I wrote a few pre-thoughts on the new Twitter API last August, but I’ve only just now got around to migrating my numerous apps.
First to escape the cull so far is Twitblock. I was initially pleased to see that it wasn’t denied access to all its old functions – blocking, reporting spam etc.. But what I found is now a huge problem is the new rate limiting model. Continue reading…
I’ve been debating whether I think CSS preprocessors are a good thing or not, so I wrote this in order to make my mind up.
I’m pretty old fashioned, so I’d resisted pre-processors until quite recently. But after working on a project built with Sass I found that I liked it a lot; just not for the reasons I thought I might.
It’s not all sweetness and light of course (I’m still a jaded cynic). Here are some of the arguments I’ve been having with myself recently, starting with the nice bits.
Continue reading…
Earlier this year I accidentally blocked search engines from my blog. Want to see what that looks like? Continue reading…
In part 1 I showed how to add a swipe effect to a scrolling area using only the new CSS properties in IE10. I also added some JavaScript to create the same effect in other touch-supported browsers like iOS.
The CSS stuff in IE10 is great, but there is only so much you can do with it. If we want a completely custom effect we need to get involved with IE10’s touchscreen event model. Things get a bit more complicated now…
This demo uses JavaScript in IE10 to achieve the same swiping effect as the CSS solution in part 1. However, if you swipe harder you will move three places instead of one. This way you can essentially flick an item from one end to the other. Not the greatest effect in the world, it’s just an example.
I just finished working on the Lovie Awards Winners Gallery. As a result of the Microsoft partnership I learned quite a bit about touchscreen support in IE10. Part of the site has progressively enhanced sideways scrolling areas which are swipeable on touch screens. I’ve put together a few demos here to show what we ended up doing and highlight some of the gotchas.
I’ve been waiting ages for this. Amazon Web services added Cross Origin Resource Sharing in August.
CORS enables loads of stuff you couldn’t do on S3 before, but I only need it for one thing, which is hosting web fonts for specific domains.
Here’s is a quick post to explain how to host your web fonts on S3.
Continue reading…
I made a stupid error recently, so I thought I’d document it in case anyone else was planning on going the same way.
Twitter pre-announced a new version for their API last night and developers are predictably miffed about it.
I’ve run TwitBlock for three years and have always known that one day it will stop working and I’ll have to take it offline. However, it’s not clear to me yet whether I’ll have to take it down in six months, so I’m trying to avoid a rant for once (mostly).
I just don’t think the impact is clear enough at this stage. Most points in the announcement are either too grey, or just confirm a general direction we were already well aware of.
By way of composing my own thoughts, this is my reaction to some points in the announcement:
I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that the previously excellent spam filter Akismet for WordPress has become less effective.
I have wondered if the rise of embedded solutions like Facebook comments has caused Akismet to miss out on useful data, but perhaps it’s just the spammers getting cleverer.
Either way – I didn’t want to install Facebook comments on my blog and I didn’t want spam comments either. Even when they do get caught they still use up disk space and emptying thousands of spam comments every month is just irritating.
I’ve been working on some WordPress builds for clients recently and decided it was a bit ridiculous that my own website didn’t have a custom theme.
Despite my utter contempt for WordPress as a piece of software, building a simple theme that behaves largely like a blog is not too hard. This one took about a day and I only had to throw one monitor out the window. (acceptable).
It’s not beautiful, but here it is …
Surprise – it’s grey.
