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 […]

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 […]

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.

Playing around with HTML5

Posted by on Aug 24, 2014 in Code Chat | No Comments
Playing around with HTML5

I’ve spent a little time recently trying out some newer html5 features as well as Facebook Integration. Cheers! I was browsing through my Facebook photos recently and the shots of friends enjoying drinks on a night out reminded me of the opening credits from Cheers. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if you could create […]

CSS specificity and point scoring

Posted by on Mar 1, 2014 in Code Chat | No Comments
CSS specificity and point scoring

We all know about how CSS works right? Styles are inherited and cascade through the DOM to child elements. We know that CSS rules referring to element IDs have a greater weight than classes and inline styles trump them again. But how exactly does the browser work out which styles should win out when multiple […]

WordPress Optimisation Checklist

Posted by on May 11, 2013 in Code Chat, WordPress | No Comments
WordPress Optimisation Checklist

WordPress is a framework which is great for rapid development because it is so quick and easy to set up. Check out the famous WordPress 5 minute install. However, if you want to really make sure that your installation is working as efficiently and securely as possible, there are a few extra tweaks I tend […]