Programming A Basic Guide to Contributing on Github I have a few open source projects that I host using Github. People often have great suggestions to improve the project, and the issues they report constantly shape and help build a better project. Unfortunately there are people who are sometimes reluctant, or unaware of how easy it is to
Fonts Web Typography using Web Fonts I love web typography! Only a few years ago, the ability to add custom fonts to a website seemed impossible. Fortunately, due to modern browsers we are now able to create beautiful websites using web fonts. While I have to admit that I am no designer, and struggle with CSS
Testing Running Selenium Tests using Node.js Browser automation is a great way to automate and test repeatable tasks in the browser. I've always been interested in browser automation and testing using tools such as Selenium. If you are looking for a way to ensure that your website runs as expected in many different browsers and devices,
HTML5 HTML5 Charts using Chart.js Let's face it - everyone loves a good pie chart! Using charts makes information much easier to visualize. It is easier to see a pattern in a chart, but much more difficult when looking at raw data. In fact, there are loads of different web based charting solutions available to
Web Performance Mozinar: 8 Simple Steps towards a Super Fast Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major part in the way we use the web today. SEO techniques can make your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. I've long been a fan of the Moz blog and their free SEO tools that can help grow
Icons Free Icon Packs for Developers - Part 2 A while ago I created a blog post with a list of free icon packs for developers that can be easily used on any website. The web is packed with loads of great icons, but they seem to be all over the place! I thought it would be handy to
Google Chrome Quick Tip: Create Data URI's using Chrome Here's a quick tip to use Google Chrome's Devtools to convert an image to a Data URI.
Speaking I'll be speaking at Apps World Europe I've been fortunate enough to be asked to present at this year's Apps World Europe in the HTML5 and mobile web track. The title of the talk is called Making your site fast - overcoming the speed of the mobile web and is focussed around the web performance of mobile
ASP.NET The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit needs your help! The ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit has been running as an open source project since August 2010. It contains a rich set of controls that you can use to build ASP.NET websites using HTML5. If you've never used it before, it can be a great way to take advantage
Web Performance Getting started with the Picture element Responsive web design is awesome. It's changed the way we serve content to our users and has allowed us to offer a tailored experience to different screen sizes. It is really flexible and with a little bit of knowledge, anyone can get started. While this flexibility is great, it can
Web Performance My Favourite Talks at Velocity Conference New York 2014 After a long flight and a little bit of jetlag, I've arrived back in London after visiting New York for Velocity Conference 2014. In typical Velocity fashion, the quality of the talks have been amazing and there have been a few highlights that are worth sharing. I thought it would
Web Performance HTTP vs HTTPS performance comparison Google recently announced that they will be starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in their search algorithms. This means that websites that serve traffic over HTTPS with secure, encrypted connections will be slightly favoured over those websites that don't. During Google I/O, there was a big push
Programming Convert JSON to a C# Class As a web developer, I regularly write code to consume and create data in a JSON format. It's a simple and easy way to represent data as a string and if you work with JSON every day, you'll know how much easier it is to use than XML. If you
Speaking I'll be speaking at Velocity Conference New York 2014 Velocity Conference is without a doubt one of my favourite conferences of the year. It's the conference where different topics such as DevOps, web operations, web performance, and mobile explode into being. Packed with some of the best speakers in the industry; it's a great place to learn and network.
ASP.NET What is the difference between Build and Rebuild in Visual Studio? If you are a developer that uses Visual Studio as your IDE, you will be familiar with the Build and Rebuild tasks. I regularly write code in Visual Studio and am used to hitting the Build command when I am developing, but have often wondered what is actually happening under
CSS Loading CSS Asynchronously When it comes to web page performance, the size and weight of every resource on the page is important. Large JavaScript and CSS files can slow down your page load times and frustrate your users. There are a number of techniques for loading JavaScript asynchronously and many different techniques for
Content Delivery Networks: Which one is right for you? This article originally appeared in issue 232 of net magazine. It also appeared on their site, but as they moved domains and lost the content, I thought I'd post it on here. I hope you find this article useful! Imagine if I told you that you could drastically increase the
Web Performance The Ultimate Image Optimization Cheat Sheet Images play a massive role in modern web development today. They comprise of around 62% of the average page’s total payload, which is an astonishing amount! In terms of web page performance, images can be a huge performance roadblock, but they don't have to be. Simple image optimization techniques
Programming Visual Studio - Why should I remove unused references? When it comes to writing code, I like everything to be neat and follow a certain set of coding guidelines. I like to adhere to the principle that I always code as if the next person who ends up maintaining my code is a violent psychopath who knows where I
Web Performance Automatically removing unused CSS using Grunt I have previously blogged about the importance of keeping your web pages lean and the impact that unused CSS can have on your page performance. Apart from causing cluttered files, unused CSS can can slow down page load times due to the unnecessary weight of the file. Google Chrome developer
ASP.NET Validating email addresses in .NET - Handy Tip If you've ever written any code that sends emails before, I'm pretty sure that you've had to validate the email addresses that are entered by users. Email address validation can be tricky at the best of times and with international domain names in email addresses, almost anything is possible. In
Web Performance Remove unused CSS in your Web Application I've previously blogged about my CSS skills and to be honest - they suck! I normally resort to using pre-rolled frameworks such as Twitter's Bootstrap, Foundation or TopCoat. These frameworks are really useful and their components help you get the basics of your UI up and running in no time.
ASP.NET Extending System.Web.Optimization The ASP.NET framework is packed with loads of great features and with each release it seems to get better and better. One of my favourite features is the bundling and minification classes that optimize JavaScript and CSS files in a website to reduce file size and improve page performance.
IIS IIS - Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type application/x-font-woff If you take a look at websites such as Medium, SquareSpace and Information Architects, it's clear that great typography can really enhance the look of a website. Web fonts are a great way to introduce typography to your website and can be added in a matter of minutes. Adding a
ASP.NET Working with multiple Web.Config files When dealing with multiple development environments, it can often be quite tricky to keep track of the different environment specific settings that you may have in place. Fortunately, Visual Studio has a handy feature that allows you to have more than one Web.Config file for different environments. I have
