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Parting is such sweet sorrow

Employee number one, Anthony Short is leaving us for bigger and better things.

Newism on the hunt for a web designer / developer. Is that you?

expressionengine-addons.com is now ee-garage.com

It's been a rocky 6 months for our ExpressionEngine addons site but we've settled on a new name with new addons & branding to follow.

All your projects are belong to Adam

Newism welcomes Adam O'Brien as our new Project Manager.

Designing for Amnesty International

Newism have recently redesigned an email template for Amnesty International Australia to help them better communicate their message of human rights.

Newism gains yet another rock(abilly) star

We’re totes stoked to announce that the impressively pompadoured local web extraordinaire Chris Buttery has joined the incredibly good-looking team at Newism.

Newism seeking mid-level php developer and/or recent graduate

Newism is excited to announce that we're in need of a mid-level php developer and/or recent graduate. The position will be full-time at our Newcastle office and the successful candidate will be able to start immediately.

“Newcastle web developers take on the world.”

The tiny number of you who aren't tuned into ABC Radio Newcastle missed out on Newism's first ever interview recently.

The Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation

An epic summary of one of our most rewarding projects to date.

nib Health Care iPhone App

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Entry Previews with NSM Live Look

We've just updated your favourite entry preview addon NSM Live Look (formerly LG Live Look) for Expression Engine 2.0. 

Look Hear - March 2010

In March, I'm going to be doing a little talk about our web design process here at Newism. There are very few web designers at this event, so I'm taking the chance to give other people in the industry some insight into what we do and how we do it.

A Real-World Case Study on HTML5

There's a lot of talk on the web lately about HTML 5, but not many real-world case studies about its implementation. We're talking about it, but it seems few people are actually doing it. From a business point of view this is completely understandable - it's risky. Being dependent on Javascript is the one roadblock stopping most people from implementing it everywhere.

HowTo: Enable ExpressionEngine 2 custom field settings

Planning on developing ExpressionEngine 2 custom fields which have their own custom settings — then this quick post is for you.

NSM TinyMCE - ExpressionEngine 2 WYSIWYG custom field

Unless you've been hiding under a rock you probably know that EllisLab have released a public beta of ExpressionEngine 2. As a result I've been receiving constant requests to port my most popular ExpressionEngine modules, plugins and extensions to EE2. So far a large number of those request have been for LG TinyMCE, my TinyMCE WYSIWYG custom field.

My 2009 EE wrap up, AcademEE Awards and EE2 Roadmap

Newism welcomes Tony Arnold as our newest team member

We’ve been keeping this under our hats until we finished with the formalities, but it’s with great excitement that we can finally announce that -ex Newcastle Uni ‘Senior Analyst Programmer’, Tony Arnold, will be joining our crack team of elite nerds.

Michael Jordan’s greatest Gatorade moment? Vote with Wildfire on Facebook.

Working closely with Wildfire, we implemented a brand new voting based promotion for Gatorade and it launched today!

It wasn't easy but the results speak for themselves (over 500 votes in the first couple of minutes). The promotion even includes a tasty embedded Flash video in the header, which we didn't think was even possible in a Wildfire app, but it gives a very, very cool effect — and I'm not even a fan of Flash.

Britney Spears Facebook Promotion

Fixoutlook.org - Using Twitter to petition Microsoft

A little over a week ago our friends at Campaign Monitor asked us to help them use Twitter to send a message to Microsoft about their decision to use the Word rendering engine in Outlook 2010. The result was http://fixoutlook.org and an unprecedented 20,000 strong online movement that took both us and Microsoft by surprise.

Building Campaign Monitor update and work in-progress

Getting the Building Campaign Monitor blog series out the door is a priority for us, but we've been rather busy of late. Here's how we've been spending our days (and nights).

Espresso - A sugar sweet web development experience

In case you haven’t heard yet, or don’t use Twitter, Espresso by MacRabbit was released a couple of days ago. To describe Espresso is rather easy - imagine all the good parts about Coda (The all-in-one solution and the nice interface), and all the good parts about TextMate (awesome text editing capabilities, snippets, and most of all, expandability), and you’ve got Espresso.

I’ve been working with Espresso since the private beta, and it’s come a long way. I won’t do a complete feature breakdown and a comparison with its competitors, I’ll just go through some of my favourite features and explain why it’s worth taking a look at.

Introducing Publish Plus - Collaborative workflow for ExpressionEngine

For the last 6 months we’ve been developing a new ExpressionEngine extension called Publish Plus which greatly improves ExpressionEngine’s standard publishing workflow.

Publish Plus adds entry drafts, live in-template previews, workflow state, revision notes, advanced email notifications and then some to ExpressionEngine.

Building Campaign Monitor Part 3 - Design Process

Since the last two posts in the 'Building Campaign Monitor' series were so incredibly dull technical, we thought we'd lighten things up a bit and go for some pretty pictures instead :)

Building Campaign Monitor Part 2 - ExpressionEngine Template Groups

Templates are the presentation layer for ExpressionEngine sites. All of the front-end code, including XHTML and ExpressionEngine tags go in a template, and all of those templates, go in a template group (which is a kind of virtual folder). Template groups are the focus of this post, and we'll cover individual templates in the next one (that's if I've not been executed for pun-crimes against humanity in the meantime).

Building Campaign Monitor Part I - ExpressionEngine Weblogs

The easiest way to explain how we set up the weblogs for the Campaign Monitor site is to let everyone login to the back-end and have a look around - just promise not to delete anything. You can login with username: 'admin' and password: 'asif'. The second easiest way is to write a detailed overview (see below).

Building Campaign Monitor

Newism recently launched the new Campaign Monitor website - which so far is our biggest and most advanced project to date. Along the way we learned some fantastic things about building and deploying a major site, and rather than keep all of this amazing new learning to ourselves we've decided to share it via a multi-part blog series. Huzzah!

LG Live Look 1.0.2 Released

A sneak peek of version 1.0.2 of LG Live Look is now available from our repository on GitHub. I'll update the official download and documentation very soon but in the mean time you can download the GitHub hosted zip version and take the extension for a spin! The official download and documentation has now been updated!

Continue reading for new features, bug fixes and upgrading instructions

The New Campaign Monitor

Over the past three months, Newism have had the privilege of building not only the epic new Campaign Monitor website, but also a teaser site at http://www.thenewcampaignmonitor.com/. Campaign Monitor (if you are one of the twelve people who haven't heard of it) is a world-class email marketing product from Australian company, Freshview.

Are Pinvoke Fugue icons the new FAMFAMFAM?

We still love FAMFAMFAM icons, they are instantly recognisable and communicate their purpose clearly, but as they say a change is good as a holiday and we're booked on a flight to Pinvoke.com.

‘Sixtyone’ - The Newcastle University Student Design Exhibition

The exhibition is open from 21st November - 5th December and is totally free. It's being held at the University of Newcastle in the Design Building. The opening night, Friday 21st November, will be a special event, and is open to the public as well.

Nominate http://leevigraham.com in the Mashable Open Web Awards “Blog Plugins” category

Over the last 12 months I have published over 20+ ExpressionEngine extensions, modules and plugins with the majority gifted back to the ExpressionEngine community under a Creative Commons license. As a result there has been some great feedback and support from everyone which I appreciate greatly.

I've never asked for anything in return (apart from the odd donation here and there) but that is all about to change! Don't panic, it won't cost you a cent and will take less time that it took to write this post (and a great deal less time that it took to write the ExpressionEngine add-ons).

Newism accepted into the ExpressionEngine Pro Network

Leevi and I are very happy to announce that Newism has recently been accepted into the ExpressionEngine Pro Network. This means a great deal to us, as we have been advocates of EllisLab's brilliant publishing platform for a long time, and getting our site out the door meant we finally met the requirements for Pro Network entry.

ExpressionEngine weblog entry previews with LG Live Look

This tutorial will show you how to setup your ExpressionEngine templates to accommodate previewing of unpublished weblog entries inside the publish/edit form using LG Live Look.

LG Live Look is an ExpressionEngine extension that adds a new 'Live Look' tab to the publish/edit form in the control panel. The tab contains a preview of the last saved version of an entry, which can quickly be updated using the 'quick save' button.

LG Live Look also adds a link to the edit entries table for each entry row. The source of the tab content and the target of the link can be easily customised in the extension settings using a subset of standard {ee} template tag variables (a full list can be found in the documentation).

Webqem and Red Square merge

Webqem and Red Square have played an integral role in Newism's existence. I'd like to say thanks.

Personally, this is fantastic news for me, as Webqem was where I learned everything about the web, and Red Square was one of the main companies that supported me in my early days of freelancing.

BigTarget.js - Increase the size of click targets and get more call-to-action conversions

Say goodbye to boring 'Read More...' links by turning your entire content block into a clickable target!

bigTarget.js is a small jQuery plugin that takes a single anchor and adds an onclick event to it's selected parent.

Using URL rewrites to make ExpressionEngine, Campaign Monitor & Google Analytics play nice

There are some .htaccess URL rewrite issues when tracking Campaign Monitor email campaigns using Google Analytics. The issues can be resolved by adding a simple rewrite before a tweaked remove index.php rule. In this post we present a step by step solution.

Bits & Pixels is on again this weekend!

Bits & Pixels is a social get-together for web designers and developers based in Newcastle and the Central Coast of New South Wales Australia. We meet up at a particular venue and just hang out for a few hours, chatting about life, work and everything in between.

It's a friendly and casual event, so don't expect anything too serious. It gives you a chance to get away from the computer, network with people in the industry and talk about the latest news, technology and everything else about the industries we work in.

Hi, from Anthony!

Hi there, my fellow web people. My name is Anthony Short, and I'm the junior web designer and developer here at Newism.

Yes, that means my daily duties can include brewing coffee and fetching the paper - but when I’m not doing that, I’m designing and developing for the web. Fortunately, I’m currently the only employee with the official title of “Web Designer / Developer”, so I still hold that over the higher-ups, and it makes me feel just a little bit special.

10 questions to ask when looking for a professional web designer or developer

As part of Newism’s “Building a Better Website” presentation at the Rapid Solutions insurance conference, we provided the attendees with a list of 10 questions to ask web designers and developers, before they considered them for a project.

This list is in no way exhaustive, but it should definitely give small business owners a good indication of the professionalism of your potential new developer.

If you can manage to hire these guys, do it now!

“Newism is one of those rare web development agencies that truly understands the web. They recently took us through a major redesign with some complex ExpressionEngine integration and the results have been fantastic. I can’t recommend them enough.”

David Greiner – Founder, Freshview (creators of Campaign Monitor).

First day visitor stats for newism.com.au

Some simple website stats for day 1 of newism.com.au

Hello world - Part I

The virtual plumbers have fixed their leaky tap. After what seemed like was a millenium, the Newism site would like to say hi.

Why Part 1? Simply because this is a soft launch of our new website, available to a lucky few including our friends, colleagues and family. We know it's not 100% complete but it's coming along nicely, and with a bit more and polish it should be ready for general public consumption in the very near future. Until then, here's the Newism story so far, where we currently stand, and an insight of what we are planning for the future.

LG .htaccess Generator - Removing index.php from your ExpressionEngine site

One constant frustration I see new and experienced users expressing in the ExpressionEngine forums expressing is how do they easily remove the index.php from their ExpressionEngine site.

The first point of call is usually "Remove index.php From Urls" documentation in the ExpressionEngine Wiki which lists three main methods and their caveats. The three methods listed in the wiki are:

  1. Include List Method
  2. Exclude List Method
  3. File and Directory Check Method

Each method has their good and bad points which are listed after the jump.

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