Pages tagged “webmaster”


02 Feb 2024

Skill swaps

Late last year I finished (after probably taking too long) (also, when is a website ever finished?)… a website. This one is a little Django site for a friend of mine who’s a very talented artist. The site showcases paintings, and it has the world’s simplest home-made CMS and a contact form. Nothing super clever, but it was fun to build. In return, Sammie gave our family the best souvenir ever of happy holidays - a painting of “the big house” - where we’ve spent many summers swimming; eating, drinking; watching shooting stars; chasing and being chased by bats and hornets and debating who goes down the hill for an armful of pastry and baguettes every day.

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07 Aug 2015

Physical Web for Presenters

I was at a very interesting meetup (Cambridge Internet of Things) yesterday. Alongside a thought-provoking presentation about online privacy and cloud computing, I learnt about the Physical Web project. Scott Jenson explained the aims and the activities that are well underway. I’m a geek, I get excited by such things and my mind runs ahead. As I watched people holding up smartphones to capture the projected slides, presumably to grab details, it occurred to me that giving a presentation might be a great physical web use case.

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16 Jul 2014

Automatic testing FTW

When you’re building something made of software (!), it’s widely-accepted best practice to write tests for it. Nothing new there. Attending an excellent event in Cambridge last week, a superb presentation by Tim Perry from Softwire made me realise something else though. Writing tests makes your application more secure. This sounds trivial, but I mean tests like “does the widget do what it’s supposed to do” tests, not “does the app refuse log in if the password is wrong”.

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08 Oct 2012

URL shuffling and Google juice

I thought I’d write up something I did at work today, in case it’s useful to other “webmasters”. We have a site which, through evolution, history and multiple editors, has ended up with a cluttered URL space. It happens. This is a worthwhile thing to do for tidiness, to enable future redesigns, and to ensure good navigation (and hence Googlability). I was keen to do it in a way that maintained existing links, and in a way which would preserve search engines' knowledge of our pages.

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