Posts
2021
- Experimenting with short lines of text: the ideal width for whom?
- Notes on line length revisited: Does recent research debunk the idea of an ideal line length?
- Julian Cope on Faust and Jim Kerr, and the term “Krautrock”
- Notes on marking up two navigation lists on the same HTML page
- You are your phone’s AdID
- Notes on files and folders, and how platforms killed them
- Automating webp production in Jekyll
- Should I use… webp?
- Intention not tech
- Indieweb as state of mind
- How to write old-fashioned CSS
- Applying the principle of proximity to improve your web article typography
- Some notes on leading (or line height) on websites
- Setting responsive font sizes in CSS
- Notes on the design of Nabokov’s Butterflies and blogs
- Integrating the Nord colour scheme into a Jekyll site using custom properties
- Some notes on measure (or line width) on websites
- The phantom life of the section element and the mess of headings
- Focusing your writing with a simple scaffolding technique
- The perfect blogging platform: crossposting, conversing on social media and monetisation(!)
- The perfect blogging platform: customising typography rather than theming
- The perfect blogging platform – some principles
- Why doesn’t Labour like people who live in cities?
- The state of the Labour Party in 2021
- Notes on the “indieweb” #4: four months in – community, difficult discussions and the end of the web
- Edit your RSS feed to control your site’s output to micro.blog
- Four reasons to delete at least 95% of your website
- Navigation submenus – what’s the best approach? Dropdown, hovers, clicks or keeping it flat?
- Notes on the “indieweb” #3: Who’s it for?
- Adding webmentions to Jekyll (an overview)
- CMSs should allow component-based page creation, but does WordPress Gutenberg get it right?
- Four reasons it’s worth paying $5 a month for Feedbin, an RSS reader
- Libraries as alternative
- Notes on the “indieweb” #2: Where do I find things to read?
- world@hey.com launches and it can edit posts, which sounds clunky
- A reminder: Publishing to a website is easy
- Email churns out bad HTML
- Marketing without tracking
- A note/post on notes and posts
- Why brand web pages?
- Stormborn and the tyranny of choosing a Netflix series
- Labour Needs A Big Idea
- The Investigation – the best Scandinoir drama for ages
- Ronnnie and Maggie, Ted and Bet
- You should try the blogging platform called WordPress
- k-punk and Peep Show
- English Scheme: Annotated Fall analysis
- Notes on the “indieweb” #1: Where do I publish and discuss?
2020
- Moon in a Dead Eye by Pascal Garnier
- Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany
- Endless Utopia
- Static works
- The Yale School of Art School website
2019
- Building a web that lasts
- Losing the election, strategy and hope
- NetNewsWire: Free, open source (and very good) RSS reader for Mac
- Styling Twitter, and HTML with soul
2018
- Taking a break from blogging as I know it
- In defence of view page source
- Hiding accessibility on web pages
- Using Staticman for comments on a Jekyll site
- If users aren’t bothered about griddy layouts, why are we?
- For RP: Ditch your accent and your regional pride
- Inclusive web design is web design for everyone, including you
2017
- Basic income, realism and wasteful pessimism
- Why modular CSS is better than using ‘semantic’ class names: An example
- The end of The Deck
- Improving where filters in Jekyll
- General Election! 2017!
- The Uniqlo website’s fixed header makes it unusable
2016
- Getting to grips with Contentful and Jekyll
- Your most comfortable reading colours depend on who you are (or: how accessibility is a tricky business)
- Design habits: Being a CSS API user rather than an API author
- How to display a blog listing page
- Work if you want to
- It's easy to make fast static pages without Google AMP
- Using presentational classes makes web design easier
- Meaning, separation and using lots of classes freely
- Why we'll be using a CSS framework like Tachyons to rebuild our website
- Using Tachyons and keeping your markup dry
- The future of libraries (again)
- Running a library website on Jekyll (maybe)
- Living in Nigel Farage's dream
- Fight and Challenge Everything (yourselves)
- Notes on (hyper)local journalism
- Belief and apostasy
- Delicious and how every excellent web service ends up eating itself
- WordPress, me and Oxmetifan 20
- Creating WordPress sub navigation menus that only appear where you need them
2015
- The dangers of automation (or making a visit to the library worth it)
- The vacant centre (part III)
- Container housing – Right solution, wrong problem
- Unstyle and looking at naked HTML
- Why my website looks so plain
- How the Observer used dubious research and shoddy reporting to promote a Blairite Labour leader
- The last liberal and how the centre broke
- Generating page specific classes in WordPress templates to keep code DRY and extensible
- Labour
- In defence of blogging
- The Swedish universal versus austerity
- They went and broke citizens income, so what's next?
2014
- Cast the 2015 election runes
- Newcastle, Sports Direct and Wonga – a working class club
- 30 days a blogger
- In praise of Georgia (again)
- Friday reading – Google, Stanford, DC, liberals and gentrification
- The minimum wage legalises low pay
- The art of linking
- Scotland
- Why restaurants publish images of their menus online (and why they shouldn't)
- Lowestoft
- In praise of universality
- Write edit build publish edit build republish
- Matthew Parris only said what most British people think about places like Clacton
- Households, deficits and belief
- The morality of work
- Mozilla, money, adverts and corporate speak
2013
- 3 right wing reasons for a Basic Citizens' Income
- Basic citizen income—two examples of how it would work
- Basic citizen income—genius idea the UK will never adopt
- Evening Edition looks good but has an audience problem
- A few notes on moving from WordPress to Jekyll
- Tschichold, democratic design and the politics of typefaces
- Google’s infantile big brain
- A world without work
2012
- The rhetoric of hard work
- Debt
- The great Readability conundrum (Or – If you provide a service, charge for it)
- Evening Edition and making readable news
- How the iPad makes coffee table books
- ITV News website redesign
2011
- Hard working
- Obama shows Ed Miliband how to do blogging
- 16 pixels
- Reading newspaper articles involves looking at words
- Why justify?
- Adding em or en dashes to Google docs
- Scherzo, mobile first (and what that means for you)
- An HTML5 challenge (which lead me to think – Why bother with HTML5 sectioning elements?)
- Why business writing is rubbish
- Putting content and meaning first
- Lord Ashcroft, floating voters and 2015
- Nabokov on other writers
- An ode to Firefox
- Short attention spans, mobile phones and the future of reading
2010
- How to write a blog post
- Good web copy is boring
- Why I don't like Tumblr and Posterous
- An aside really isn’t a sidebar
- Vertical navigation and not making users think
2009
- Good copy redeems bad layout and typography
- Introducing the Scherzo theme for WordPress
- Two blog formats – magazines and journals
- How print and web are different
- Simple, complex, ordered, butchered