Reads, Takes and Links

Author: chris

  • Visualising the wiki holes you fall down with Pilgrim

    I just came across Pilgrim, an interesting web thing that converts pages inrto a more readable, ad-free version of their form self, but also visualises the links you click to get an map out where you end up going as you look through it. I’m finding these tools, and ones like hypothesis, and Pockets’ recent…

  • How much CO2 does an office worker generate per year?

    I just posted this to friends on Facebook, and it seems a good idea to share it here too, to help with my search: Hello internet friends. Would a kind soul be able to help me out here? I’m doing a recorded 20 minute talk in Feb about the environmental impact of building digital products…

  • Recap – storing state in a browser for users

    I’ve been working on some static sites recently, and I needed to show some content to someone, but allow it to be dismissed easily, and then stay dismissed. This is much a note to future me as anyone else, but hopefully it’ll be helpful to some other soul on the net. Doing this with frameworks…

  • Super hand tip – search your own tabs in Firefox

    If you’re like me. You have too many tabs open. So many in fact that you might open the same tab multiple times because you forgot when you last opened it. Firefox tab search is your friend When using Firefox, there’s a hidden feature which I only found out about last week. You can restrict…

  • Book review: Time is Money – The business Value of Web Performance

    Since discovering how significant the  energy impact of moving data over networks is for the Planet Friendly Web Guide, I’ve found myself reading more and more about web performance optimisation (WPO). Last week I ordered Tammy Evert’s book, Time is Money – the Business Value of Web Performance. It arrived on Saturday morning, and I…

  • Sporadic video recommendation # 3 – Yulia Startsev, on side effects, promise and generators in javascript

    I’ve been trying to get back up to speed again with javascript recently, and with all the new features being added each year, I’m starting to like it much more than I did before. Try as I might, though I hadn’t really got my head around how to use generators, or when they might be…

  • This is not news but Mozilla’s Developer Docs site is fantastic

    I recently was trying to debug why some snazzy passwordless sign-in flow wasn’t working on Firefox for me, when it worked just fine on Chrome, and investigation lead to me reading up on CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), a way to share access to resources (like images, js files and so on) across domains. I’m…

  • Does peer to peer matched funding exist online?

    I met a guy a few years back, Premasagar Rose. We got on well, and we had a lot of similar interests, but I didn’t know he had left the UK for Portugal until I saw a tweet along these lines: My friends, I need help to spread — We're crowdfunding to rebuild homes after…

  • An update on election Hackday and the goals of WhoTargets.me

    Earlier in August, I went to a hack day with a few friends to work on WhoTargetsMe, a project started by some people in London. We ended up working on the project because we felt that platforms like Facebook had emerged, that were were powerful in the same way that you might consider TV and…

  • On fairphone, and sustainable electronics

    I’ve been a Fairphone user since 2013, when the first phone came out, and I’ve been a user of the FP2, the first phone the company designed fully themselves. In this post, I explain the process of updating it to extend its life, compared with buying a new one, and how hard doing sustainable electronics…