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I’ve now moved from a Tumblr blog to my own hosted solution. Find me now at www.jackfranklin.co.uk/blog.

The difference between the two operators is a subtle but very important one. Hopefully this post clears it up.

This is something which I used to struggle with when I got into programming. The different between i++ and ++i. I would always use the wrong one. It’s actually pretty simple, but for me it took a real life example to figure it out. So I’ve created one today in the hope at least 1 person will benefit. It’s written in JavaScript, but ++i and i++ work the same in pretty much all “mainstream” languages I’ve come across. 

Essentially, ++i pre-increments. That is, it increments i before using it. And i++ is a post-increment, i is used and then incremented. If you run the code below, which is a small snippet I threw together on JSFiddle.net, it should make sense: http://jsfiddle.net/4kVRQ/2/

At first i starts as 0, and then we perform ++i. This increments i to 1, before outputting it onto the page. We then perform i++. This outputs i (which is still 1) and then increments it by 1. This gives us our final answer of 2.

And of course, i— & —i work in exactly the same way, just decrementing instead of incrementing.

If you follow me on Twitter you may well know most of this but if not then you wont. Essentially whilst at Uni I planned to do the odd client project when I felt like it, believing stupidly that I would be able to support myself on that and my loan and a small bit of support from my parents.

Whilst I can just about, it does not leave me much free-will in terms of spending - and whilst I’m not a complete party-animal I do like to go out and enjoy myself from time to time. Recently I’ve had a few enquiries from various people about my rates and when I’m available.

Freelancing is something I am definitely considering doing once I graduate, and also over my 4 month summer period, when I aim to save up lots of money working full time, either at a local agency or maybe freelance. 

So I’ve decided I’m going to throw myself in whilst at Uni - and have figured out I can dedicate around 10-15 hours per week on freelance work.

And this is where you come in. I have a vague idea of what I need to do but nothing more than that - I’m talking about invoicing, what should I charge, how should I go about scheduling work, etc, etc. I know I follow a lot of people who are freelancers and some who have taken the plunge recently, but I’m all ears. Any advice is much appreciated, so if you hit me up with a comment I’d love it, or throw an email to jack [AT] jackfranklin [DOT] co [DOT] uk.

Thanks.

I have a love hate relationship with RSS. With Twitter so popular these days, I tend to pick up all my news items from that. Anything I want to read right away I do. I’ll then either bookmark it to Delicious for reference later, or just close and that’s it. If I come across an article I want to read but for whatever reason can’t at that exact moment, I send it to Instapaper. Once read on Instapaper, if it’s good I’ll star it and then bookmark it if I feel it needs to, or I’ll just delete them.

With the purchase of a Kindle, this has worked exceptionally well for me. Instapaper lets you download your items to Kindle, so I’ve been doing that and reading when I can, before logging in to Instapaper and organising everything. (PS - if Instapaper could add a ‘Save to Delicious’ button, I would love it). 

I always used to use RSS though and decided that I should check it out again. I’m told that ‘Reeder’, the insanely popular iPhone & iPad RSS app is now going to be released for Mac OS X in the future, something I’m very much looking forward to. Until then, I’ll stick to Google Reader - although I’m going to scout around for some apps. I logged in and had over 1000 new items from 157 different sources on my Google Reader account.

So what did I do?

I deleted every single feed.

Blank canvas, new leaf, etc.

So I’m going to continue going as I do, using Twitter, but then if a website continuously pops up during this process, say 5+ times in a relatively short space of time (2/3 weeks perhaps), then it’s worthy of a place in my RSS. But I’m going to be ruthless. I’m tired of how I used to do things - log in, 300 unread items, sort them all out. I used to have around 300 unread per day before I cut my sources down to 150. Now I want just the select few. The best of the best of the best.

It may not be an iPhone 4. It may well be 2nd hand and a couple of years old. But it’s my first iPhone.

And I love it.

I got published on other’s blogs the other day so I thought I’d post them here in case you missed them:

Show me your Dock Series! Part 32 

Grace was looking for some people to take part and I did! Gain an insight into my work flow with a detailed look at my dock. Thanks Grace!

An Interview with Jack Franklin

Dan Davies was looking for people to interview so I volunteered (anything for 5 minutes of fame!). This one was pretty light hearted, I’ll admit! Thanks Dan :)

This was all inspired about 2-3 weeks ago when someone I follow on twitter posted something along the lines of

“Wow…I’m now being followed by [famous_person_here]…must tweet good stuff”

I’ve nothing against the person who said this (and if you know who you are, I haven’t stopped following you or anything) but it wound me up slightly. I’ve blogged about this before. One of my biggest peeves:

Guides on how to Tweet

I HATE these things! I read one once that said “Don’t tweet about what you’re doing. No one cares”. It also contained lots of tips…keep tweets short so people can retweet them, don’t swear because it might put people off. Who actually cares?

I’m going to be myself on Twitter. I make no apologies for this and neither should you. Be yourself. If people like you or can relate to your interests (EG: web “stuff”)  then they will follow you. If they don’t like your habits, they wont follow you. But you probably don’t want them following you anyway. If they find the occasional expletive inside a tweet and don’t like it, then it’s their loss. They wont follow you. But you shouldn’t care.

I’m not about to be someone I’m not in an attempt to gain 100000 extra followers.

And I’d like to think you’re not going to either.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of jQuery work recently and one thing that got me recently was random flickering. I would make an element fade in and out on hover, but when that element was faded in and I hovered over it, it would fade in and out really quickly. This had me baffled for a while. On a very basic level, the code looked something like this (link to JSBin)

If you hover over the red box, you will see a paragraph appear. Now, if you put your mouse on that paragraph, you’ll see the flickering problem.

Why is this?

It’s because you are showing/hiding an element when its sibling is hovered over. Make it appear when the parent is hovered, and no problems.

Hope this helps!