Blog
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Building My Site: Design
12 November 2015
When I decided to update my site, I wasn’t looking for a job — my current employer is a great company to work for. But having lived through the dot-bomb crash, the closing of two employers, the subprime crisis, and seemingly annual layoffs when I worked for Yahoo! I know that things can change quickly, and wanted to get my portfolio up to date. Just in case.
Faced with the task of redesigning a website that hadn’t been touched in a decade, I approach it as I would client work: gather the requirements, determine the process necessary, do the research, formulate the design principles, and execute a design.
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The Movie Blurb Dialogue
14 August 2015
‘Astonishing…breathtaking!’
— Ralph Stuffyshirt, The Daily Bungle
Consider the movie blurb: a fragment of text splashed across an ad for a mediocre film. It gives the impression of clarity without actually offering any. What is ‘astonishing’? The quality of the special effects? The director’s incompetence? The blurb lacks the context you need to understand it.
So too with Apple’s iCloud Password dialogue.
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Y! Security
11 August 2015
Whenever I travel out of the UK, the first time I connect to the internet with one of my gadgets I get an email from Yahoo! stating they detected a sign-in attempt from an unrecognised device in {name of the country I’m in}, and asking me to sign in with the device I ‘usually use’.
Huh? I just signed in with a laptop/phone I use every day. What gives?
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Building My Site: Server Side Code
24 June 2015
In my first post, I explained how I’m using Jekyll, Git, and bash aliases to publish this site. I chose this setup because it keeps the server-side of things simple: there’s no database, and no code executing when a page is served. Just some markdown files which get mushed together with templates to produce static HTML files.
For the most part, the site follows that simple formula. But there are a few instances where I need a bit more control over formatting, or a bit of logic to avoid maintaining links by hand. Enter the YAML serialisation format and the Liquid template language.
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I ♥ San Francisco
16 June 2015
If you follow typography or Apple at all, you’ve probably heard the upcoming iOS9 and Mac OS X El Capitan will use San Francisco as their system font, rather than the controversial Helvetica Neue.
I love the change.