Blog

One of my main gripes about PageSpeed Insights is that I have to go and manually run each of my pages through it. Instead I went and put together a little tool to do it for me. Don't forget kiddlywinks #PerfMatters

You get more and more perks in terms of API access when you have SSL on your site and ServiceWorker is enough for me to bite the bullet and go SSL. Here are the notes from my experience with gauntface.com.

The WebView has been updated in the preview release of L and brings with it some new web platform features.

Ever tried getting a third party library working in CodeIgniter? No? Oh, well maybe it's best to keep it that way aye.

When trying to use the Google+ Sign In button on my site, I found a few difficulties at making it happy with PageSpeed Insights and put down a few notes.

Ever wondered what you could do to improve your sites page load time? PageSpeed Insights is a tool which highlights any problem areas on your site and this is how I got my score up to 100/100.

Performant Web Apps...... The harsh world of getting 60fps for a newbie web developer.

In the latest redesign of my site, one of the key area's I wanted to focus on was page performance, both loading and animations. I ended up with a style guide and a half way decent build process for image optimisation.

If you're using Cordova, there is no reason to not take advantage of build tools like grunt and fewer bytes to load will still cut down load times inside your apps. In this article we'll look at how you can hook up grunt into the Cordova build process, meaning you have one command to build your web project, copy that over into Cordova and build the project onto your device.

Second evening of mucking around with my Raspberry Pi, VNC and FTP FTW.

Adding support for D-Pad navigation is much harder than it should be for a web application. I've taken some of the best bits of a sample application written for Google TV and generalised it to hopefully help others add in D-Pad support by including some additional class names and tabindexes to your HTML.

In Android KitKat you have the ability to have a translucent theme in your app so you can style notification bar and navigation bar. We'll look at a basic example for doing this.

First evening playing around with the Raspberry Pi and they always say you should blog about new things. Hardware, Raspbian and Wifi are all the exciting things covered.

I made the mistake of digging around and looking at how you should implement focusing in a web app. I quickly found each browser has it's own quirks and has rather different behavior compared to focusing in Android.

Just a cheeky post on how to test Spatial Navigation in Opera TV.

Ever wondered what exactly happens when you try to get a mobile device display a desktop site correctly, with the required zoom level?

Half marathon run, legs tired and £1000 raised for Rocking Horse Childrens Charity.

In this post I'll cover how you can hook Yeoman and Cordova together so you get the benefits from Yeoman with the ease of deployment from Cordova.

Most sites don't respond to a users touch. This raises the question of how should you respond?

A new responsive design of gauntface.co.uk

At Google I/O 2013 I presented "Modern Workflow for the Mobile Web". This talk covers all the tools you need to get going with developing for the mobile web, saving you pain and time.

If you've ever needed to get the VideoView to size a video with the correct aspect ratio and found that the Android VideoView isn't working for you then give this a try....

Quick notes on how to remove the CodeIgniter index.php from the urls when hosted on an Apache server.

I wanted to get Sublime to show up in my menu of applications in Debian. Find out how I did it and use it for any of your own apps.

Having unwanted files in a git repo is just a pain and can often bloat your repo, often resulting in problems when working with others. Here's a brain dump of using the global git ignore and the files I ignore by default.