A brief round up of what I did this year, mainly for myself but you can read it if you want. (more…)
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Goodbye 2014
Tuesday, December 9th, 2014Nigel Slater’s chickpea and chorizo stew
Tuesday, 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. (more…)
Let’s meet in the middle
Friday, 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! (more…)
Why don’t you use Bootstrap?
Wednesday, 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. (more…)
Content equal to browser height & centered
Friday, 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. (more…)
Correct use of tabindex
Monday, 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 (more…)
Accessible HTML video as a background
Tuesday, 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. (more…)
Old web standards vs. new best practices
Monday, 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. (more…)
Autoprefixer – the write once works everywhere Gem
Friday, 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. (more…)
Recruiter email fails
Friday, 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.”
Goodbye 2012
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012I wanted to do a round-up of things I’ve written in 2012, but quite pathetically that would give me a list of three, so I’ll add to that what I’ve been working on this year. (more…)
Why we should support users with no JavaScript
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011Why should we want to support users that, for whatever reason, have Javascript disabled? I had found it difficult to answer this question in a constructive way, whilst also being backed up by research. This post aims to give you some reasons why we should still be supporting users without Javascript. (more…)
Autoplay is bad for all users
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Translations: Belorussian and Polish
Autoplay is a bad idea not just for accessibility but for usability and general sanity while browsing. This article will explain what the problems are, where to find backup for arguments and what you can do if autoplay is a must have. (more…)