I’m not a massive fan of Jakob Neilsen, I’ll be honest. I’ve always felt that his views on design vs usability are unnecessarily polarised, and I find his style a little pompous and overblown. My good friend and hotshot front-end developer Larry has a mock shrine to his web heroes on the wall of his office. For [...]
I’ve created an initial working version of my CSS SCaffold tool. This tool is intended to help developers speed up the process of styling up their HTML markup by providing a set of empty CSS rules based on the markup that they have written. I was sort of surprised that the major tet editors didn’t have anything [...]
Over the christmas holidays I set myself the challenge of re-creating the classic Windows game Minesweeper, from scratch, using HTML5 and JavaScript. Click here to try it out. Working on the DK Quiz over the last year, in particular over the last few months of 2011 as we optimised the site for high volumes of [...]
I opened up a Google+ account last week. I haven’t really used it yet and I can’t really work out how I feel about it. Google have obviously tried to roll up some of the key features that make Facebook and Twitter distinct into one new application. The main difference between Facebook and Twitter, in [...]
Last week I attended my first ever hack day, run by Radioplayer – an organisation that aggregates all the UK’s radio stations in a single online location. The day was great fun and I got to meet a bunch of interesting people, many of whom came from completely different disciplines to me. I learned plenty [...]
Tutorial for City University, School of Infomatics Web Applications Development Module – 2011 Download source files here. View demo here. In this tutorial we will cover a very basic implementation of the jQuery AJAX function. All projects like this need a starting point. At the moment I am favouring the HTML5 boilerplate by [...]
Having watched a few great short video tutorials from Think Vitamin, especially Responsive Web Design for Mobile by Keir Whitaker and a couple of videos by Nick Pettit, I’ve improved the responsive layout on the site. Images now resize correctly, the footer columns stack up vertically, and most importantly I ditched the width: 100%; style [...]
Added favicon and apple-touch icon, screengrab of the latter below. (This post is being written from my phone for good measure!) Also added image auto resizing and CSS media query to hide sidebar on small screens. This is not necessarily how I’ll treat the sidebar on small devices ultimately, but it’s a step towards the [...]
Couple of minor changes to the site tonight. Added a border partition to inactive nav elements, and cleaned up the vertical and horizontal alignment of the footer columns. Pics below for my own future enjoyment.
Put together a ‘base’ for my site’s redesign today. Took about two and a half hours of coding and messing about in Photoshop to put this together. Most of the page was designed in the browser, but used Photoshop at first to organise a pallette and to rough out main column placements. I’ve decided to [...]