Search

An incredibly extensive collection of single-user tools. Need to check colour contrast? Grab image metadata? Generate a gradient? Yup, all of those are in here. The list is immense and the tools are …

There are quite a few tools that claim to help find accessibility issues through automated, pre-programmed test suites. But how accurate are they? Equal Entry have pitted six of the most popular …

Very high level guide to getting webmentions on your website, tracking them, and automatically pinging linked sites when you …

Useful website for generating meta tags, Open Graph tags, Twitter cards, and JSON-LD …

A very useful package for getting around the otherwise convoluted steps needed to upgrade npm on Windows. Just open up a PowerShell instance as Admin and use the following three commands (and only …

IWC London was one year ago today. When it came to an end, I felt like I finally understood the IndieWeb. I was wrong.

For the second year running, Khoi Vinh of subtraction.com is asking for designers/developers to fill out a survey detailing what tools they use in their day-to-day workflow. I'm probably not the …

Noah explains what it's like working in web design with colour vision deficiency (CVD). Gives a great overview of what CVD covers and why some people can see more/fewer colours than the average …

At this point, surely access to the internet is at least a utility, if not a human right. Olu has put together a brilliantly reasoned argument for just that, and how to go about building for a world …

Baldur has written a wonderfully paced, deeply interesting post on the whole SPA/MPA (AKA normal website) debate with one critical conclusion: SPAs are fine; MPAs are fine; anything will suck if …

A wonderful overview of why progressive enhancement and inclusive design go hand-in-hand, and why both are still necessary and deeply useful techniques for modern web development. I particularly …

A tool for generating colour palettes which are perceptually consistent in terms of lightness, contrast, and saturation. Usefully, it automatically calculates WCAG 2 contrast ratios; it also attempts …

Migrating content between fields in Craft is not as simple as it might be. In the wake of Craft 5, I've been getting a lot of practice, and wanted to write up some of the techniques I've been using.

Memory augmentation has always interested me. I'm envious of those that never forget a name or can quote verbatim. Like Mark Llobrera, I've started using technology to never …

My new PC is up and running and starting to be "just right" (we'll get to further details later, I promise), so one of the big "new" things I've got for the new year is a subscription to Adobe CC - …

I find it slightly bizarre how popular Last.fm has become over time. I understand that the service now offers a plethora of features, including some powerful music discovery tools, yet at the core …

Currently, both myself and my partner are looking into replacing our mobile phones (her slightly more urgently). As a result, we're both quite deep in the mire of tech reviews, contract comparisons …

An attempted experiment to replicate the blog layout of ilovetypography.com, which uses floats to great effect, with more modern CSS Grid and Flex techniques. Turned out to not be quite so simple, but taught me a lot about the benefits and limitations of CSS Grid.

I was recently given a new laptop at work (🥳), but failed to realise that my Git author details weren't syncing correctly with GitHub for almost a month... 🤦 Rather than simply accept those white squares, I decided to rewrite the repository history. The process turns out to be quite simple, but I still hit several snags so figured it could be useful to document my fixes and errors.

Welcome to the third version of theAdhocracy! It's been a long time coming, but the site has finally been rebuilt, rehosted, and re-just-about-everything else, so I figured I'd actually formalise the launch with a new post explaining what's happened and why.

A step-by-step guide to installing Craft CMS 3+ on the Arcustech hosting services, because sometimes all the command line steps can seem a little daunting if you aren't used to it!

I finally made it to an IndieWebCamp meetup, even if it was remote only due to the increasingly restrictive implications of the coronavirus. I learnt a lot, I had a great time, and I'm ready to start implementing a whole bunch of new ideas right here. I also took a huge number of notes from the speakers and sessions throughout the day.

Notes from the fully remote React Summit 2020 (or at least the talks I tuned in for). Lots covered, from static-site generators and the Jamstack through to React state management and accessibility. What a fun day!

In which I start off asking a simple question: what content categories should I use on this website? Four hours later, I've discoverd information gardening, now pages, digital-me libraries, and oh so much more. And yes, I think I've answered that first question. Fancy a trip down the rabbit hole?

Oh dear. Tim's put together some actual numbers on the impact that using a frontend framework has on the user. As a proponent of the Jamstack, which pretty much has JavaScript frameworks at its core, …

Notes from my second fully remote conference, this time Sparkbox's UnConference. Being able to freely access talks from the US is a rare bonus of everything going on right now, and this did not disappoint. Musical cameos, great talks on UX, accessibility, design systems, and amazing speakers. Great event (despite the time difference).

The search page is live, the index is populated, but it all looked a bit rubbish and it didn't quite work as well as I wanted. Now it's using custom-styled components, queries are tracked/stored via the URL for persistence, and you can filter results based on category.

Having hooked up Algolia with my Gatsby build pipeline and populated a search index from my Craft CMS API, the next step was the build a frontend UI to enable users to actually query my posts. It turned out to be a pretty simple process.

A look at why ARIA should be treated like any other web …

Marketing needs versus user experience is a topic that I have some deep misgivings over, but a recent post made me want to try and boil some of those thoughts down into their underlying rationale. I'm not sure I totally succeeded, but there we go.