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Author Archives: Sam
We’ve Moved!
It was sad to leave our South London den in Forest Hill, but exciting to be moving into central London. You can now find Toasted Digital in Covent Garden, and on our new phone number 0207 240 4415.
Along with a geographical shifting, we’ll soon be launching our new website, so keep eyes peeled for that. We’ve also got a little more space here now, so if you’re looking for any freelance work, or even some central London desk space, get in touch and we can have a chat.
Go To Town! And more…
It’s been a busy half a year here at Toasted Digital! While working on a lot of white labelled projects, we’ve also had to chance to work on an awesome new project called Go To Town. We handled branding and illustration to responsive design, and we’re happy to see the website is now live.
The new year is bringing change here, we’re moving into a new office in central London, and expect to see a new website in the Spring with a more regular design and development blog. More updates soon.
Work with Toasted Digital
Freelance designers and developers get in touch! There are always exciting new projects coming up (We work with some fantastic clients and agencies with more to come) , and so we’re always on the look out for great creatives to collaborate with. If you’ve got awesome skills, please send over your portfolio so we can have a chat.
All areas are very welcome, but our main focus is on progressive enhancement for websites and web apps, so an understanding of all the usual suspects of responsive design, JavaScript (including jQuery, Canvas etc), CSS animation and general web based fun is going to be key.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you. Portfolios to here.
Examples of handling the EU Cookie Law
Tomorrow the much complained talked about EU cookie directive starts being “enforced” on websites not showing some evidence of making progress to become compliant. There’s been a confused and unclear scramble since I last posted about this, and countless solutions, ideas, questions and so on have popped up. We haven’t managed to perfect a solution yet, although the cookies & privacy page has been updated to be more informative while that gets sorted.
I’ve put together a few examples of the way sites are choosing to handle this in its early stages. I’m sure a lot of these will change (This article was written on the 25th May 2012) as webmasters learn about visitor response to them, but if you’re truly stuck for ideas, it’ll give some direction.
Big Cheese approach – BT – www.bt.com
An example of one of the big companies, BT have a slider letting you select the level of cookie you’ll accept. On changing you’ll be shown what the website will and won’t do with those settings. I wasn’t presented with this on landing on the page, only on clicking their footer “change cookie link”. This is a fairly informative method, although the effort required is unfortunately an affirmation of making the user experience that little more convoluted.
A Mobile Approach – BBC - m.bbc.co.uk/news/
I noticed this one pop up last night. I was presented with this page as soon as arriving on the BBC news site, and while it completely blocks the site (more or less), I found it pretty quick and painless. That said, it’d be interesting to know what a user with no prior knowledge of this law makes of the page.
A Solution – Codeworks
Codeworks (our hosts) have quite a neat slide down bar, which gives you a little information, and the ability to view more specific information too. Their script gives you to capability to set or not set cookies in your other scripts very easily, and is available pretty cheap on code canyon. It also has a Europe only option, meaning it’ll only display to european visitors.
And another! Cookie Control
This is another good example of a script you can configure fairly easily for your own site. It’s a neat looking thing, and has a lot of options if you want to delve further in.
So here we are, it’s a reality (somehow). Please feel free to share any examples you’ve seen that you think are worthy of noting, we’ll be releasing our own solution quite soon, but as with the rest of the industry, it’s something to keep a keen eye on…
Update
In a bizarre and also somewhat relieving last minute twist, the ICO has revised guidelines at the 11th hour. Shambles is a word which comes to mind. Why they left it right until the last minute is the first question which comes to mind. While we re-group on this, here’s a good summing up of the way we feel.
MODx Professional Partner
Once again a big chunk of time passes by without a blog update. I really have to fix that. Things have been busy behind the scenes here, and a few things are changing, I’m really excited about 2012 and the new projects and collaborations it’s bringing with it. There’s also a new website slowly brewing away….
I’m also pleased to say that Toasted Digital is now an official MODx professional partner. It’s nice to finally become a part of the program after years of using the CMS and building countless sites using it. It’s great to see how it’s grown in that time, and where it’s heading.
New Launch : Films & Music LLP
Things have been quiet on the blog front recently, but that’s in partly due to how busy it’s been on the work side of things here at Toasted Digital. There’s been no shortage of great projects with agencies and freelancers a like.
The latest TD driven project is for a new company called Films & Music, who are doing creative business development for various levels within the music industry. With some help from Pixsaul on the MODx backend, we’ve illustrated, designed and built them a new web presence.
Facebook Apps Require SSL From 1st of Oct
If you’re into Facebook app development, it’s worth noting that Facebook appear to be going ahead with making it mandatory to serve your Canvas and Page Tab content from a secure connection from the 1st of October 2011. The Facebook blog very briefly mentions that you’ll need to obtain an SSL certificate to use these features. This’ll mean app owners will need to purchase a certificate to serve their content via https.
Summer News
It’s been a little while since I updated the blog, I do have some new tutorials and articles in the works, but it’s been a very busy summer at Toasted Digital.
I’ve been working for and with some really great people, including v-on, working on the classy Krailler converting their site to MODx Revolution, and Designing John Bassam‘s online presence. Krailler are doing some really big things in their London workshops, really excited to see how that progresses.
Interior Designer John Bassam
Next, Toasted Digital has taken on creating the full online identity for Wales based Klazar Marketing, expect an illustrated design work for that very soon.
Finally, I’ve been working with Pixillion on an exciting new project, still stamped top secret, for the Royal Geographical Society. All will be revealed on that soon…
On top of this a big new Toasted Digital experimental project (more details soon) and illustration/HTML5 app work here and there, and that’s a very busy summer! I’m always on the look out for interesting new projects as well, if you have something you’d like to chat about, get in touch. I also have a great network of freelancers always hungry for exciting new work.
MODx Evolution to Revolution Tag Converter
I’ve been doing a few MODx Evolution to Revolution conversions recently, and developed a simple jQuery script to handle converting the Evolution template tags to the new Revolution syntax. It’s pretty basic, but it does the job, so I thought I’d share with the community. Hopefully in the future there will be an easy way to upgrade, but in the meantime little tools like this should help a little 
Check it out
Confusion of the EU Cookie Law
I’ve recently written an article on HTML5′s Local Storage. The technology gives users a new level of ease through being capable of such things as remembering half completed forms for completion whenever they like. However, from the 26th of May 2011, this action is now illegal in the UK without the user’s prior consent.
The law, which comes from the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive will apply to all websites within the EU. It affects all websites which store ‘non-essential’ cookies. So while we have the technology to remove extra hassle for users, as developers we’re now required to implement an extra consent handler (such as a popup) in order to use it.
The ICO website now has a slide which asks the user to accept cookies. Does the average internet user even know what a cookie is?
What does this mean? From what most people seem to understand, (and I use the word understand fairly loosely, as no one seems to completely understand this law, even the ICO are vague), this will basically make for instance, any website that uses google analytics, illegal. It’d also make remembering users’ preferences illegal without consent, which potentially means if a user chose not to grant permission, we can’t even remember that choice, creating a rather laborious cycle.
The law covers anything which stores information on a user’s computer, so HTML5 Local Storage would be inclusive of this despite being a similar technology, rather than a cookie.
From the ICO guidelines, it seems at least this would not affect ‘strictly necessary’ cookie data, for instance an “add to basket” action on an online shop.
We’ve been given a 1 year grace period to implement changes to our websites, but the general consensus is of being fairly uncertain exactly how to do this. From the point of view of a developer, the EU have been incredibly narrow-minded with their view of how cookies are used, and are at least in my opinion, massively hindering the progression of what we’re trying to achieve with making the online user experience as simple and easy to use as possible.
For a good break down and explanation of the law head over to Silktide or have a look at their very good video below.