http://remysharp.com About [code] and all that jazz Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:28:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's now a bit of a tradition with a year end blog post (almost entirely so I can look back and actually remember myself!), so today I post my summary of 2011 and what's happened for me both in my work and personally. In short, this year has still been hard ... http://remysharp.com/2011/12/31/my-2011/ So here's how I got around that, and how I'm using Instagram today. I always held off installing [Instagram](http://instagr.am/) because I felt it was another black hole to post my pictures to and friends and family viewing my pictures used [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/remysharp/). When I visited Portland earlier in 2011, [Petra](https://twitter.com/PetraGregorova) showed me indeed ... http://remysharp.com/2011/12/10/i-like-instagram-but-its-not-as-open-as-id-like-it-to-be/ Pretty much every personal project I work on I try to make it publicly available - usually under an MIT license - but I pretty much always forget to include an MIT license file. There's an [Open Source Initiative](http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php) with the license, but it doesn't have the date, nor the license ... http://remysharp.com/2011/10/18/a-public-mit-license-resource/ September 29 2011, at 11:14am Ellis Tennyson Sharp graced us with his arrival and said hello to his mummy and daddy. ## Arrival Ellis was delivered by elective caesarean section because of [losing Tia during labour last year](http://remysharp.com/2010/12/31/2010-the-year-ill-never-forget/#tia), and in the theatre I was able to hand my camera to a nurse ... http://remysharp.com/2011/10/17/ellis-tennyson-sharp/ Rich text input is difficult on any platform, but I discovered a rather cheeky, but simple trick to give you rich text inputs on iOS. The way a number of rich text input libraries work (like CodeMirror and Ace), is that when you're typing, you're typing in to a tiny, almost ... http://remysharp.com/2011/10/10/rich-text-input-on-ios/ I joined twitter around early 2007 and during those early months I toyed with a number of different avatars. At some point I settled on the avatar I have now - just a quick snap of me in front of my desktop. However, as the years went on, I got chubbier, ... http://remysharp.com/2011/08/23/on-changing-my-avatar/ Hopefully this doesn't become a meme instead of what I intend for this blog post. There's a way to consume at @reply timeline in Twitter by just stuffing a shed load of new lines with anything at the end (like a period). If you're a twitter app developer, please consider removing ... http://remysharp.com/2011/08/02/antisocial-spaces-on-twitter/ During [The Highland Fling](http://thehighlandfling.com/) (an excellent conference by the way - highly recommend), James Edwards aka [Brothercake](http://www.brothercake.com/) was talking about the graceful degradation of HTML5 Web Form elements, in particular the [input range type](http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/input.range.html). He points out that degrading to text isn't graceful at all, because with a range, you have ... http://remysharp.com/2011/07/18/input-range-polyfill/ Today we're pretty well versed with how JavaScript works. We know that `script` elements block rendering (well, actually blocks the parsing, which thus delays the rendering), and we know why8. Sure, so we put the `script` elements at the end of the document. But did you know that `link` elements ... http://remysharp.com/2011/06/08/link-elements-block-dom-parsing-too/ When Tia was born last year, through the pain of losing her, Julie and I promised ourselves that something good must come of this tragedy. In recent months we have been working on *Tia's Trees* - a project to improve our local park joined to a children's centre, as a memorial ... http://remysharp.com/2011/06/06/in-memory-of-tia/ Last year, a few months before [Julie](http://twitter.com/julieanne) and I were due with Tia, I thought about running a workshop tour. Something where I could offer the web community training, whilst simultaneously seeing more of our grand postage stamp of a country. Here's why and the plan, and I want your ... http://remysharp.com/2011/04/27/my-big-workshop-tour/ Recently I ran a workshop where I ran a small section of the workshop on CORS and how to enable it. In the past, I've found it to be very easy but this time around everything backfired and it didn't work. So after the workshop I went about understanding why ... http://remysharp.com/2011/04/21/getting-cors-working/ The state of offline detection in desktop browsers is broken and it needs to fixed or at least get better, but I can't see this happening unless we push against the browser vendors to fix this. Currently, as of April 2011, offline and online events are broken, as is the navigator.onLine ... http://remysharp.com/2011/04/19/broken-offline-support/ I've written my fair share of single file applications. All the JavaScript and CSS are inline, and if I'm feeling particularly ninja, I'll base64 encode the images, and make them inline too. To make the whole thing completely available offline is insanely easy, and reusable to boot. The first step is to ... http://remysharp.com/2011/01/31/simple-offline-application/ This week I had the pleasure of attending Seb Lee-Delisle's [Creative HTML5 and JavaScript workshop](http://sebleedelisle.com/training/#creativejs) and even as someone who classes themselves as an expert JavaScripter (I hope!), I still learnt tons. To me, Seb has gone through it all when he was developing for Flash years ago. Things ... http://remysharp.com/2011/01/12/creative-html5-and-javascript-workshop-by-seb_ly/ I've only managed to write up my thought on the previous years twice ([2009](http://remysharp.com/2010/01/03/goodnight-2009/), [2007](http://remysharp.com/2007/12/31/2007-moments/)), but this year was one of, if not *the*, most important year of my life. ## Professional The most important part of 2010 was in my personal life, but for the sake of remembering (this blog is ... http://remysharp.com/2010/12/31/2010-the-year-ill-never-forget/ I recently had to work on a project for iOS that required that sound play on particular actions being performed. The problem is that iOS and HTML5 has been seriously oversold by Apple and the devices are pretty poor in comparison to the desktop. Audio and video are particularly poor, ... http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/ Each year, since 2006, Julie and I have planned a Christmas movie day, where we watch a day of Christmas spirited films whilst eating various Christmas type food (basically: volauvents). We have a rule that we can't watch the same film two years in a row, but we're secretly trying ... http://remysharp.com/2010/11/29/our-christmas-films-list/ [Full Frontal 2010](http://2010.full-frontal.org) ran last Friday and (as I secretly hoped) was a huge success. As with last year, we had a good number of people asking how they could get one of the Full Frontal t-shirts (as sported by yours truly). And this year we're giving the opportunity to ... http://remysharp.com/2010/11/16/full-frontal-t-shirts-in-tias-name/ [node.js](http://nodejs.org/ "node.js") is clearly the hottest thing since sliced bread, and recently I've been working on a larger project that runs as a node server. The problem I encountered was that, unlike a PHP based web app, whenever I made any changes to the code, I would have to manually stop ... http://remysharp.com/2010/10/12/nodejs-rapid-development-nodemon/