I redesigned this site recently. You might have noticed. Maybe not if it’s your first time here, that’s ok too. Those full page splash images with everything fading into view look pretty snazzy but there’s one small problem: the Lighthouse test’s Largest Contentful Paint test fails to pick up on any element that starts at…
The advantages of loading scripts from Google’s CDN are fairly obvious – for a common script such as jQuery, we’re on to a better-than-even chance that the user will already have the script in their browser’s cache from other sites, reducing the total download weight of your site. Even if they don’t, the file will…
In Part 1 of this guide, we covered how to set up a portable development environment with the basic set of software tools (a web stack, an IDE and a good text editor). Continuing on, we’ll create a project and make it portable. The instructions given are specific to Netbeans because that’s what we set…
Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ recent posts on his iMac plus Air setup, I thought I’d document how to set up a seamless development environment between desktop and laptop. If you intend to set up a similar environment, you’ll need to perform these steps identically on both machines. Part 2 of this series will deal…
Aral Balkan posted the following snippet on Twitter just now: <span>u</span><span class=”hideIf320″>ser e</span><span class=”capIf320″>x</span><span class=”hideIf320″>perience</span> followed by the explanation: … adaptive copy 🙂 (Actual names shortened for the tweet.) Writes “user experience” in widescreen, UX on smaller screen 🙂 It’s an interesting idea, but I think it clutters up the markup with too many non-semantic…
Ok Skype, I finally caved in and installed your poxy app. Thing is though, you also allow calls to non-Skype numbers so I’d really appreciate it if you allowed it to be set as the default application to open href=”tel:” links. Y’know, RFC 3966? Because believe it or not, some people still use those old-fashioned…
Continuing from my previous post on troubleshooting SVN setup on Windows, I’ve recently encountered (and solved) quite a serious performance hit that’s been affecting my main development machine. Since I spend a lot of time on the move, I do most of my development on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D430. It’s a fantastic little…
If you’ve never read The Daily WTF, it’s a fantastic site run by Alex Papadimoulis highlighting the horrors that readers have found and submitted in real production code. Reading it is a heady blend of “oops, I used to do that” mixed with some absolutely abysmal stuff that you’d swear couldn’t possibly be real. Just…
mail() fail I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could…
During the course of my career, I’ve had to deal with some quite bizarre things jumping out at me from the source of pages. One developer I know, from a well-respected firm (to spare your blushes I won’t link to it, Kev) is in the habit of using <div id=”mchammer”> “because it’s a wrapper”) but…