Jonathan Miles, Freelance Web Designer

Basic image optimisation mistakes (crimes against images)

Jon — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:00:06 +0000

Image optimisation is about making images that are suitable for the web. That means reaching a balance between file size and quality, to ensure an image looks good and downloads fast. There are a few mistakes that beginners often make. Mistake 1: Unnecessarily big images A classic mistake is to use a big, high resolution [...]

Debugger statements make YUI Compressor error

Jon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:30:40 +0000

YUI Compressor 2.4.2 gave me this error when I tried to minify a JavaScript file: 1[java] [ERROR] 4447:21:identifier is a reserved word Line number 4447 is a code block like this: 12if (debugging) debugger; The problem is the debugger statement – I’m not sure why because it isn’t being used as the name [...]

The Beatles: Rock Band

Jon — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:15:28 +0000

My copy of The Beatles: Rock Band for the Wii arrived last Friday – not on the Wednesday, despite GameConnection‘s claim that pre-orders are dispatched to “arrive on the day of release” (I have an email telling me it was dispatched on the game’s release date). I’m a patient person though, so a short wait [...]

New website design

Jon — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:10:32 +0000

My colourful new website design makes a change from the last one – you can see my previous designs over on the design page. My starting point for this latest design was a blog post showing how to make abstract art with Illustrator. By using the twirl tool it’s possible to create some nice swirly [...]

Hiding Joomla’s author meta tag

Jon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:15:57 +0000

Joomla’s metadata is output by a simple jdoc statement from within the website’s template: 1<jdoc:include type="head" /> When the template is up and running on a website that simple line will produce the relevant metadata in the HTML: 12345678<base href="http://www.example.com/" /> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <meta name="keywords" content="fun" /> [...]

Resizing images with jQuery

Jon — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:15:31 +0000

The other week I came across a post about resizing images with jQuery. The idea is simple: use JavaScript to detect the size of the browser window (or whatever metric works best for you) and then replace any images with smaller versions if needed. My immediate thought was that this technique would work great on [...]

Getting the first frame of FLVs

Jon — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:15:18 +0000

Videos often look best when the first frame is visible before playback begins – they’re known as poster frames. But until playback begins the first frame won’t have been downloaded. So a technique to achieve the desired effect is to initially display a static thumbnail image taken from the very first frame of video. When [...]

Cufon ignoring font colours

Jon — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:25:01 +0000

Recently I was working on a website and using the rather natty Cufon (a clever bit of JavaScript) to do some font replacement. Or at least that was my intention – for some reason it was ignoring the font colour I’d set in my stylesheet… Always add stylesheets before scripts The problem was that I’d [...]

Fingerjig 1.3: jQuery on-screen keyboard

Jon — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:26:11 +0000

Fingerjig 1.3 is now available to play and it comes with a new feature that I think will particularly help players who are learning to type. I’ve had to restrict the new feature to Firefox only, so I’ll explain why I had to do that in a moment. For those of you who are using [...]

Left 4 Dead survival map: Overworked

Jon — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:45:33 +0000

Over the last couple of months I’ve spent some of my spare time creating a survival map for Valve Software’s zombie shooter, “Left 4 Dead”. The map is called “Overworked” and requires you to try and fend off the zombies from a couple of small office buildings. If you get a chance to try it [...]