Underlining text can be great for highlighting or drawing attention to certain words or phrases, but on a website, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could animate that underline? If you hover over my site menu above, you’ll see that each menu item has an animated underline hover status.

To create this effect is fairly easy. We can create this effect without any 

, but all of my styling will be in SCSS. If you don’t want to use SCSS, then view the demo below in CodePen and you’ll be able to toggle between CSS and SCSS.

Firstly, we are going to create our list of items to animate. We are going to be using an unordered list. You can use whatever you want.

HTML

Animated underline hover status using CSS

The default checkbox supplied by most browsers is not that visually appealing. Although you can increase, or decrease the size, there is very little you can do with it in terms of styling.

So, what do you do should you wish to have something a little more stylish? Let me show you how to create a replacement checkbox to add flair to your mundane forms.

The answer is to create your own display. What we’ll do in this example is essentially link up a label to the checkbox, hide the checkbox so that we can use its functionality, and display a replacement using pseudo-elements. This will all be done in pure HTML and CSS.

The first thing we need to do is create our display, which is very basic.

Replacement checkbox with animation

Have you ever needed to create a bunch of random file names to test something like 

? Well, recently I did, and I didn’t have a collection of files to hand that would test the regular expression in the way I required.

So what do programmers do when they have a need? They fill a need, to paraphrase from the animated film 

. We are going to write a script that creates a chosen number of random file names. We’ll allow it to select from an approved list of extensions, and a collection of words to make it look like actual file names.

This creates file names that will realistically match the ones that will appear in a live environment. Having better data, to begin with, will improve your code because it will allow you to deal with unexpected file names that you might not have tested normally. This will allow you to put code to handle these issues at dev time is always better than just before making a project live.

Create realistic random file names

 error that I was getting from my preprocessor tools.

If you happen to create you own script for WordPress, either Plugin, or Theme, you may also use preprocessor tools to build those scripts.

During one recent build, I happened to be running 

 to verify the quality of the Javascript that I was writing.

I recently came across a problem where JShint refused to validate perfectly valid script. The problem seemed to be that it wasn’t aware of a WordPress global JavaScript variable: 

Fixing ‘wp’ not defined using jshint

You may have noticed that on Android when viewing some websites, the address bar changes from the default Gray to a colour matching the theme of the website.

This is actually a very easy change to make on your website. It also can add that extra bit of style and presence to your website, while also making it stand out.

, you need to get the Hex value of the colour you will be using. Then add the following line to the 

Change Chrome Address Bar Colour on Android

If you read my previous post, in which I 

, then you’ll need ways of filling it with books. This list doesn’t include the obvious, because, well, they’re obvious. This will try and help you find other sources of books. Or covert other reading material to Kindle book format.

There are many ways to do this and probably depends on the type of books that you want to read. I have a need for programming books at the moment, so most of mine start in the form of Web Pages and PDFs. Luckily, there are ways in which you can get readable versions of these onto your Kindle.

There are two ways to get files onto the Kindle, you can either download them via the Store over the WiFi, or you can copy them across the same way you did the updates. Link up to the PC via USB, and drag and drop into the Documents Folder. It really is that simple. You might want to check what 

Get all the kindle books

A Kindle is a marvellous piece of tech, something that only now am I getting into. Admittedly, very late in the game.

But you don’t need to go out and spend lots of money on something new. You can pick up a 7-8-year-old one in very good condition for about £30 – £50 on eBay or similar websites.

OK, a little background information. I love reading. I don’t do it as much as I should, or would like, but I find it relaxing and hopefully provides with me some sort of self-improvement.

This year, I set myself the challenge to read as many books as I can. Starting towards the end of last year I managed to get a few books in, but have set myself the goal of one book every month as a reasonable target.

Why you should dig out your old Kindle

I can’t be the only one who forgets what naming convention I should be using between different languages. Especially as there are variations between each one.

So, just so that I could see how many I could cover, I thought it would be a great idea to make a list here, with a brief description of each type, and any varying names that come with them. Hopefully, writing them down and looking into each one myself would help it stick.

This isn’t a conclusive list. Not yet, at least. I’m not covering every obscure one. For now, it’s just a brief introduction to some of the most widely used naming conventions and some of the ones that I use on a regular basis.

Naming conventions aren’t just used to name variables in programming languages either, they can be used in file names, folders and even company names. Like 

A brief list of programming naming conventions

 be easy, but sometimes, it can get stuck in use, or stubborn.

 from my machine as it was no longer something that I was using, and one of my services refused to be removed.

The reason for this was that I was starting to run everything from portable installations instead, but I digress.

I ran into a problem while uninstalling XAMP, as I had seemingly removed all remnants of XAMP, yet MySQL seemed to remain.

Bringing up the Task Manager and viewing the services tab, I could see that the one I wanted to remove name was 

Removing unwanted Windows Service

Sometimes, after updating or installing Package Control in Sublime, the install option seems to be missing.

Make sure it is not listed under ignored packages within your User Settings.

My programming musings that nobody else reads