Articles

All 26 of my articles, dating from 2013–2021.

2021 (1)

2020 (2)

Time to Cache Up

For a long time I’ve been searching for a sound solution to storing the entire webmention history of my blog, as packaging it up with the rest of the repository was not cutting it for me. Enter the world of async.

published 23 November 2020 · 12 responses

Sassy Lobotomised Owl

Managing spacing between elements and components on your page can be a tiring task if undertaken manually. This is where the lobotomised owl comes in: a short, simple snippet of CSS that simplifies this whole process for you. In this article I’ll explain how I make use of it in a more dynamic way using a SCSS mixin.

published 14 January 2020 · updated 29 November 2021 · 30 responses

2019 (4)

The Flip-Flop Technique

I recently implemented a colour scheme toggler in the footer of my website, following Andy Bell’s guide, Create a user controlled dark or light mode, and I found a wonky but fun alternative solution for styling my dark theme which leverages CSS’s filter property.

published 30 August 2019 · updated 07 September 2020 · 4 responses

Reply Targets

Providing a useful context to content written in response to someone else's blog post, tweet, toot, etc. helps a reader to understand the conversational nature of these back-and-forths. What abstractions can we make to the data that holds these reply targets, and how can those abstractions make for a richer reading experience and for a leaner publishing workflow?

published 19 June 2019 · updated 26 June 2019 · 6 responses

LiquidBase60

I have started auto-generating short-URLs for each of my posts, old and new, and opted to implement Tantek Çelik's NewBase60 for representing the unique URLs, but I've done so with Liquid so it plays nicely with my Jekyll-powered website.

published 04 March 2019 · updated 08 August 2020

Sparkline Sound-Off

I have been following in the footsteps of Jeremy Keith for a few months now. Dotted around my website, now, are sparklines, representing my activity over time. As an added bonus, a little tune based on the sparkline's values plays when you click on it. With a moderate amount of musical theory under my belt, here's how I accomplished that audio delight.

published 04 March 2019 · updated 21 October 2021 · 5 responses

2018 (2)

Numerals, Romanticised

For a better part of the year, I've been working on a Jekyll-based Progressive Web App, BloodBuilder, for managing my Sorcerer in a game of Pathfinder I've been playing with some friends. One of the many intricate parts of logic involves the ability to convert Arabic numerals to and from Roman numerals, so I wrote a simple Liquid include to handle this.

published 07 November 2018 · 1 response

Variables for Both

Now that CSS Custom Properties, or CSS Variables, are becoming a solid standard, I'm using a method to map their values to CSS Variables whilst providing a value-as-is fallback using a straightforward syntax in a SCSS function and mixin.

published 15 October 2018 · updated 06 May 2021 · 9 responses

2017 (4)

Crossing Guards

Throttle back on your scroll events and watch out for the IntersectionObserver!

published 09 November 2017 · 3 responses

No Three Snowflakes Are Alike

I developed a Sass function to generate a list of unique pairs given a List or Map of data, so I extrapolated the idea and refactored the function to generate a series of unique groups of size n.

published 03 November 2017

Unique Pairs in Sass

In creating a from-scratch grid for a redevelopment project, I was using Sass to loop through various bits of data to generate a bunch of repetitive CSS, but I realised I had no DRY way of generating a list of unique pairs of items from a given dataset, so I set out to find out how.

published 16 June 2017 · 1 response

Remapping Ranges in Sass

Great inspiration can sometimes be found in exploring available opportunities and embracing new ideas. In this article, I'll try to replicate a foreign concept in a familiar way, and explain why I decided to even do it.

published 15 June 2017 · 1 response

2016 (3)

April LWS Talk

I gave a talk at London Web Standards and asked the question, So how can we write media queries that are both consistent and succinct?

published 29 April 2016

Shoot for the Moon

Don't be half-minded when dealing with fractions and pixels. How can we ensure all browsers interpret fractions in our CSS equally?

published 23 March 2016

An Extended Response

If you've dabbled in Sass before, you're likely familiar with @extend and @mixin, but is there any use-case for @extend? Given the benchmark performance of the two, can we still be confident in the cascade when @extending in Sass?

published 18 March 2016

2015 (2)

Backscratching Revisited

I revised my original technique for styling default elements and took it a step further to scratch the greatest number of backs.

published 08 June 2015

Theming Pinboard

I recently decided I would embark on the task of theming Pinboard. Here's how I did it.

published 12 March 2015

2014 (3)

On Your Marks, Get Set, Wait

What's really important when reading an article online? Content should always come first, and give users the option for more later.

published 22 September 2014 · updated 25 January 2016

A Slice of Heaven

We know that webpages are composed of text and boxes. Lots and lots of boxes. But with the power and might of CSS3 we can do some fancy stuff that never used to be possible.

published 27 August 2014

Let’s Look Back

I haven't published a new article in a while now, but I haven't been twiddling my thumbs. Let's look at what happened behind-the-scenes in the last eight months since my first article.

published 09 February 2014 · 2 responses