Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

It might be a hard sell, but there are number of advantages to using the web.

It might be surprising. But it's all possible on the web.

A spent a while living just with web apps. Here is my report.

This is the web platform

Maybe? :)

We've done a lot of work using Github in the recent past and here is some of the work that we have optimised.

This post announces the implementation of automatic deployment for this blog, powered by Jekyll (Octopress) and GitHub WebHooks. The previous workflow involved local editing, committing to GitHub, and deploying via SSH using rake deploy. The new process leverages GitHub WebHooks and a modified version of Github-Auto-Deploy to automatically pull, build, and deploy changes upon pushing to the GitHub repository, simplifying the deployment process and eliminating the need for terminal access and SSH keys.

I recently used Page Speed Insights for Mobile to improve my blog's page load time and one of the key recommendations was to reduce render-blocking CSS above the fold. This led me to explore the concept of critical CSS, which is the minimum CSS required to render the initial view of a page. I developed a proof-of-concept tool (bookmarklet and devtools snippet) that analyzes the DOM and extracts the critical CSS by iterating through visible elements and using window.getMatchedCSS(). This tool helps identify unnecessary CSS, integrate into build processes for optimization, and potentially generate page-specific CSS files for improved performance. It currently has limitations, working only in WebKit/Blink, ignoring media queries, and not handling pseudo-elements.

I've run hackathons and learned they're not for winning customers. They're not about startups or brand awareness. They're about learning and improving your product. Treat them like beta tests where developers help find bugs and make your platform better. Focus on making your platform valuable and easy to integrate with. Reward developers for providing feedback, not just cool demos.

I've been working on making html5rocks.com more mobile-friendly, focusing on reducing "Time to first read". The main culprit was the Table of Contents (ToC). My initial experiment with an offscreen ToC using CSS had cross-browser inconsistencies. Now, using existing JS, the ToC is fixed to the footer and toggled into view. I'm still exploring pure CSS solutions. Initially, I favored a small scrollable ToC at the bottom, but Paul Lewis suggested a full-screen ToC, which proved better. It minimizes distractions and clutter, provides more screen space for a readable, easily navigable ToC with larger touch targets and subtle hierarchy, even for long lists. The before/after screenshots demonstrate the improvement.