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Surely I'm not alone in wanting YouTube playlist …

Rewilding Britain just launched it's new/first website, which I'm far too excited by. Philosophical fanboyism aside, I really like the web design they've created. Plenty of green; stunning …

Thanks to the constant barrage of live music over the last week, I've been frequently pondering my Last.FM API hack. Coco and the Butterfields seriously highlight the Last.FM problem: since Monday …

Toshl is one of those weird little apps that, on paper, appear extremely useful but which I've never quite clicked with. On at least three separate occasions over the past year I've signed up for a …

How do you decide which use cases you should support and which you shouldn't? This question has been hovering in the back of my mind for quite a while now, because it seems to be increasingly …

Today's lunch started no differently to any other. Grab some food, open Internet Explorer (I know, it's not by choice...) and fire up theOldReader to chip away at the ever mounting pile in my inbox. …

I am an …

I received an Amazon Echo for my birthday. I honestly wasn't expecting to, so it was a really fun and exciting surprise to unwrap; although, I have to admit that my initial reaction was "What am I …

There are a lot of new web technologies emerging at the moment which really feel like we're entering a new era. Over the last decade, the likes of HTML5, ES6+, flexbox etc. have brought the web, and …

I just fell down a rabbit hole learning about Dark Patterns, thanks largely to a link in an, as ever, well thought out Adactio post. To be clear, I knew what a Dark Pattern was, I just hadn't come …

Craft CMS has the ability to accept environment variables as well as aliases. It can be worthwhile understanding how these two seemingly similar concepts differ, and when you might want to use one over the other.

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 look back and a look forward... it must be the start of a new year. 2019 held a lot of change and personal improvement, but I can't help but feel that 2020 is going to be a big one. So what exactly do I have planned and what am I hoping for the next 12 months?

I have a tendency to prefer the kind of "inside-out" control that Kent is advocating in this piece, though I've never head it called "inversion of control" before. The idea of giving your users the …

I finally made it to an IndieWebCamp meetup, even if it was remote only due to the increasingly restrictive implications of the coronavirus. I learnt a lot, I had a great time, and I'm ready to start implementing a whole bunch of new ideas right here. I also took a huge number of notes from the speakers and sessions throughout the day.

Notes from the fully remote React Summit 2020 (or at least the talks I tuned in for). Lots covered, from static-site generators and the Jamstack through to React state management and accessibility. What a fun day!

In which I start off asking a simple question: what content categories should I use on this website? Four hours later, I've discoverd information gardening, now pages, digital-me libraries, and oh so much more. And yes, I think I've answered that first question. Fancy a trip down the rabbit hole?

Some thoughts on Code Institute's "5 Day Coding Challenge", having just completed it.

I love Heydon's breakdown of why "accessible" =/= "good". To paraphrase: accessibility is about removing barriers that would prevent people from using your site, but if the content is crap or the …

The search page is live, the index is populated, but it all looked a bit rubbish and it didn't quite work as well as I wanted. Now it's using custom-styled components, queries are tracked/stored via the URL for persistence, and you can filter results based on category.

Having hooked up Algolia with my Gatsby build pipeline and populated a search index from my Craft CMS API, the next step was the build a frontend UI to enable users to actually query my posts. It turned out to be a pretty simple process.

On the surface, Netlify has very simply redirect functionality. In principle, I tripped up twice trying to set it up 😅 Konstantin helped set me right: I needed to move the _redirects file to the …

Two months after Disney+ launched I'm still a huge fan of the content catalogue but swing between feeling bemused and exasperated at the actual experience of using the service.

An overview of JS promises for all skill levels. Starts with an excellent analogy of thread-blocking as …

Josh breaks down why and how you can use CSS variables more easily in React, specifically using styled-components. Honestly it feels a little terrifying how much is needed just to get basic …

I always forget what closures are, even if I continue to use them. The article makes a case for considering closures as stateful functions which is quite neat. Basically, closures allow a …

The idea of a great divide in front-end development resonated with me. I'm worried about how the erosion of certain skills could lead to a less inclusive, accessible web, for both users and developers. On the other hand, there are some massive advantages to our new tools. It's a double-edged sword.

Another month, another big and fully remote JavaScript conference. JSNation fit into my schedule a little less (and didn't quite overlap with my interests as neatly) but it was a fun event with some interesting talks on topics that are often only on my periphery. Much to think about!

An enhanced version of the <datalist> element that uses a tiny amount of additional CSS and JS to modernise the element and bring additional functionality to …

I'm still intending to add a /feeds page to this site at some point (see Making RSS more visible with slash feeds) and now Jeremy has put together an implementation I really like. Jeremy's idea of …