I was recently reading the article Via Negativa by Adrian Zumbrunnen and found it a really nice reflection on the reasons for creating a simple product.Minimalism in web design is an evergreen trend but how many of us have actually...
This week a pull request was made on the Chromium project that, in certain situations, blocks Javascript from loading on 2G connections.Currently the Gutenberg editor doesn’t work without Javascript; it doesn’t even have a noscript tag.Chrome for Android may start...
Gutenberg is slowly marching towards a releasable version but has anyone tested it on a real world project? There have been a few announced but nothing significant (that I’ve seen). I’ve integrated it into a couple of themes, and mostly...
Mythic is a new starter theme by Justin Tadlock (with help from his friends/ collaborators). The project is designed to introduce a fully modern theme development process.It follows best practices for coding, and makes use of things like npm (or...
WordPress 4.9.8 was released last week and Gutenberg plugin installations have rocketed because of the ‘try Gutenberg’ prompt that was included. This post on WPCouple shows some of the fantastic positive reactions Gutenberg has received.Of course, it’s not all rosey....
I have thought quite a lot about accessibility in recent years. I am definitely not an expert, and I am sure there’s a lot of areas I could improve, but I always strive to make my projects as accessible as...
JavaScript is simple, or at least it used to be. If you’ve done any programming, and you know how to use Google then you can program in JavaScript. Of course, to make it more powerful we have to complicate things.We...
It was WPCampus last weekend, an education focused WordPress conference. There’s a lot of talks about using WordPress in Universities and other educational establishments – but there’s also a lot of more traditional WordCamp subjects.One presentation in particular caught my...
Now you have no reason not to make your website(s) secure!Troy Hunt is Microsoft Regional Director and MVP for Developer Security. Online security, technology and “The Cloud”. And he made have I been pwned, an online database/API allowing you to...
Last week the UK Government design team published their website design system publicly and it’s a really good example of a huge public company trying to create consistency, and ease development, on a massive project.I really like that the design...
4 years ago I uploaded a video of an animation creator website I was building called Brush Ninja. Then mostly forgot about it. A video of the original version of Brush Ninja from over 4 years ago. The project was...
When making WordPress themes there’s 2 functions that are really handy. is_home and is_front_page. I use them all the time in both themes and plugins. But I can never remember the difference between them.is_home vs is_front_pageOn the surface they are...
In January I published Colour, a simple app that analyses the colours used in a website and suggests ways you can merge the colour to make the design simpler.I don’t know if it’s an age thing, or a generational thing,...
When I wrote about using Github for Copywriters I wanted to keep things simple so that my copywriter friend could edit website content easily without having to worry about using Github properly. The problem is he now wants to create...
The start of August this year brought with it the #LowRezJam. A game jam where game developers make games with a size limit of 64×64 pixels. That’s really small. Really really small.I took part last year, and really enjoyed it,...
A couple of days ago I read an article about the MillionDollarHomepage and how the content on it has largely vanished. This raised the question of permanence on the web. The article also mentioned how it would be an interesting...
I have a couple of sites powered by Jekyll on Github pages, and I use Cloudflare to help make them nice and speedy (and to get around the github pages traffic limits). However, this means that each time I update...
WordPress 4.8 has just been released and, whilst not a ground breaking update, it includes some nice features that make WordPress more pleasant to use.One of the main areas focused on is some new widgets. There haven’t been any new...
Typography on websites is hard – especially if that site is powered by a CMS such as WordPress. Making the text on a site look good when the screen size, or content, can be changed means that often you have...
I use WordPress a lot, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to rebuild one of my older sites with Jekyll (a static site editor) so that I could host it on Github pages. As I have explained before...
I don’t remember exactly when it happened but about a year ago WordPress introduced a prefix at the front of WordPress archive titles. This prefix is designed to give context to archives. For example it helps to distinguish between tag...