Archive for posts dated '2016'
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March 2016
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Back to basics
TL;DR; Is this site broken? No. I decided to try an experiment with letting my website go CSS naked. It's an attempt for me to make proper use of Web Standards, HTML5, semantic markup and hierarchical structure. My reasoning When I decided to reboot my website, I started to spend time browsing themes and designs, while I found many decent ones, there wasn't any that I felt comfortable with. I didn't have much interest in…
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May 2016
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Website Relaunch
Wow, I finally pressed the button and my rebuilt website has been launched. I have to admit, I was quite nervous about making the actual switch from WordPress to a static HTML site. I kept thinking "What have I missed?", but throw caution to the wind, it's my own website - if anything breaks, I'll just fix it. It feels like I've wanted to move away from having a dynamically-generated website for the longest time.…
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Open Graph: Facebook and Twitter Cards metadata
One of the motivators for going "back to basics" on my blog was to focus on the markup semantics and laying a solid foundation. Given one of the main powers of the Open Web is the ability to link and share content, I wanted to get my metadata in a workable state. I've known about Open Graph for a few years, professionally I make sure that my client's websites leverage it - but the funny…
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Succumbed to the CSS dark side
Well, it didn't take me long to succumb to the power of the CSS dark side! ;-) I had a few people comment about my website being "broken" - and my semi-auto reply of "going back to basics" - but this hasn't bothered me much, it's quite interesting to start a discussion around the idea. However, I do admit that there are enhancements to be had with applying basic stylings. So I've started a minimal…
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Apologies for RSS mistake
For readers of my blog via the RSS feed, I have to apologise to you. When I relaunched my blog at the start of May, I was using Wyam's built-in RSS module - which initially appeared to work well. But I noticed an issue with my configuration after I'd corrected a typo on a recent post. It turns out the <guid> value for each post had been created as a unique identifier based off a…
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June 2016
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umBristol hiatus
At our recent umBristol meetup earlier this month, I announced that there wouldn't be another meet-up until after the summer, as I'll be away on extended holiday; plus, there's CodeCabin in early September. I proposed to the group that if they wanted to organise an umBristol whilst I was away, then I can give them organiser access rights on the Meetup.com group. Now, between you and me, I'm hoping that someone steps up to the…
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GitHub Activity Patterns: Star & Fork
Confession time, I check my GitHub activity feed dashboard as much as I check my Twitter timeline. I know a lot of people who ignore their GitHub dashboard, but for me I find it a great source of information... to see who is working on what; if there are any new Umbraco related open-source projects; and also if anyone has starred or forked one of my projects. Over the past few years I've noticed patterns…
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July 2016
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Bulk Photo Resizing with ImageProcessor
I'm currently on a month long holiday in Sri Lanka, taking a nice overdue break from work, (much respect to Rich for holding the Umbrella fort!). During my travels, I've been keeping a family blog - journal updates, add a few photos, etc. However the WiFi upload speeds at the various hotels we've been staying at have been painful slow; uploading a single photo (around 3Mb) to our blog or even Facebook is taking an…
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August 2016
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Code Cabin 2016
Next weekend will be the inauguration of Code Cabin. If you haven't heard about Code Cabin yet, it's a weekend retreat for 20 developers; a chance to get together share ideas and hack some code. If you want to know more about the backstory, watch the uHangout episode when Matt announced it back in April. All the tickets for this Code Cabin sold out before the end of June, but if it sounds like something…
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September 2016
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Code Syntax Highlighting in Wyam
I'd been going back and forth on how I should handle the syntax highlighting of my blog's code snippets. A popular choice would be to use a JavaScript library, (such as Prettify or Prism). I have nothing against those libraries, but in the pursuit of making my website fast and lightweight, I wanted a non-JavaScript option. My idea was to use a .NET library to convert my source-code snippets into colourised markup. The only library…
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October 2016
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Elegant Objects by Yegor Bugayenko
At last month's Code Cabin, I was chatting with Steve Temple about Ditto and best coding practices, he suggested that I read Elegant Objects by Yegor Bugayenko, as it made him think totally differently about object-oriented programming. Looking around Yegor's blog, I liked his ideas, so I ordered the book ... I even noticed a small CSS bug on his blog and submitted a fix for it. I do love open-source! A day or so…
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