An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order’ sign, just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs, Sorry for the convenience’.
The concept of progressive enhancement, in a nutshell.
Blog
Block referrer spam from the SEMalt botnet
We are trialling the following solution for blocking what is fast becoming a scourge of the web; SEMalt referrer spam.
It’s been added to the .htaccess file on one of our personal sites, and we’ll see how it does there before implementing these measures on the rest of the sites we manage. Update to follow.
UPDATE: While blocking at the server IS working, there is much more to blocking this type of spam which is detailed here and here.
Make the new Twitter profiles more readable
Twitter is currently rolling out it’s redesigned profile pages, mainly to make Twitter more appealing for new users who may already be used to other social networks (read: Facebook).
That’s all well and good, but what about us, more seasoned users? Tough. Instead of a nice compact stream of information, we’re stuck with masses of whitespace and wildly varying font sizes. At times, this results in seeing as few as 4 tweets at a time, even on a 1080p desktop display.
If you’re using a modern browser (and you really should be), this won’t be a problem for long. If you don’t already have it, install the Stylish add-on [ Firefox | Chrome ] and our Twitter Profile Compactor user style.
This little chunk of CSS removes the excess whitespace and ensures the font sizes of tweets are all uniform. That’s a bit better!
If you get stuck at any point, give us a shout on Twitter and if you have any ideas for making this work better with the new Twitter profiles, the code is up on GitHub.
A Whistle Stop Tour of Git
Having just spent the afternoon showing Karin from Scream Blue Murder how to use git, I figured this would be a useful reference. It’s super quick because there is little to no explanation here, just the raw commands. It’s up to you to do a bit more research to understand what’s going on! Saying that, there should be enough here to get you working with git, even if you don’t grasp it all – just dive right in and play around.
Site Launch: James North Thrillers
We’ve recently launched a website and blog for author James North. James needed a website to augment the release of his upcoming book Deep Deception on 8th November and there was only a 3 week window to get the site designed and built.