Blog

Getting more from git

This post is based on an internal workshop I delivered at a previous job, where we used a modified version of gitflow. This post will contain faint reflections of that strategy, and although I’d recommend reading up on gitflow it’s not necessary.

Skiplinks in Opera Mini

Usually when I build a navigation it is at the end of the source and a skiplink appears at the top of small viewports linking to it. I then enhance it using CSS and JavaScript so that most devices and browsers get something nicer—an off-canvas interaction perhaps.

Responsive images with WordPress Advanced Custom Fields

Advanced Custom Fields is an amazing (and free) WordPress plugin that turns it into a proper CMS and gives developers fine-grained control over how data entered by content administrators is handled and displayed. I love it.

The for loop in JavaScript

The for loop is most commonly used for iterating over an array and performing an action on each item. For example:

The case for accessible web design

This is a guest post by Toby Osbourn. Toby is one of the most talented and productive web developers I know and I was privileged to work with and learn from him for 6 months. He tweets a lot of interesting, thought-provoking and funny stuff too.

How to design a simple site if you’re a developer

An alternative title for this post is, “How I redesigned my blog without being able to design”.

I’m not saying it looks great, but it’s not terrible and at least one proper web designer said, “I like it”, so I’m going to write down how I did it.

Modern tooling

There’s a sentiment among web developers that seems to me to be more prevalent lately, a bit of a reaction against modern tools like CSS preprocessors, task runners and package managers. It’s pretty well summed up by two tweets:

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I'll be giving a talk on responsive images

On Thursday 9th October at 6.30pm I’ll be giving a talk on the new responsive images standards. It’s a free talk and will take place at Rumble Labs in Belfast, just round the corner from St. Anne’s Cathedral.

Responsive images

The <img> tag all started with this message and has been with us since HTML 2.0. In that time it hasn’t changed much at all, just put a path to an image in the src attribute and you have an image on the screen.

Progressively enhanced accessible tab UI

There’s a demo and code on github, but I wanted to do a quick post writing it up.