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 […]
Secret tip: retrieve Twitter profile images without using the api
A common problem when creating sites which use the Twitter API is how to store and display user profile images. When you query the API the resulting user data gives you the URL of the user profile image. However this image URL is not a permalink. If the user changes their profile image the image […]
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
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 […]
Custom Styles for Select Inputs
It’s long been a problem for developers that the Select (or dropdown) input doesn’t allow you many options for customising their look and feel. You shouldn’t be trying to style selects! When you search for help on this matter, you often come across people arguing that select inputs get their style from whatever browser you […]
Building a Responsive Design: Top Tips
Coding HTML at the cutting edge, make use of HTML5 and CSS3 to create fully responsive layouts that look great on screens of all sizes.
Preventing Contact Form Spam
This is a problem which comes up time and time again. Every time you add a contact form to a website, you open yourself up to spam attacks. Solving this problem involves striking the right balance between making life easy for the person filling in the form, and the person receiving the spam at the […]
Target _blank is out the window
Clients will often ask me to target external site links to open in a new window. Of course the correct answer is “No, it’s not up to a site to determine how a link should work, the user can decide that when browsing.” Not only is it bad practice but the target=”_blank” tag has been […]
10 Easy SEO Wins
Optimising your site for search engines is an important part of the development process and there are dozens of ways of making sure your content stands out in the rankings. Here are my top tips that take very little implementation and will imminently improve your visibility in search. If you’re interested in getting a more […]
YouTube Data Class
This is a class I’ve used several times and it demonstrates some of the useful data endpoints offered by YouTube. Often I will have to ask users or a web service for YouTube videos, and these may come in the form of share URLs, embed code or video URLs. This class allows you to extract […]