Had the idea to make some loading spinners using CSS a couple of months ago. Inevitably the internet got there first, and there are already many excellent examples out there, including one from Codepen‘s “Top 100 Pens of the Year” no less – so yeah, not a new idea. However, there was one thing IContinue Reading
Task management systems usually come with severity and priority options, however I’ve rarely seen clear, up front definitions of how they should be used. There’s myriad ways of course, but here I’m going to share a simple one I’ve used in a couple of my former placements, just as a straw man. Severity Severity canContinue Reading
Here’s a snippet I wrote the other day that overlays the page with a typographical/layout grid when activated. Others exist, but very few, and not with the functionality I wanted, so there’s room for another. I made it into a jQuery plugin simply to make it clear it’s dependent on jQuery: It’s not suitable forContinue Reading
In the spirit of a brand new month of April, I’d like to launch my latest personal project. It’s an open-source, online, multi-player, real-time, cloud-based, gaming platform, with the age-old classic ‘Battleships’ as the first release. You’d be a fool not to try it out: Play Battleships GS now!. How to play Take a copyContinue Reading
As anyone who’s used it knows, the standard JS Twitter Widget document.write-s itself into the page by default. This obviously sucks because a) you have to have the JS for it mixed up in your content, which in turn means b) if it hangs for some reason, all content after the widget is held up.Continue Reading
There was a mini debate among friends on Twitter recently about using separate class names for JavaScript. For example <div class=”tab iTab”>; with your CSS attached to “.tab” and your JS attached to “.iTab”. Coincidentally this is something I started doing a few projects ago, thinking separation good / overloading bad, and I have toContinue Reading
It’s reasonably well known that Fireworks can create alpha-transparent 8-bit png files (so can various other widgets but curiously, still not Firework’s celebrity sibling, Photoshop). That’s an awesome trick, because they’re generally about a third of the size of 32-bit – however they are limited to 256 colours, which won’t work for CSS-spriting most designs.Continue Reading
Just a quickie: The other day I had to add a backing track to a game. Stack Overflow lead me to the excellent SoundManager2 library, which features an extensive API and nifty HTML5 with Flash fallback behind the scenes to give maximum platform coverage & performance. The only problem I had was finding an exampleContinue Reading
Ever had to redo a site design without access to the files? Sounds ridiculous I know, however that’s exactly what I had to do recently when applying the Starbucks rebrand and associated redesign to their non-US sites (e.g. Russia, Canada) and investor relations site. The sites were hosted by Starbucks and build by a thirdContinue Reading
From the archives of jobs gone by, I thought this little known doc might be of interest: The matrix of factors to be considered in deprecating browsers from the BBC’s browser support standard. Alongside the BBC website visitor stats this chart (from the appendix of the BBC’s browser support standard) aims to provide a clearContinue Reading