From my Blog…

1. Why do people navigate the web using search?

   20th March 2012

   You know that thing when you see a regular web user navigate to Facebook via Google rather than using the address bar? Why do they do that? I was thinking about this the other day I think I've come up with a reason. If you think of the browser address bar as a command-line and a web search as a GUI it starts to make sense. If you get one character wrong using the address bar you will be met by—probably… continue reading »

2. CSS responsive images, max-width and captions

   17th February 2012

   Working on a small project recently I came across a frustrating little issue when trying to use responsive images with a caption (demo). The problem arises when a rendered caption is longer than the width of the image it belongs. Images in responsive designs need to be marked max-width: 100%; so that the content can naturally flow to the width of the page. However without an explicit width when… continue reading »

3. Tay Bridge Notifier

   7th January 2012

   Tuesday 13th December, the last day a colleague would relish the look on my face as they convey news that the Tay Road Bridge was closed. For now at least the bad news should be mine. The frustration of coming home via Perth–a 25 minute journey becomes ~2 hours–twice within a week was motivation enough to write TayBridgeTweets, a simple program that tweets when the status of the bridge… continue reading »

4. The new BBC Weather site, nearly but not quite

   9th December 2011

   A couple of weeks ago the BBC launched a–much needed–complete redesign of their Weather site. It's great, a million miles from the one that it replaced. All apart from one thing. Above is the forecast map for St Andrews tomorrow, notice the one thing you can't see? Yup, the weather for St Andrews and it's vicinity for tomorrow. And the local map is little better: When not frustrating,… continue reading »

5. Meta matters

   17th July 2011

   Yesterday I sat down to do some work on a couple of personal projects, and ended up reorganising my desk, and making a new laptop stand. You can see the final outcome in the photo below (go to the Flickr page to see annotations). My desk - July 2011 The main change is changing to a closed laptop stand rather than the open one, and a general reclaim of desk top space. In my previous setup my laptop… continue reading »

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