Building animated gifs

Posted by on Mar 17, 2017 in Code Chat | No Comments
Building animated gifs

I’ve recently spent some time on a project that involved generating and sharing some animated gifs and I thought I’d share some insights. Technologies The best tool I found for generating animated gifs is Imagemagick. It’s a well established tool with a command line version and a PHP library that allows you to programmatically create […]

Working with Facebook Live

Posted by on Dec 19, 2016 in Code Chat | No Comments
Working with Facebook Live

I’ve spent some time recently working with the Facebook Live API and since this is a fairly new service which is being heavily promoted I thought it might be useful to share my experiences with it. The aim was to build a tool that would pop up a message on the website when a channel […]

Maintaining aspect ratio with CSS

Posted by on Sep 19, 2016 in Code Chat | No Comments
Maintaining aspect ratio with CSS

There are occasion when you don’t want the size of a box to flow with the page content. For example, when you’re building a page of tiled content, you may want to make sure all of the tiles are the same size, but you can’t fix the height and width because the size must be […]

GoPro hack – create a cheap pan-lapse rig

Posted by on Feb 5, 2016 in Tutorial | No Comments
GoPro hack – create a cheap pan-lapse rig

Here’s a quick hack I put together which allows me to take time lapse footage with my GoPro which slowly pans around throughout the sequence. This type of effect is often used in wildlife documentaries to capture plants or weather over an extended period in a dynamic shot. You can spend thousands on pro kit, […]

Create ASCII art with Facebook

Posted by on Feb 1, 2016 in Code Chat | No Comments
Create ASCII art with Facebook

It’s been discovered that Facebook have a cool secret feature where it will create ASCII art from any of your public photos. This only works with public photos, so a good example to try this with is your profile picture as these photos are always public. Browse to your photo albums, look in your “Profile […]

Creating a custom sharing service

Posted by on Jan 15, 2016 in Code Chat, JavaScript | No Comments
Creating a custom sharing service

This is possibly an example of a pun which has gotten out of hand. It began when I was setting up some sharing buttons on a blog using the service sharethis.com. I couldn’t help thinking how funny it would be to have a similar service called “Cher This” which somehow allowed you to share a […]

A collection of tasty projects

Posted by on Nov 16, 2015 in PHP, Portfolio, Responsive Design, WordPress | No Comments
A collection of tasty projects

I’ve spent a year or so working for the in-house team at Jamie Oliver and I wanted to highlight some of the amazing projects I’ve been able to work on. Learn more about these and other projects I’ve worked on recently in my portfolio.

Fixing blurry background images in Chrome

Posted by on Oct 17, 2015 in Code Chat | No Comments
Fixing blurry background images in Chrome

I recently came across an interesting issue whilst using background-image:cover to fill and crop an image to a specific size within a div. This works well and looks great in most browsers, but in Chrome, on certain types of images, if you look really carefully you can see a slight blurring of some of the […]

My dev tools

Posted by on Apr 16, 2015 in Code Chat | No Comments
My dev tools

Here are a few of my favourite every-day dev tools that make life easier.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Posted by on Jan 16, 2015 in Flash | No Comments
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

I’ve been looking back at some of the older Flash projects I’ve done. This is a game I’ve always liked – it was fun to make and really successful. I developed this as part of a suite of quizzes for Kenton School’s intranet. The full embedded version allowed teachers to track the high scores in […]