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 […]
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
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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]