I was surprised to discover recently that my exif-orientation-examples repository has quietly collected almost 300 stars on github. The sample images were created over 5 years ago now, and are pretty low-resolution and unsuitable for testing on modern displays and websites. With that in mind, I’ve replaced the sample images with 1200x1800 pixel images (previously they were 600x450 pixels), and automated the process of generating new images. ...
One of my favourite services at the moment is Transloadit, who provide an image processing API that works a treat on top of platforms like Heroku, where there are strict request timeout limits that make large uploads difficult. They handle auto-orientation of images automagically by default, and normally I’m not even aware of it happening during testing since my camera and OSX also handle auto-orientation transparently. ...
2013-03-28 Update : These plugins are now hosted on GitHub I’ve finally gotten around to cleaning up and releasing the source for a couple of the Jekyll plugins used to build this site. You can find them all on the Jekyll Plugins project page, or browse the source. As always, if you come across any problems please create a ticket and we’ll try to get it fixed as soon as possible. Enjoy! ...
A couple of weeks ago someone commented on the SimpleColor plugin with a nice suggestion - adding the selected color as text inside the color selection button. I finally got around to implementing this last night, and added a couple of extra options to support this : ...
I was playing around on the weekend screen-scraping and analyzing word-frequencies for various sites (don’t ask), and was getting some slow responses (and accidentally got my IP blocked from one site when I hit them a few too many times). Eventually I hit upon the idea of hitting Google Cache for each URL (the pages I was scraping had sequential ?id=xxx URLs so it was easy to automate), with the aim of speeding things up a bit and taking some load off the target sites. With this in mind, I spent a few hours Saturday and Sunday developing fromthecache.com - it’s built on rails, and designed to provide transparent access to the Google cache, while fetching the original page as a fallback if necessary. ...
2013-03-28 Update : This project is very dated, and I don’t recommend it’s use. It’s now hosted on GitHub. I’m happy to announce the release of Rails Kitchen Sink a rails-project-starter, which I’ll be building all future Rails apps off of. ...
In building the new site, I decided to take the opportunity to try out something new. I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog for about 5 years, and while it has served me well, I wanted to try out something different. The main criteria for choosing a new blogging platform were : It should serve true static pages, with no need for server-side processing. It should be easy to store the entire site in Git. It should support the concept of layouts - I wanted to have a single ’template’ file that blog posts could easily inherit from. It should support MarkDown or Textile for formatting posts, since I want to keep away from posting raw HTML as much as possible. It should support comments. I should be able to deploy updates to the site with a single command. By patching together a few different open-source technologies, I’ve been able to achieve the above and more. ...
2013-03-28 Update : All projects are now hosted on GitHub I’m pleased to announce my new projects section, where I’ll be consolidating the various open-source projects I’ve released. Until now these projects have usually only been released via blog posts, but from now on each project will have a dedicated project page, with git repository information, issue tracking, and a link to a downloadable zip bundle of the latest release. ...
All of the content from recurser.com (blog posts, static pages, code repositories, git/svn etc) has been migrated over to the main “recursive-design.com”:/ site. If you’re reading this from the old recurser.com RSS feed, please update the feed address - sorry for the inconvenience! You can find the new feed at recursive-design.com/feed/ . The old feed will continue for a few weeks, but will eventually be turned off. I’m planning on posting a lot more regularly from now on, so if you aren’t a subscriber yet now would be a great time to start !...
It’s relatively easy to get the feed for your Jekyll site running on FeedBurner. Firstly, you need to choose a subdirectory to host your feed on. Calling it feed seems to be a fairly popular choice, so I decided to follow the crowd. Create a folder called feed at the base of your Jekyll site, and create an index.xml file inside with the following contents (obviously swapping the references to Recursive for your own site details) : ...
