A brief round up of what I did this year, mainly for myself but you can read it if you want. Read the rest of this entry »
Goodbye 2014
December 9th, 2014Nigel Slater’s chickpea and chorizo stew
November 25th, 2014One of my favourite stews to make and it’s no longer on his website, fortunately I’d copied it and here it is mainly so I can read it when I need to. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s meet in the middle
November 7th, 2014I give to you my most recent side-project: Let’s meet in the middle.
It’s a simple web app to quickly and easily find a place to meet half-way between two locations. If you’re meeting a friend after work for a beer, or a client for a coffee, you can enter your location, their location and the method of transport and see places you could meet! Read the rest of this entry »
Why don’t you use Bootstrap?
October 8th, 2014Context: I work for Forward Partners which is a catalyst for ecommerce startups. We provide a unique combination of funding and help from our hands-on experts – product, design, marketing, front and back-end development, talent and fundraising. I work predominantly with idea-stage businesses until they have achieved enough growth to start hiring their own team.
Start-ups often use ready-made frameworks and tools in order to get an idea from concept to production in the quickest and most efficient way they can, such as Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Bootstrap. I’ll be explaining why I choose not to use Bootstrap when creating websites for our early/idea-stage businesses. Read the rest of this entry »
Content equal to browser height & centered
October 3rd, 201415 October 2014: updated to include feedback from comments.
A current design pattern on some scroll-hijacking sites is to have each section as tall as the browser window so you see that content without distraction before moving onto the next.
This is a demo of content equal to browser height using CSS with a fall-back coffeescript solution for browsers that don’t understand css transforms. It is also responds to any adjustment in height and width of the browser window. Read the rest of this entry »
Correct use of tabindex
September 29th, 2014Definition of tabindex from w3.org:
This attribute specifies the position of the current element in the tabbing order for the current document. The tabbing order defines the order in which elements will receive focus when navigated by the user via the keyboard.
In general you shouldn’t need to explicitly set the tabindex of an element on a page, however there are a few exceptions to this Read the rest of this entry »
Accessible HTML video as a background
September 23rd, 2014Today I got a comment on Autoplay is bad for all users which asked:
So why does this high-traffic site designed by a former top-Google UX designer use it?
The comment has linked to a page which has video as a background element playing underneath the introduction text and call to action button, the images are moving but there is no sound on page load. At times this apparently important information is completely invisible.
Using video as a background is on the increase so it’s important to know how to make it accessible for everyone. Read the rest of this entry »
Old web standards vs. new best practices
September 22nd, 2014My professional life as a front-end developer started just before the Web Standards Project, everyone was working to make sure style was separated from content. It was drummed into me and I drummed it into you for many years, so it’s been difficult to forget. Read the rest of this entry »
Autoprefixer – the write once works everywhere Gem
September 19th, 2014Are you bored of looking up which vendor-prefixes are still required for a particular rule on a particular day, or you want to remove the bloat that a catch-all mixin gives you? Then read on. Read the rest of this entry »
Five ways with responsive tables
June 16th, 2014Recently I was uninspired by Bootstrap’s cop-out for responsive tables where they just add horizontal scrollbars for widths under 768px.
I’d come across a few ideas in the past and now I’m exploring them to give pros and cons for each solution. Read the rest of this entry »
Five front-end links for Friday
June 13th, 2014A few links I found interesting this week. Read the rest of this entry »
Highlight dates from selection to hover position
May 13th, 2014This would be useful on a calendar when selecting a range between two dates.
Recruiter email fails
May 9th, 2014I get a LOT of email from recruiters, this is a collection of the strangest:
Hedging their bets:
“We may or may not have spoken in the recent past.”