May 9, 2017

This is the third piece in a series of posts about improving my blog built on Jekyll. In this post I’m handling implementation of Service Workers, and enhancing my Google AMP setup further with them.

May 9, 2017

This is the second piece in a series posts about improving my blog built on Jekyll. In this post I’m handling implementation of Google AMP.

May 9, 2017

I’ve been working on some visual and technical improvements to my blog lately. I set out with the goal of making things faster, improving my build tools, and utilizing a Service Worker and Google AMP. My blog uses Jekyll, and is hosted using Github pages, so there were some limitations that I had to consider while setting out to achieve these things. In the first part of this series I explain how I setup Jekyll to use a popular taskrunner called Gulp, and the reasons behind it.

April 1, 2017

I normally write about developer related subjects on my blog but today I’m deviating from that slightly. When my mum and brother visited Austin last week my brother decided to rent a larger car for a day trip, but not just any car, a Tesla Model X 90D. For those unfamiliar with Tesla it’s a company owned by entrepreneur Elon Musk. Their cars are completely electric, packed full of technology, and can even drive themselves. Needless to say I was pretty excited to get behind the wheel.

March 16, 2017

Since Alaska Dispatch News’ launch of Google AMP we’ve run into one issue that keeps popping up: journalists. AMP is quite restrictive, and sometimes human error can cause a document to become invalid. Two of our biggest examples of this come from malformed URL’s, and content pasted from another source due to additional attributes that AMP doesn’t like. While we’ve put in a number of restrictions that curb how their content is filtered through to the AMP site there’s only so much we can do until human intervention is required to solve the issue. But how do you know there’s an issue? Google Webmaster tools reports on AMP errors whenever it crawls the site, but that is not instant and not everyone has access to it, and by the time you’re aware you might have already missed the traffic spike which it may have produced. In order to make sure that all of our articles are reaching their full potential we decided to create a Slack bot using Python.

March 10, 2017

I was in New York City on March 7th and 8th attending Google’s AMPConf on behalf of Alaska Dispatch News. It was two full days of talks and I’m now full of ideas on how to improve our mobile experience. In a previous post of mine I discussed that we were working on our AMP site, as of February 7th it launched and we’ve seen some great results, these are something I hope to share later once we’ve gathered more data.

December 31, 2016

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a product by Google aimed at publishers with the intention of speeding up the delivery of their articles. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been working on numerous improvements to the Alaska Dispatch News website to eliminate roadblocks in an effort to make it AMP compliant.

October 16, 2016

On October 12th to the 13th I attended Steam Dev Days, an event hosted by Valve Software in Seattle, Washington. I was representing Red Moon Workshop, an indie developer whom I’ve been helping lately with their web content, and with the creation of their first game title, Shot One.

October 9, 2016

Recently I’ve been working on a showcase website for a group of game developers based in Austin Texas called Red Moon Workshop. I’ve worked with them in the past on other projects, so I was happy to get the opportunity to revisit. Red Moon Workshop creates cosmetic items for Valve titles such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. They are also working on their own title called Shot One.

August 14, 2016

HTTPS (HTTP Secure) has been around for a while, however it’s becoming increasingly important to implement it. Not only does it provide enhanced security, but it’s becoming more common for browsers to prevent access to useful API’s without it. For example without a valid certificate Chrome will block access to the Geolocation and Service Worker API. In addition certain search engines are also starting to favor sites using HTTPS in their site rankings.

July 3, 2016

Lately I’ve been working on a web application using API data from one of my favourite websites, Untappd. Even though the API is not available to everyone, I wanted to create a way which allows others with a key to reuse components of my application. After doing some research I came to the decision to use an open-source Javascript library by Google called Polymer. It’s specifically designed for building web applications, and offers a number of pre-built components. The cherry on top is that Polymer works really well with service workers, another API I’ve been excited to try.

June 23, 2016

Something I’ve been working on lately has been reducing the CSS footprint of the Alaska Dispatch site. During the mad rush to launch it had become bloated and was failing to meet best practices. There were specificity issues, a rampant use of !important tags and the file size was getting too large.

May 30, 2016

After almost a year in development the site I’ve been working on for Alaska Dispatch News has been released. The website was developed on top of the Washington Posts Arc Publishing tools, and was even featured on their site. In this post I want to give a breif overview of how the website gets its content, and how the newsroom staff at Alaska Dispatch can utilize the tools to modify the entire site on a day-to-day basis with almost no developer involvement.

May 2, 2016

I spent three days in April in the town of Oxford located in the South West country side of England. I was there to attend a Front-End Developer conference called “Render”. The conference boasted some great speakers from companies such as Google, Facebook, npm and more.