Writing

My main tech writing WAS on the domain allbs.co.uk, however these have all been migrated to this domain (benseymour.com) and there is now a 301 redirect. Below are some popular posts:

Practical Responsive Images – Book: on the release of my new book on Responsive Images, a post providing an introduction and some context

You can’t manage what you don’t measure: simple steps for baselining habitual behaviours, and the motivating effects of tracking ongoing improvements.

NE Dev #2  [LinkedIn]: a write-up of our second developer meet-up based in Middlesborough.

NE Dev #1  [LinkedIn]: a write-up of our first developer meet-up based in Middlesborough, established and coordinated by Darren Lee, Peter Coulton and I.

Multi screen journey’s require adaptive content [Amplience Blog]: Centrally managed content, be it textual, images, video or interactive creative content, can provide considerable improvements to workflow efficiencies, which can reduce your time-to-site, and make it much more feasible to get your carefully crafted and cultivated content in front of eyes that matter the most, and in a consistent manner.

Make More of Your Videos [Amplience Blog] : In addition to the engagement benefits for just serving great video content, we should now also be considering further enriching our video content.

Combining Content and Commerce [Amplience Blog] : Introducing curated commerce elements directly into inspiration content can unleash some extremely interesting potential into the equation. In twelve months of building interactive campaigns one client increased its online revenues by 30%.

Healthy Working : Standing-desk edition :  Are you sitting comfortably? … I hope that you won’t be for long. At the start of the year I decided to make a concerted effort to work in a more health conscious manner. No gym promises, or exercise targets, my plan was to aim low, and to endeavour to form some small habitual improvements which would hopefully work like compound interest, and give noticeable long term benefits.

Azure Like It : Getting started with Microsoft Azure Websites. I need a production IIS  environment for a pet project. Initially setup on Amazon Web Services, it seemed a natural opportunity to further explore Microsoft Azure.

Practical Responsive Images : Art Direction. Following on from yesterday’s Practical Responsive Images post, the next example use of the < picture > element (and using PicturefIll), is to apply a point-of-interest crop to an image to maintain the desired focus at different breakpoints….

Practical Responsive Images : Using PictureFill. Thanks to the work of the Responsive Images Community Group and key supporters, the industry is gaining considerable momentum towards implementing the element and the srcset attribute…

7 Customer Experience Tips : Qubit Bright Sparks. It’s a fantastic line-up to be a part of, and I’ll be doing a “10 minute power talk” about Customer Experience Tips including some recent learnings from some great eCommerce client projects. Main topics I’ll be rapidly covering: 1) Multi screen journey and adaptive content…

Over-Engineering : 800 years of operation. This amazing structure was NOT the crowning glory of Marshall’s dreams, it was a secondary feature, a beacon to encourage and safeguard the traffic that he needed for the business venture he was looking to establish.

The Apprentice Bowl. The most impressive part of the tour was seeing ‘The Apprentice Bowl’. An incredibly intricate bowl, incorporating every pattern that Waterford employs with it’s crystal glass, and requiring 600 precision cuts, each one made by hand, anything less than perfection and the item is smashed and recycled back into the next batch…

Node.js : Hour 1. How much fun I could have with Node.js – in just an hour…

Web Performance Optimisation : Hour 1. How much could I improve the performance of one of my websites in 1 hour?

Web Performance Optimisation : Hour 2. how much more could I improve the Web Performance given a second hour?

Web Performance Optimisation : Hour 3. Getting to 99/100 and 5 A ratings.

Image SEO and Dynamic Media Systems. The image and video verticals in search engine results pages (SERPs) do not yet tend to be as hotly contested over as the textual content elements of SEO. Yet, video and images both make up part of the prime real estate that is the first page of search results.

Lynx on Mac : The Text-only Browser. Following Paul’s (@paulrobertlloyd) session at Responsive Conf I was really curious to try out Lynx, which is a text-only browser. I was intrigued with looking at the world from such a limiting perspective, and the notion of viewing the web with no design-overlay really resonated.

Healthy Working . Get-fit-while-working. In lieu of a sit/standing desk, I’m going to give this a bash as part of my new 2014 regime. There are stacks of reports about the dangers of sitting all day, and while I hope to buy an electric sit/standing desk sometime this year, I will try out doing gentle steady cycling while working.

Wireless Headless Node Server.  We are looking to use the Raspberry Pi as a motion triggered camera for our bird feeder. This was my son’s idea for his poster for the Raspberry Pi Poster Competition …

Lightning Review of 2013. Inspired by @rem’s review, but lacking the time to do a proper post, here is my lightening review of 2013…

Creating Animated GIFs with bash terminal. My Goal: Can ‘I quickly create Animated GIFs on the Mac’ preferably without having to buy an app.

Terminal Velocity. I had one of those problems to solve, that initially had me toying with blowing the dust of some Python, but it struck me as the perfect time to spend more time on my Mac’s Command Line…

Timelapse via Android Mobile. Experiments in shooting timelapse photography using just my Android devices

iPad + Adobe Colour Lava + Photoshop = Creative Workflow Goodness.  Having finally got my hands on an iPad. The first thing I wanted to try out, was Color Lava, which was something I’ve loved the idea of ever since I first saw an internal demo back in my Adobe days.

Drawscript + HTML5 Canvas. Drawscript is a very interesting Adobe Illustrator extension (currently in beta) which converts vectors into graphics code. This can then be used to make UI elements on iOS or via javascript to use with HTML5 canvas.

Responsive Images in a Responsive Layout.  I’ve been meaning to update my previous responsive images example to be in conjunction with a responsive grid layout (rather than mapping to the whole page width). It’s a relatively small change, but makes for a more real-world use case.

Origin Pull on Amazon Cloudfront.

Telephony-as-a-Service: Twilio. With Twilio  now offering full UK telephony support*, I spent part of my day off today exploring their platform – and I’ve got to say, I’m thoroughly impressed.

Amazon Route 53 with S3. Amazon Route 53 allows you to create and manage your public DNS records, however Amazon does not act as a domain registrar, so you need to use your usual provider for that.

The Limits of the Unlimited : Offsite backup tales

What Motivates Us

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