling ActionScript 3.0 with Sublime Text 2
At Clock we typically spend our time developing JavaScript and PHP, however, occasionally Flash presents itself as the most suitable platform for certain components. To avoid the need of installing a separate authoring environment (and even the license fees associated with some of the official…
From Firefox to Chrome
This post is a follow-up to my original blog regarding browsers So, I made the leap from my trusty Firefox to Google Chrome, and it was a lot easier and efficient than the last time I tried it. I used the handy 'Import Bookmarks and Settings' menu option and it pulled my stuff across pretty…
How To Set-up Your Company's Google+ Profile
Google has finally rolled out branded pages for Google+! Whereas G+ Profiles was purely aimed at connecting people, it now empowers everyone from local businesses to global brands to build your online relations with G+ Pages. Using the same style and layout as your Google+ Profiles, your Page is…
My Browser
About a month ago, my colleague Mike shared a fascinating read, browser speed reports on LifeHacker, and in the article it overtly stated that Opera 11.51 had taken the title as speediest browser. Like a lot of people I suspect, I have pretty much stuck with the same browser for a number of years;…
Our blog incentive scheme
At Clock we have introduced a blog incentive scheme, and I thought I'd share it with you - in case you might want to do something similar, or just in case you are interested. It is a 6 monthly prize allocation system, and the prizes are worked out via the following metric: The most popular blog…
How to interview for a Front-End Developer (and what any decent applicant should know)
A friend of mine (who's just started his own digital agency) got in touch the other day to ask the question: "We're interviewing for a front-end developer this week and [not being a front-ender] I was wondering if you could give me some tips on what topics we should cover?" Not a problem at all, I…
The sad news about Steve Jobs this morning got me thinking...
Incredibly sad news to wake up to about Steve Jobs this morning. In so many ways, he was an inspirational figure. I guess only time will tell if he will be as influential as Einstein in the bigger picture, but he won't be far off I think. The technology revolution will be far more wide-reaching…
Code readability: The 5 minute explanation test.
As the great man, Albert Einstein, once reportedly said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." I was reading an article by Alberto Gutierrez on makinggoodsoftware.com and within the article he touches upon a technique that we *sometimes-but-not-often-enough*…
Getting To Grips With Social Media Marketing
Starting at Clock Limited a few weeks ago, I began my voyage into the murky realms of Social Media from a professional perspective. Naturally, my first handful of tweets were shaky and this was demonstrated through my initial (and unfounded) ‘nice to meet you’ tweet to what turned out to be an…
Deleting a git commit
When working with Git you will find that sometimes commits need to be removed as they have introduced a bug or need to be reworked. If it is the last commit this is very straight forward. Simply run: git reset HEAD This will pop off the latest commit but leave all of your changes to the files…
Basics: Always send urls
As a rule of thumb we should ensure that we always send URLs to clients / friend / co-workers when instructing them to do something on a website. Relying on others to know what is meant by 'staging version', 'live version', 'account section', 'sign-up' page is thwart with danger and room for…
Why you should be using VERP (Variable Envelope Return Path)
You may not have heard of VERP, but it is very important that you find out whether your email campaign software/service uses it. Variable Envelope Return Path or "VERP" is a technique to enable automatic detection and removal of undeliverable e-mail addresses. I have previously used email campaign…
Using 'Commuting Time' Summary
So what have I learnt from trying to better use my commuting time? I have learnt that despite limitations, you can actually achieve a fair amount during driving to and from work (or by train). I found the best use of my time was split into the following sectors: - Creative ideas I would say that…
Using Commuting Time: Week 3 – Interview with Syd Nadim, Skobbler and more
To recap, I am on a voyage of discovery - learning how to maximise my commuting time. In the last few weeks, I have discovered: Learning #1 Just because a Google search doesn’t yield results after 10 or so searches, does not mean it doesn’t exist. Learning #2 Dragon Dictation is not adequate for…
My Stylus Mixin for CSS3 Linear Gradients in Node
I've been getting my hands dirty with more Node development recently, and one of the best parts of it as a front-end developer is the utilisation of Stylus. Stylus, combined with Jade speeds up my output so much. I love the cleanliness of the markup (well, what markup there is) - it's clean,…
Using Commuting Time: Week 2 – Interview with Vincent Iweka, bad drivers and more
To recap, I am on a voyage of discovery - learning how to maximise my commuting time. Last week I discovered: Learning #1 Just because a Google search doesn’t yield results after 10 or so searches, does not mean it doesn’t exist. Learning #2 Dragon Dictation is not adequate for writing emails..…
Using Commuting Time: Week 1 - Interview with Dave Birss, iphone apps and more
So... Following on from my quest to utilise my commuting time. That evening on my drive home, I fired up voice memos on my iPhone and recorded my first thoughts: [audio src="http://blog.clock.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/20110623-180655.mp3"] Apologies for the repetition, I am driving (you can…
The Web Agency Boilerplate
You know what we love in web agencies?...Templates. Boilerplates. Frameworks. Basically stuff that allows us to save time because someone else has done some thinking. I have spent 15 years in 4 agencies across 2 countries, and have noticed one thing in all of these agencies. Basic stuff missing.…
Utilising Dead Commuting Time
I heard an inspiring and motivational story on BBC Radio 4 on my travels to work this morning. It was a story about Steve Spiro and how he had created an album entitled 'Frequent Traveller'. Within the report it explained how Steve wanted to make use of his 1 hour 'dead' commuting time - so he…
Which branch should I be working on?
Here at Clock we have recently switched from svn to git; it is awesome. If you don't already know that you should try it for a month. Git is both powerful and flexible and this allows you to adopt sophisticated branching models which can improve the quality of your development process…
My pre-concerns of nodeJS
Recently, our tech team has got well into nodeJS - even recently launching our first project utilising it. I am (sadly) at the beginning, with hardly any prior knowledge about this strange-mystical-yet-exciting technology. My concerns with it are: Stability & Security Support Having to…
The Very Best of Clock's Bookmarks
At Clock, we like to keep up to date with what's happening in the industry. One of our key three aims is to be "bleeding edge". Since I stared my placement at Clock back in July 2010, we've been sharing useful and interesting links via email and Delicious. This post contains what I believe are the…
What World of Warcraft taught me about Project Management
The Lesson Until about 4 years ago I was a major elitist when it came to work and skills. I just refused to work with people below a certain standard of coding or execution excellence and often found myself struggling with projects that, despite have elite teams of people throughout, never seemed…
HTML5 contentEditable CMS?
This is a blog post of an idea, rather than the critique of such a system or nuisances thereof. I have done some quick Google searches to see if there is anyone out there using the new html5 'contentEditable' feature to perform content management system tools for a Web site - and whilst there are…
Bash Completion Problems with option lists generated by PHP
When creating bash completion scripts that get fed from PHP, I realised I was getting the following problem: I would type the command then press tab to get the completion $maiden<tab><tab> But nothing would happen except the cursor jump forward. I would then not be able to backspace…
Exporting Postgres Tables as CSV
If you need to get a quick CVS of a large query output to a client in a CSV and are using PgAdmin3 or some other GUI tool running on your local machine you might want to considering running this command on the database server directly. echo "COPY (SELECT * FROM \"User\") TO STDOUT CSV;" | psql -U…
Why has Bing become my default search engine in Firefox 4?
I decided to write this post because ever since I upgraded to the full version of Firefox 4, I have become really frustrated with a key piece of browser behavior I am accustomed to. Not everyone browses the same way, but I love Chrome and the fact that the address bar is also my search bar. For all…
Deploying node.js apps
Here at Clock, long gone are the days of FTP uploads to put a site live. We use deployment tools to automate the process, which have the advantage of being faster, while reducing the chance of human error. I'm delving into node.js development, for which I've set up my own deployment and…
PHPExcel Cheatsheet
PHPExcel is a collection of classes that allows you to generate excel documents in PHP. It is incredibly powerful and you can perform almost all (if not all) task that you would normally use in excel. It is really easy to install, either download the files or they now have a pear channel. For more…
SCRUM Lite - Project Management for Small Teams
Now...anyone that has done any work utilising SCRUM will happily tell you that implementing the full SCRUM method into a small development team is quite difficult...even unnecessary. Ask any SCRUM instructer and they will tell you if you DON'T implement the full SCRUM method ... then you aren't…
A School Report: Optimisation...
A couple of useful tools that we use for checking page speed (and optimisation of) are 'YSlow' and 'Google Labs: Google Page Speed'. To run through some of the nuances and discussions we have internally, I thought it might be a nice exercise to blog about the ones I discovered for our very own…
Forrst - The essential power-up to Software Development
Over the last year I've noticed people posting links on twitter to their latest design, a new layout they want feedback on, or even something graphically compelling. These links however, were Forrst links, and to anyone outside of Forrst, inaccessible (By default, but users can change). Not being a…
Avoiding Superfluous HTML5
HTML5 (or rather, the continuing specification of HTML) is very, very good really great stuff. New elements, better semantic meaning to mark-up, more accessible interactivity - it's all leading to some very exciting times ahead, and with those times I hope that we'll start to see more and more…
Just because you're listening to the client doesn't mean you're hearing the client.
Communication is key if you want to build strong relationships with your clients, and on top of this - an understanding of the work you are producing is key. George Bernard Shaw once said that: "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." I think you could argue that in…
UI Draggable Switch jQuery Plugin
I thought I'd share a small jQuery plugin I've built. See the demo | View the source The plugin works in all browsers, including IE < 8 and Mobile Safari. How it works The plug-in requires a single element to get started. This element should have relative positioning, a width set and no padding.…
Virtualbox 4.0.4 Shared Folder Update
Continuing from previous blog post, I have benchmarked the newest release of Virtualbox 4.0.4 with Shared Folder access. Same test as before, benchmarking static content servered up by apache from a Shared Folder using the follow command: $ ab -c 10 -n 500…
VirtualBox 4.0 Shared Folders Still Slow
I've recently installed the newest version of VirtualBox. I had every finger and toe crossed in the hope that my long standing bug with Shared Folders would be fixed. We run an Ubuntu 10.04.1 VM and use a Apache/PHP stack and serve up sites using files from a folder on the host environment. This…
Visualising live data with the HTML5 canvas
I've been doing some research into representing live statistics visually in web pages. Live meant that bespoke images weren't an option, and I was reluctant (and not well versed enough in the technology) to use flash. This was a perfect opportunity to look in to canvas. Armed with a signed and…
Phing Filterset Custom Task
I couldn't find anywhere online to quickly show me how to use filtersets in a custom phing target, so I worked it out myself and thought I'd bash it out here. Not much to it I know, but always nice for a reference! Filtersets allow recursion through files with specific includes and excludes, and…
A Few Useful Online Tools
Online tools used to be fairly limited and not that useful for business, traditional offline software used to dominate - but I now find myself using more and more online solutions. A few to mention: #1 Basecamp: It brings the projects (and teams) discussions/assets etc together quite seamlessely…
Eclipse PDT Templates assisting CS
Coding Standards are important for a number of reasons: Standards allow everyone to follow the same practices, which lowers the learning curve when moving between projects. Coding standards make the reading of source code easier, thus lowering the time needed by a developer to understand it. …
The Future of Captcha?
I saw an interesting post on forrst.com this morning which was a screenshot of a planned method for making Captcha easier for users and still stop robots / spammers from filling out your forms. Captcha at the moment requires users to decipher a series of distorted characters and enter them in a…
Mooving the Atom & H.264 Video Codec
Today I was held up by our Flash video player not progressively downloading a seemingly regular F4V video uploaded by a client. The symptoms of this meant that the person watching the video would get a blank screen up until 100% of the video had downloaded, often minutes later. I used G-Spot to…
The Tea Game
In order to make the tea making fair in the workplace, we have concocted a game to distribute the tea/coffee making responsibilities. It goes like this: Objective Not to be the player with the lowest card (ace is high) or to be the player holding a red Queen. The Dealer The dealer can be 1 or more…
URL shortners, undoing DNS
I am by no means an expert in DNS or the like, but as my colleague (Mike) and I were discussing, the premise of DNS was to turn IP Addresses of servers, which are humanly unreadable (just numbers) into URLs that are readable and understandable by humans (i.e www.amazon.com). Now, as if…
Branching Policy for SVN
Recently I've been looking into the prospect of switching from our current SCM system of SVN to GIT. Linus gives a pretty convincing argument in this video (Thanks to Michael Cronnelly our Head of Technical Services for hooking me up with this) but for us the business case is not strong enough at…
Opening Clock
Clock have decided to embrace the open source world and release everything we can for all to use. We will open all our policies, development methodologies, software tools, and any assets we produce internally. As much as possible we are going to put it out there for others to use, comment, and…