A couple of years ago, I was still working at a Dutch web agency. Even before, I lived for a couple of months in India for a study project. At that time, the people and the country gained a special place in my heart. So I always wanted to return and the opportunity came. Together with my wife, who happens to be a designer as well (phew), I flew back to India to meet some friends and, surprisingly, volunteer at an NGO. While it’s already some time ago, I feel it is time to share some of the things that […]
I’ve never been a vivid Instagram user, due to one reason: you can not upload images while being on your desktop, laptop or personal computer. However, it is possible if you are a little clever with a browser and computers. Actually, it is pretty easy. The only prerequisite is that you have the Chrome or Firefox (if you value privacy) web browser installed on your computer. Now Instagram is designed as a mobile-only platform, so it perfectly makes sense to use it mobile only. This is also the use that would be advised. But in some cases, you might want […]
Your WordPress might be optimized for performance. You have caching running, optimized images and your scripts and styles. And now you wonder what might be next to optimize WordPress further. You are a perfectionist, so how else can performance be improved? There are a number of functions WordPress which you might not need and can easily be disabled. I wrote a PHP class which does throws a couple these optimizations together in one class. This class removes a couple of WordPress functionalities which you might not need, as well as a number of JavaScripts. In this way, your WordPress installation […]
Finding a good webhosting company for your WordPress website is not easy with so many contenders. It’s a perfect example of a decision dilemma. The same dilemma that you experience when choosing a fine wine. If you haven’t taste one, it is hard to know which one to pick. Unless there is someone close by who has tasted some of the wines. In the past year I’ve extensively tested three shared WordPress hosts, and I am more than eager to share my taste. The three contenders are GoDaddy, Siteground and Fastcomet and all offer shared hosting packages. According to their […]
The use of imagery is profound in websites, but takes a heavy toll on the loading times of websites. And this is even more true for smaller mobile devices, which often need to download the same images as their high definition counterparts. Although they can be scaled, their file size remains equal. Luckily enough, there is an HTML attribute for the image tag which can help to serve the right. It’s called srcset and sizes. Responsive images used to be about scaling the image proportionally to the width of a device. A desktop would serve the full size images, but […]
You might have a lot of products for sale. And you might want to sell them. In other words, you might want to have a certain product you want to photograph. There is only one problem: you are limited in your budget to rent a professional product photographer. However, with some conventional home equipment, you can make some proper product photographs easily at home. Why should I be able to do this? Imagine you are having a certain product which you want to sell on an online marketplace. Now chances are that there are many like you selling the same […]
Some years ago, I had the common classic keyboard which was somewhat hard to clean. I had some spare hours left, and a keyboard that wasn’t cleaned for 5 years. What to do next? Right, cleaning my keyboard. And the amount of dirt, it was shocking. That’s why I want to introduce three keyboards that are easy to clean, but are also harder to get dirty. Three dust-proof keyboards Logitech Washable Keyboard K310 › This is the keyboard I am personally using, and I really love it. Besides that the design is looking quite good, the keys are stacked upon […]
The way users experience your website is greatly influenced by the interactions users have with your website and how these interactions are perceived. These interactions span from page-loading interactions to just small effects when following conventional links. The following article how CSS Transitions can enhance the experience for visiting links. CSS3 covers a nifty property which enables smooth transitions between different states of a styled element. Let’s say you have a certain div element which changes it background on hovering. Normally, there would be no transition and the background would be immediately changed on hovering. Using transition, we can have […]
Dropdown menus can almost be considered a web standard, and occur for example in many WordPress Themes. Now I’ve worked some times with Superfish plugin, which makes the transition between drop-down menu’s smoother, but it did not work optimal in all cases. Well, with CSS3, it is fairly easy to make a smoothly animated dropdown menu! The good thing is, that we don’t need Javascript. The bad thing is, the animation will not work in older versions of IE. Well, I guess you would have expected that. Nevertheless, it saves a whole piece of Javascript and rewards users of normal […]
Website optimization is an important aspect of a web developers life, as website speed is a determining factor if visitors will stay. In this tutorial, we will look to one small aspect of website optimization, namely the use of image sprites. This will be done with the example of social media icons in svg, which we will render retina compatible with a .png fallback for IE8. What is an image sprite? Image sprites combine reusable images into one single image, thereby reducing the amount of http requests that have to be made. Using CSS and elements with a fixed height […]
