Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
Achieving consistent mobile rendering
22.11.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: Technical Comments: none
As a developer from time to time you come up against issues that have not been documented and can take hours to find a fix for. Unfortunately we recently encountered such a scenario and felt it appropriate to document the solution to help other developers in the future.
The curse of consistency
23.08.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: CSS, General, Technical Comments: none
Consistency can be vital to a project’s success, certainly when we refer to accessibility and usability, but sometimes consistency can be a hidden curse. The purpose of this post is to inform the non-developer types out there when consistency should be disregarded.
The future of mobile websites
10.08.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: CSS, General, Technical Comments: 1
As we continue to invest time into research and development, it’s becoming more apparent that the digital mobile landscape is evolving. More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web and access information on the go. It seems like only yesterday i wrote an article on “The increasing need for mobile compatible sites” but since then a lot has changed meaning perhaps a new approach is emerging.
Resources for building HTML emails
28.06.2011 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none
HTML emails add a professional look to website correspondence and help to continue the brand experience during communications with your clients. If only they weren’t such a pain to build!
Server-side Map Marker Clustering
24.06.2011 By: eugeneingram">eugeneingram Under: Technical Comments: none
How do you provide clustered markers in Google Maps for dynamic site content when you have 120,000 items and counting in your database? This was a problem we were recently presented with for a geo-tagging solution that would allow articles and user provided content such as photographs to be geo-tagged and shown in Google Maps in a visually appealing way.
Optimising content for different users
21.06.2011 By: ronansprake">ronansprake Under: CSS, Technical Comments: none
At Soak, site performance is a point of pride. Furthermore, as a client-side developer, this mostly comes down to the work I do. Apart from religiously following best-practice guidelines and adopting tools such as Firebug and Smush.it, what more can be done?
CSS3 Scalable Background Images
12.04.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: Creative, CSS, Technical Comments: none
CSS3 Comes with a range of nifty new features allowing the modern I-Dev to push the boundaries of what is possible within website presentation. Although a lot of the CSS2/3 features may have been around a while it’s only recently that support has been good enough to warrant using some of the many new features.
One of my favourite tricks is the scalable background image, I’m sure you have already started to see this on a few sites and in time I think more and more people with look at adopting this approach. The below example is based on pure CSS, there are ways to include JavaScript to support older browsers but personally I think the idea of progressive enhancement is that a website should render better for users with capable browsers therefore encouraging users with older browsers to upgrade.
See Example ยป
CSS3 Thinking outside the box
06.04.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: CSS, Soak Related, Technical Comments: none
CSS3 Child Element Detection… Is it possible?
I was recently asked by a fellow developer if there was a way to detect if a HTML object contains a certain element and alter the CSS styles depending on the element it contains.
The Scenario:
“You want to target all anchor elements containing a link to a pdf BUT if the link to the pdf contains an image you don’t want the same styling to apply:”
The increasing need for mobile compatible sites
13.01.2011 By: adamcollison">adamcollison Under: Industry News, Technical, Trends Comments: 1
As technology marches on there is always something new to keep developers busy; it only feels like a couple of years ago it was the use of Flash in websites. This quickly changed with a trend towards Facebook integration and iPhone apps, now with ever increasing sales of smartphones it seems like the current trend is for mobile browsing. We always knew that mobile browsing would improve but I didn’t expect mobile browsers to evolve so quickly.
Terms of use for Social Media logos
12.10.2010 By: alanofford">alanofford Under: Creative, Technical Comments: none
Everyone these days is into social media. Gone are the days when clients would um and ah about whether or not it was just another trendy marketing buzz-word. Now we often get requests from clients, sometimes half-way through a project, asking where we can position their Twitter feed. In fact, the term ‘social media’ may be coming close to jumping the shark, with developers like Ryan Waggoner washing their hands of developing apps for Facebook, and Twitter introducing a new site which aggregates the information from the third party apps that helped make Twitter so ubiquitous.