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When you love a website design, you look into how it was made, right? That's what I did with Robb Owen's recent redesign. Amazingly, his incredibly smooth scroll and cursor tracking is achieved via …

A neat little npm package that runs accessibility (a11y) tests on web pages to whatever WCAG or other standard you need. The fact it can be automated at build time should be very useful. There's also …

A critique of npm (and other package managers), the move-fast hype cycle of tech products, and the tech debt it …

Yesterday I finally filled my camera's memory. Painfully, that means I haven't downloaded (or edited) a single photo this …

I am a huge fan of the ever insightful talk show Last Week Tonight, hosted by John Oliver. I love the directness of the opinion pieces, agree with many of the stances taken and largely find the …

Yes, I am one of those irritating people that have decided to resurrect an audio format that, by all rights, should be long extinct. And, further yes, I'm also now going to complain about my …

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!

An amalgamation of all the data you get fed at the end of a year. From Spotify Wrapped, to Google tracking, to my own beer journal, a look back over 2019 from a (mildly) data-centred viewpoint.

Oh boy, there's a lot worth pulling out of this overview of upcoming web …

Static sites don't make search functionality easy, but luckily there are some excellent services that do. I've been messing around with Algolia and finally have it working with Craft and Gatsby the way I want it... on the backend, at least.

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).

An interesting read that covers some of the basic terminologies of typesetting, as well as the technicalities of how browsers actually interpret the line-height value. Hint: it's not what you'd …

I can relate to Lea's frustrations (or, more specifically, those of her friend who doesn't often stray into JavaScript …

Notes from the 2020 Jamstack Conf. Some interesting dives in the Jamstack community and various applications of Jamstack technologies, with tweet threads as usual.

The way we make websites is built on a false assumption: that the tools we use are the right ones for the job. Now – more than ever – we should be questioning why common frameworks, …

I've been thinking a lot about an article I read recently that called out technical writing online for being overly trusted. But shouldn't that same argument apply more universally to third-party code coming from any source?

I "missed" the meetup (it was 2am local time 😂) but glad to catch up, a really nice introduction to 11ty/Eleventy as a build tool. The more I hear about the flexibility that 11ty gives you in …

The combination of the Carbon design system and NextJS should make for rapid website development, but I ran into a few small hurdles getting them to play nicely with one another using existing documentation and community guidelines.

A fascinating look at how modern front-end architecture and practices can help solve some of the communities issues; even the ones they initially created! Really neat to see how Brad has been using …

Super useful walkthrough on taking a branch from one repository and publishing it to another repository entirely (great for creating test repos or stripped-down example repos for bug …

A frankly depressing look at the state of the mobile web in 2021. From lacklustre technological advancement in the past decade, to increasing device saturation, and the overuse of JavaScript, here's …

As more and more companies begin dabbling with blockchain tech, I'm increasingly bemused by just how blind they appear to be to the growing consumer concern over the same space.

Daniel has created an extremely useful HTML template that includes most common elements, perfect for kickstarting a CSS design scheme, and all in a handy GitHub …

Starling Bank frustrates and impresses me in equal measure. Their technical solutions are magical – when they work – but their service is steeped in a privileged bias that makes them hard to truly recommend.

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 …

Apparently, ARIA live regions don't play nicely with React. Whilst they work fine in many browsers, they simply don't function in VoiceOver without some workarounds.

Various notes from my battle to get a local development environment working for Craft CMS.

The increasing use of React Server Components is meaning the end of the CSS-in-JS era. But what options exist to fill that gap? I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've found.

A thoughtful look at the idea of sustainability in web development and design, particularly in terms of whether worrying about an individual design choice's carbon footprint is meaningful or simply …