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Quicklink and Website Carbon
In the never-ending pursuit of speed, us site builders trundle our hamster wheels round an array of different technologies. Image compression, JavaScript and CSS minification, CDNs, conformance with web standards, server cacheing and response times, redirect...
Can a web page have too much white space?
Can a web page have too much white space? It's an innocent question and may even appear to be impertinent given how much white space is embraced, even revered, by web designers - myself included. White space is at the heart of the less is more...
Adding a scroll indicator
Scroll bars have been with us since the first GUI. They help us navigate content that is taller - or wider - than the window in which it is displayed. They come in various flavours, suitably modified as operating systems evolved, but invariably they consist of an...
Nature therapy and VE Day
The vault of heaven was almost discernible from under the skies above Newtimber Hill in Sussex yesterday. It is six weeks into a 'lockdown' trying to stem the advance of the coronavirus pandemic and it was our first venture by car anywhere in that time. Grief lies...
Pixel squeezing with JPEGmini
The smaller an image file size is, the better. Get that wrong and your page will load more slowly, your users will leave more quickly, your site SEO will suffer and the site's carbon footprint will tread more heavily. Anyone posting images to the web engages with...
Backdrop CMS: content, config, site launch and back-up
With Backdrop CMS being a fork of Drupal, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything in Backdrop will be similar to everything in Drupal 7. It mostly...
The BBC Sounds app and the onTabletFling() event
Rants don't usually contain reasoned explanations. Although this may sound like one, it therefore isn't - as you will see. The BBC Sounds app (for Android) is so unfit for purpose that...
Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery
London's Tate Modern is home to some gorgeous Bridget Riley canvases, huge rectangles of rhombic mosaics, in shifting colour that one can stand in front of and lose oneself in. A fifteen minute stroll west along the embankment, the Hayward Gallery seems to have all...
Farewell Drupal 8. Hello Backdrop CMS
I have written before of my love affair with Drupal 7 and, separately, of my anxiety about Drupal 8. Drupal 7's abandon-ship, event-horizon end-of-life looms on...
Entangled Life
When Hamlet admonished Horatio by saying "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy", fungi could well have been one of them, as Merlin Sheldrake's scintillating book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds,...
The Eye of the Storm
As the near-blind matriarch Elizabeth Hunter, the central character of Patrick White's 1973 The Eye of the Storm, lies dying for five hundred and fifty pages of this long and complex novel, we are also reading about the writer's own mother, Ruth. After all...
The Captain and the Glory
Anyone familiar with George Orwell's Animal Farm will appreciate how satire shifts the reader one remove away from a subject to gain a better appreciate of that subject. The farm's animals, bitingly depicted by Orwell, illuminated the political landscape of...
The Vivisector
Patrick White's The Vivisector, the writer's longest novel, explores the nature of artistic creativity and the link between a painter's character and the work that it gives rise to. As with all White's novels, scenes from the author's own life serve as mini...
The Solid Mandala
In a letter to the writer Ingmar Björkstén in early 1973, the Australian novelist Patrick White wrote that he felt very close to The Solid Mandala "because it conveys a certain nightmarish quality of life which I have experienced, though the incidents in...
Riders in the Chariot
Compassion. Compassion towards the outsider, the foreigner, the misfit, the ugly, the plodder: this is the central theme of Patrick White's 1961 novel Riders in the Chariot. Read it for his view of Australian culture emerging from the Second World War; read...
Voss
Towards the end of Patrick White's novel Voss, White observes for one of his characters that only "the supreme torturer would have tweaked the curtain of illusion" (and thus caused her to imagine her childhood garden to be reflected in the face of her...
The Tree of Man
It was quite possibly the recent Australian bushfires that subconsciously put Patrick White's extraordinary fiction back onto my reading list. Those terrifyingly vivid tongues of fire and crisped lives were images I'd already encountered in his writing. Whatever the...
Moby-Dick
I have just been floored by Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It is a novel wrought of elemental stuff with a style honed with so much more craft than ever I had expected. It's not a what-happens-next page-turner; that's already known. I felt that my progress...
The Dispossessed
Placing this book in the 'science-fiction' category probably deters many people from reading it. Yes, it's a story set on an imaginary world (the paired planet of Urras and its moon Anarres). Yes, there's something arguably scientific in the form of 'the Principle...
Ightham Mote
The name Ightham Mote - whose four-consonant apparent tongue-twister contributes to the surprisingly easy Item Mote - may be derived from the Anglo-Saxon words eyot and ham, meaning island home. True or not, this medieval Kentish...
The i360, Brighton
It has been difficult not to glimpse the Brighton i360's pencil-thin outline from the South Downs, showing it black against the sea below it or flashing sunlight off its aluminium and glass surfaces as the coast curves round from Worthing's staid and matronly...
Lincoln Cathedral
Lincoln's majestic cathedral dominates the surrounding plain from its spectacular perch atop Lincoln Cliff. Its bulk - already planted 50 metres above the surrounding plain - soars skywards a further 83 metres. Seen in almost any weather, the cathedral exerts an...
Stokesay Castle
Climb to the top of Stokesay Castle's south tower and you are rewarded with a 360 degree prospect that could be one of the loveliest in all England, the gently rolling hills of Shropshire, Houseman's "blue remembered hills" with his spires and farms. From atop that...
Sezincote
Sezincote near Bourton-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire, was an early 19th century attempt to replicate the architecture of the Mughal Emperor Akbar who ruled from 1556 to 1605 and was known for his conscious mingling of Islamic and Hindu architectural styles. His...
St Botolph's Church, Hardham
The white-washed St Botolph's Church in Hardham, West Sussex, was almost certainly built before the Conquest. It is dedicated to a Saxon saint (the 7th century fenland St Botolph) and has a traditional square east end, rather than a more Romanesque rounded end that...
Haddon Hall
When the rain of Derbyshire falls on the Peak District, the stones of Haddon Hall are scoured by it and progressively rounded. The castle's ancient sluice-ways run silver alongside the timeless footsteps of its occupants. Though each weigh little by...
St. Celynin‘s Church at Llangelynnin
Sloping down to the seashore and pointing towards distant Bardsey Island, which appears as a smudge of shadow shaped like a jockey's cap on the far horizon, is the medieval St. Celynin‘s Church at Llangelynnin, north of Towyn. The slope of the land shows...
Parham House
Some of this country's finest houses are perched on a hilltop, others tucked away in woodland, some dominate a landscape with imposing intent, others block uninvited entry with obvious fortification. Aside from a stone ha-ha to keep out curious deer, Parham House...
The Uig Sands Chessmen
The oldest rocks in Britain are found in the Outer Hebrides. These are twisted Lewisian gneisses which were formed up to 3,000 million years ago, two-thirds of the known age of our planet. Essentially, they are igneous rocks made from magma deep within the...