Author: Chris
-
Blueing
A Norwegian fairy tale trope in every day life, the effect of atmospheric perspective on a landscape makes you long for the horizon. Known as “Sju blåner”, or “seven blues” in English, it is an old expression and a measure of infinite distance. Like other literary tropes – “once upon a time”, “a long, long…
-
Searchable, filterable and randomly-ordered masonry-style, intersection-observed and Bootstrap-based card gallery
That’s a mouthful, but let me explain – I needed something that would do it all. For Black History Month 2023, we wanted to have a glow-up on the old, ordinary resource sections and reading lists of the past and replace it with something that would be feel fresh on every arrival whilst containing all…
-
Shelf Wiki concept
Without proper file management, having staff change over time and different technologies coming and going, it can be quite difficult to keep everything in order. What about if someone leaves – their institutional knowledge is lost. This could be catastrophic if they were the only one! Our issues weren’t quite this bad, but over time…
-
Upgrading PHPMail to Gmail SMTP using PHPMailer and Google reCAPTCHA
Contact forms are a must on websites, preventing the need for email addresses to be on display and at risk to search-engine spiders as well as providing anti-spam protection from bots. In the past, I’ve used a simple PHP mail() setup which relies on the hosting plan’s local mail server, configured in the php.ini file.…
-
Searching a database table using MySQL LIKE and PHP prepared statements
To finish off a PHP Wiki I’ve been developing, this week I wrote a very simple database content search, which leverages prepared statements and SQL LIKE. As is tradition at this point, a nice Paint diagram to get down my thoughts and work through what it is I was trying to achieve: a search bar…
-
Photography Twitter bot
I’ve taken photos for years. First with film cameras and then the early 2000s digital cameras when they first started emerging. I was gifted my first “proper” camera on my 16th birthday – the 8MP Fujifilm S8000FD bridge camera – and over the next 5 years I snapped 120,000 images before upgrading to a Sony…
-
Rivers in trees
I’ve always loved taking pictures of oblique angles, and with trees this often means just looking straight up. Fascinated by nature’s pattern of creating rivers of sky between tree canopies, for some reason I had never thought to look up why. “Crown Shyness” or the less poetic “canopy disengagement” has been studied in scientific literature…
-
Virtual Welcome Fair 2020
During the coronavirus pandemic, less than a year into my employment, there was a massive increase in the website requirements as almost all of our services began operating online. As part of our new student arrivals period each September, we would usually host a Welcome Fair that more than 5000 students visit over the two…
-
Meeting WCAG
Meeting the WCAG 2.X guidelines in time for the introduction of Accessibility Regulations in September 2020 was a great opportunity to confirm that the organisation was ensuring digital equality as standard. I was actively producing a compliant statement and met at least AA standard across the website several months prior to this deadline, working closely…
-
Harwich RDF Tower
I’ve recently been juggling quite a few projects, for both work and freelancing. I feel my own portfolio website has slipped a little by the wayside in delivering these other projects, but then surely that’s the point of a portfolio anyway, no? Harwich RDF Tower The Harwich RDF Tower project has been very enjoyable and…