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
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
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
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
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
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 […]
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
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 […]