“Chain Letters” Flash game
I’ve been looking through some of the older Flash projects I built for Kenton School’s intranet and I couldn’t resist this one. Most people wouldn’t remember the TV quiz show Chain Letters from the early 90s featuring Dave Spikey, least of all the Pupils of a secondary school around 2006. However I reasoned this would […]
Make it snow! CSS3 animated snowflakes tutorial
The brief I was asked to add a festive touch across a range of client sites by adding a falling snow effect in the background of the pages. To do this in a stylish, un-obtrusive and efficient way was the challenge in hand. JS OR CSS3? The first big decision was whether to use javascript […]
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 […]
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 […]
HTML5 Canvas Animations – Top Tips
I recently worked on a project creating an animated music visualisation using HTML5 canvas elements to create interactive animations. Since the canvas element is quite new, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of tips I’ve build up while working with it. In-memory canvas caching The biggest consideration with canvas animations in […]
19% of the Web powered by WordPress?
In July 2013 Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress told the audience the WordCamp conference in San Francisco that “up to 18.9% of the web [is] running WordPress”. That’s a terrific statistic, and for more fun stats on how popular WordPress is right now, check out WordPress stats. It’s impressive, and it demonstrates how versatile […]
A New Look for Tweeted Trips Care of Bootstrap
I’ve just completed a re-vamp of a site I run called Tweeted Trips. It’s a site I created while on the road cycle touring, so the original was put together quite quickly and was really built as a proof-of-concept. The new version is much more robust, cleaner and has more features. The code was originally […]
Tweeted Trips used by Peugeot Italy
I always like to keep an eye on which companies are picking up Tweeted Trips and using it on their sites. Some I work with closely, like Gerber to help them embed social media campaigns in their sites, and some I just discover after browsing my referrer traffic! My Italian isn’t too great, so I’m […]
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 […]