Writing
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Whilst I can’t guarantee I’ll write all the drafts I’ve listed, I can but try. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and you might get the occasional pleasant surprise.
Articles
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A personal summary of the past year, after reading a couple of others from friends
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I spent a lot of time looking at ethical investment at the start of 2018, and finally got around to writing up a potted summary of what I did.
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My trusty 2011 Macbook Air had started to show its age – a couple of missing keys, the fan being on pretty much all the time – so I looked for a replacement. After some tedious investigation, I settled upon a Dell XPS 9370 from their Outlet store. Windows 10 can run Linux now, so it seemed like an interesting thing to spend some time with, and if it all went sour I could always fully install Linux instead.
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I run tests on Travis a lot, so would like notification of when they have finished running. However, I am allergic to things such as email and Slack notifiations, so I found another way.
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It seems quite common for a web page to have at its end a footer in a different colour from the main page background. But is there an easy way of having the footer colour continue to the end of the browser window?
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Viagogo are in the news again, so I took a quick look at their site. I saw that they are selling tickets for Janelle Monáe at the Manchester International Festival for £75 and up, even though tickets are still available from the official site at their face value of £35; but I also noticed something funny about their Please Wait pages.
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I followed a link to one of those Guardian end-of-year quizzes on my phone (probably this one), and had answered a few questions before realising that it was working entirely without JavaScript (I have JavaScript disabled on my phone because a) it cuts out most of the ads, b) it cuts out lots of bandwidth and I have a limited data plan, and c) my battery lasts longer because it’s not processing tons of code to show me some text (cough, Medium)). I found this very impressive, well done whoever worked on that, and so I thought I would take a look at how exactly they did it.
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On Twitter last week, Bruce Lawson asked people to write up their performance optimisations. I’ve had some bits of time to make some improvements to traintimes.org.uk, and so here is a short essay/notes (I don’t get much free time at present for various small-person-shaped reasons) on how this site is currently seven times quicker than the official site on a mobile.
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The JavaScript on FixMyStreet has gradually evolved over many years (we launched in 2007, remember!), and while we were working on other features in this area (such as HTML5 History) it was a good opportunity to tidy up the JavaScript, making it clearer and simpler, which in turn improved the site’s performance. Below I’m going to go through most of the steps I took, not necessarily in the order I took them, which hopefully might prove useful to your own websites. And there are exciting pictures at the end, I promise!
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FixMyStreet has been around for nearly nine years, letting people report things and optionally include a photo; the upshot of which is we currently have a 143GB collection of photographs of potholes, graffiti, dog poo, and much more. 🙂 For almost all that time, attaching a photo has been through HTML’s standard file input form; it works, but that’s about all you can say for it – it’s quite ugly and unfriendly. We have always wanted to improve this situation – we have a ticket in our ticketing system, Display thumbnail of photo before submitting it, that says it dates from 2012, and it was probably in our previous system even before that – but it never quite made it above other priorities, or when it was looked at, browser support just made it too tricky to consider.
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[There is also a video of this post.] A few of mySociety’s developers are at DjangoCon Europe in Cardiff this week – do say hello 🙂 As a contribution to the conference, what follows is a technical look (with bunny GIFs) into an issue we had recently with serving large amounts of data in one of our Django-based projects, MapIt, how it was dealt with, and some ideas and suggestions for using streaming HTTP responses in your own projects.
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Is it possible Scotland took two Bank Holidays that didn’t exist? Update: Yes!
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This post explains how various aspects of the new FixMyStreet maps work, including how we supply our own OS StreetView tile server and how the maps work without JavaScript.
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Dunder sat, glumly staring at the computer screen. “What’s up, Dunder?” asked Rudolph, entering the stable and shaking off the snow from his antlers. “Well,” Dunder replied, “I’ve just finished coding the new reindeer intranet Santa Claus asked me to do. You know how he likes to appear to be at the cutting edge, talking incessantly about Web 2.0, AJAX, rounded corners; he even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server. “I’ve managed to keep him happy, whilst also keeping it usable, accessible, and gleaming — and I’m still on the back row of the sleigh! But anyway, given the elves will be the ones using the site, and they come from all over the world, the site is in multiple languages. Which is great, except when it comes to the preview JavaScript I’ve written for the reindeer order form. Here, have a look…”
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Something that annoys me no end, and I realise there are probably more important things to get annoyed about, but do bear with me, are urban legends, specifically those concerning old laws of the UK.
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Mostly historical now, as Mars label their products appropriately, but they didn’t use to.
Public Diffs
Potential drafts
- Google and infallability
- DjangoCon Europe 2015
- Converting my bots to polybot
- Slack away plus
- Train ticket machines
- Radio 4 without Today
- Theatricalia lucky day
- Spacelog
- OTT Nght Garden harmony
- traintimes.org.uk as a Progressive Web App (well, millions of them)
- A progressively enhanced slippy map
- 2017 review
- Vagrancy Act repeal
- Justified commits
- Breakdown of a tweet HTML page
- Public Transport Outings
- How I made the live schematic tube map
- CSS puns
- Perl Plack template debug panel
- West Midlands public transport summary
- Historic TheyWorkForYou
- Twitpanto
- JustGiving’s poor custom drop-down
- Twitter to Voice and deleting your $HOME
- Sarah & Duck upcoming
- Django patch names
- NXWM short hop
- Why years of viewport tutorials were wrong
- Only Connect Babs
- How FixMyStreet lazy loads images
- Impossible CSS layout
- Bach.JS
- Causing an international diplomatic incident with a bot
- Pepys Shows
- Rails’ oldest open PR