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Rumyra’s Head

Compressing imagesMay 12, 2015

I’m currently doing a WordPress -> Middleman shuffle for our team blog at work. This came from a review of all our infrastructure and where we could do some cost cutting. We decided to decommission the WordPress site, as the content was primarily flat, (just blog posts), and we could host that for free on Github pages.

Most of the build was pretty straight forward. As a quick run down I chose to use middleman as I was already familiar with it, I added the middleman-blog and middleman-deploy gems to make my life easier and translated all the posts to markdown using the wp2middleman command line tool. There are plenty of good tutorials out there that run you through this.

When it came to transferring over the media it became important to me to keep the size of the images down to a minimum. Page weights are getting heavier these days (imo) unnecessarily. So when asking in the wonderful Front End London Slack about what I could use for batch image compression I received the following responses:Full ArticleTweet activated roseMarch 30, 2015

To see how to make the rose, please see my blog post over here on my craft blog, (it seemed a more appropriate place for a how to make pattern).

TLDR; I crocheted a rose, a couple of rows of which contained wire, I then sewed LEDs on the rose in a parallel circuit. This post describes how I made it flash when someone tweets with a specified string, head down to the bottom of the post if you don’t care about the code, there’s a cool video 🙂

Lit up crocheted rose, with equipment and code running to make it flash

The idea

What I want to happen, now I have a rose which lights up, its to have it flash any time anyone tweets with a string I specify. (The idea came from my workplace, as O2 sponsor the England rugby team, the rose is the English rose and the hash tag to look out for was one O2 was promoting – #WearTheRose).

Along with the rose, I needed an Arduino (I used an Arduino UNO), a script that looked for tweets containing the string I specified and broadcasted them to an Arduino script, which turned the LEDs on when triggered.Full ArticleOut with the mechanical, in with the ‘computerised’February 20, 2015

I like to think I’m comfortable with new technology, that I’m a woman who embraces new exciting developments in the world around her. I almost grew up online, dad always made sure there was a computer in the house and I thank him for that, because if it wasn’t for the BBC there wouldn’t have been any Chuckie Egg (imagine a world without Chuckie Egg, not even). I had one of the Motorola bricks at college and finally my own HP Desktop computer at university with shiny shiny windows 2000.

I always want to urge people to try new things, new things can be better, worried that those that are ‘happy with what they have’ could be missing out on better processes, saving time, seeing more awesome.

old mechanical janome sewing machine next to new computerised sewing machine

But today, today I saw the other side. Today I got a new sewing machine.Full ArticleToday I was given a web page design…February 6, 2015

This isn’t my typical way of working these days. User experience & flow, UI & wireframing, design, mark up, styling and interactivity are all very iterative to me. They don’t come in a waterfall sequential order anymore. Working in a lab team, I concentrate on seeing whether an idea, product or technology to solve a problem is useful, before it goes into production, so I usually prioritise content, UX flow and interactivity, before a finished perfectly styled site or app.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think styling is important, I just have to weigh up priorities with time constraints. I also built some starter files (more about these later) to help me along the way with styling, so it doesn’t fall by the wayside entirely.

Sorry I’m getting side tracked…Full ArticleJust a quick Friday tipJanuary 30, 2015

I know a lot of you out there are already aware of this and to you it will seem obvious, however, I’ve found myself giving this tip a few times over the past couple of weeks, so think it’s worth quickly noting.

If you have a containing element, (div…Full ArticleChaining CSS :not()January 19, 2015

I found myself using the CSS psuedo class :not() the other day. It proved superbly useful. For those that are unaware, by adding it to your CSS, you can choose not to affect a set of elements.

myelement:not(.ofthisclass) { style: property; }

There…Full ArticleI want a sarcasm element!November 14, 2014<sarcasm>Throws toys out the pram</sarcasm>

For aaaggees now I’ve wanted a way to express my sarcasm over the internets. When you’re typing this can be pretty hard… it can get lost pretty quickly when words on a screen don’t come with tone.

Enter…Full Article