Game Dynamics and Life Data

When the Xbox 360 launched it brought with it Gamerscore, a cumulative score based upon the earning of achievements. I use the word ‘earned’ purposely, the larger scores often require a lot of time and dedication. On Xbox Live I have just shy of 3000 achievement points, I spent an hour this morning trying to… Read more »

Internets all the way down

The biggest change in the digital world over the past five years has been the change in how the average consumer expects to be able to interact with a brand online. In 2010, there were 12.5 billion devices connected to the Internet. Cisco IBSG predicts there will be 25 billion by 2015 and 50 billion… Read more »

Event-driven programming in the browser

On the front end we use events every day but without jQuery many of these wouldn’t exist. DOM Ready has only recently become a real browser event, before that libraries like jQuery and Prototype created and fired it for us. DOM Ready was a custom event and the functionality for creating custom events exists for… Read more »

Lessons learned from making a website in 2011

I’ve just about finished my first site of 2011 and as ever learnt some things along the way. Lesson one: Killing IE6 only makes things slightly easier The Internet hates Internet Explorer 6. Not supporting it was a weight off my mind but look at your browser list without it and you’d be forgiven for… Read more »

Beware of getScript callbacks when document.write and eval get involved

Update, 10/11/11: Since I first wrote this post several excellent script loaders have been released, notably YepNope.js and the defer and async attributes have made it into the webkit builds so the problems described above will become easier to cause! Event driven programming can work around this problem and maintain the structure of your files…. Read more »

Web directions @media 2010

Attended my first @media conference this week, all really good talks that left me with lots to try and research. Fridays keynote was excellent, Andy Clarke spoke about hard-boiled web design. The idea was that by designing and developing to include the weaker browsers we’re putting limits on what we can achieve. Andy’s approach is… Read more »

Circular Animation

Circles are prettier than than straight lines, that’s basically fact. This quick script places and rotates items around a central point. This was going to be the basis of a contextual menu, I’ve gone off the idea but since I’d already wrote the basic code! Circular animation script

JavaScript patterns. Closures, jQuery plugins

I’ve been re-writing a lot of JavaScript recently, as part of a move from Prototype to jQuery, and it’s given me a great chance to concentrate on how it’s written rather than what’s written. Carousel implementation Plugins are a major plus in jQuery, but they’re not suited to everything. A plugin is called to act… Read more »

Implementing 3D Secure

3D Secure (3DS) is an authorisation step that can be added to a purchase journey, it’s aim to avoid card fraud by asking for additional security information. There has been lots of discussion/criticism around it’s implementation, my aim in this post is not about these issues but about how to actually implement it. The 3DS… Read more »