Writing - Featured

General thoughts and tips that don't fit nicely into any of the other categories.

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COP27 Egypt: A webpage sustainability review

As COP27 approaches, I thought it would be “fun” to take a look at this year’s COP homepage. How does it do in terms of website sustainability?

Screenshot of the Performance Insights site.
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Testing a page with Performance Insights

Performance Insights is a tool by Builder.io (http://builder.io/) which, in their words, allows you to learn what improvements can have the greatest impact on your site's performance.

Worms-eye view of building in the daytime.
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YouTube facades with Cloudflare Workers

YouTube embeds can added megabytes of data to a website, even if they are not watched by the user. This post looks at a way to use Cloudflare Workers plus a facade to reduce that initial data load.

Man peeking out from behind a wall with a quizzical look on his face.
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Hidden in plain sight

I was recently shown a code snippet that that a designer friend implemented on a website to combat flash of unstyled text (FOUT). It did so in a way that could possibly have negative impacts on a visitor’s page loading experience.

Cartoon illustration of an astronaut floating against a black background. Text read: Flowty - Webflow optimisations for carbon conscious designers.
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Introducing Flowty - Build low carbon, self-hosted Webflow sites

Webflow is a great service for designers who want to create amazing websites for clients. It does leave a few things on the table when it comes to web sustainability though. Flowty gives designers who build with Weblow the power to create fast, low-carbon, self-hosted sites in minutes.

Multi-coloured pens against a black background
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Creating user personas for website performance testing

The web makes it possible for businesses to reach audiences well outside of their immediate geographic area. This presents its own set of challenges to ensure online content and experiences remain fast for potential customers around the world.

grey steel buckets on wooden floor
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Proxying AWS S3 content with Cloudflare Workers

Using resources hosted by a third-party can seriously hurt website performance in a few ways. In this post, we'll cover how you can use a proxy to reduce the performance impact when hosting content in AWS S3 bucket.

Graffiti art of a black security camera painted in a white frame.
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This website is a FLoC-free zone

I switched analytics away from Google late last year. Now, I've also added response headers that will exclude this site from FLoC calculations too.

CSS programming language
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CSS can probably do that

Rather than immediately reaching for JavaScript to handle on-page interactions, why not stop and think Could CSS do that? You'd be surprised, it probably can.

Screenshot of the Fathom Analytics dashboard (Source: Fathom Analytics)
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Google Analytics Alternatives

There's an increasing number of privacy-focused alternatives to Google Analytics. This article covers a few options you can use to keep your website visitors information out of the hands of digital advertisers.

Image with text 'Optimised' centered
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Introducing Optimised

Optimised is a fortnightly newsletter focused on the ways website performance and optimisation can help your customers, your business, and the planet.

Photo of comma separated data.
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Generate CSV Files from Data with 11ty

Eleventy is one heck of a powerful, incredibly flexible static site generator. This short guide will show you how you can generate CSV data files using Eleventy.

Photo of book and computer keyboard.
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Boost branding and engagement with Open Graph meta tags

When we share content on social media we want it to be read. This blog posts introduces how Open Graph tags can be used to present eye-catching, consistenly branded shared content across social media platforms.

View overlooking Taipei city and Yangmin Mountain National Park in Taiwan.
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Freelancing in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic

As a freelancer, and someone who was working remotely in the months before COVID-19 you'd think not a lot has changed for me since. In this post I go through what life is like in Taiwan, and how the coronavirus pandemic has also led to a change in my daily working habits.

Banner for Markdown Cheat Sheet, the first Svelte app I made.
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Building my first app with Svelte 3

After doing a few tutorials last month, I finally got around to creating my first app in Svelte. In this blog post I go through some of my first impressions on the framework as I start building with the training wheels taken off!

Image of working remotely from a cafe
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What I've learnt in two months working remotely.

On the back of Buffer's 2019 State of Remote Work report, I take a look back at my transition from being office-bound to location independent. What's met my expectations, what's surprised me, and what challenges I've faced.

Cover image showing the final landing page created in this tutorial.
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Build landing pages to promote webinars across different time zones

With the global nature of broadcasting online, many events - from sports tournaments to webinars - require promotion across multiple time zones. In this tutorial, I'll cover how to create a simple set of multi-time zone landing pages for a webinar series.

Technology photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
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Why I now run my website on Netlify and Sanity

Recently I moved my entire website from Heroku to Netlify. The key driver was to remove the $7 monthly cost of running on Heroku's 'Hobby' plan. It's also allowed me able to make the website more performant without losing the ability to add and manage content. Oh, and I was also able to build this blog into the newly migrated website pretty quickly too!

A photo of me while traveling in South Korea
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'Hello, world.' A little bit about me.

This will hopefully be the first of many blog posts in which I cover content spanning web development, running a business, freelancing, and just general musings. Here's a little bit more about me, my hobbies, my past lives professionally and what I'm doing these days.