Citizensheep.com is the blog of me, Michael Grimes.
Sinatra itself has useful help pages, but (so far) this the best tutorial I’ve found. Creating Database-driven Apps with Sinatra
An up-to-date set of comparison tables for browser support of CSS3 selectors and HTML5 properties. It doesn’t include IE9, because they have a whole separate page of tables previewing IE9 support for HTML5 and CSS3. Visit Web Designer’s Checklist
This page has been around for a good while. I’m flagging it up now because I’m trying to build up a sort of toolkit and primer for colleagues managing websites; the rather unsophisticated ‘every user should have exactly the same experience on our website’ is – sadly and surprisingly – still a common attitude. This [...]
This is a very nice demonstration of what HTML5/CSS3 is capable of, and shows how ready the various browsers are for it. Visit HTML5 Readiness
I’m trying to teach myself Rails, but I’m not even a programmer. So when I’m stumped, I’m fairly stumped. Currently my app is not saving form data when it should be, and redirecting when it shouldn’t. Update I’ve actually fixed this now. It was the ‘home_path’ route that was causing the problems. Thanks to everyone [...]
Nibbler is a free online tool for testing websites. Give it a URL and it will test five associated pages against a range of criteria. It's still in Alpha, and I haven't looked closely to see how it actually works, but it could be very useful as part of a web developer's toolkit. Visit Nibbler [...]
This is really interesting, because I always assumed that online registration forms were easier to use if their components were separated clearly. This post suggests that in fact a narrative paragraph containing the form fields in-line is more likely to encourage use. Thanks to Martin Black for drawing my attention to this on Twitter. Visit [...]
A set of very handy lists of online web development tools, neatly and clearly laid out. Covers inspiration and design as well as markup, coding and marketing. Visit Web Design Dashboard
I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that I have any skills of note, and keep meaning to force myself to try and audit them just to check. So here I’ve spelled out what I do in my day job, and some of the challenges I’ve faced. Although I’m still not sure I know any [...]
I haven’t tried it yet, but this could make the creation of web accessible video much easier: it purports to enable you to add transcripts to your YouTube videos. Thanks to Andy Mabbett for alerting me to it. Visit Easy YouTube caption creator
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This work by Michael Grimes is subject to a Creative Commons License (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike).